Customers’ were asked to rate the most important areas that companies should focus on in order to provide them the best customer experience in the banking, gaming, mobile phone, retail and travel sectors.

1. AVAILABILITY – Give customers a choice of channel based on their preferences.
2. AWARENESS – Make customers aware of all channels available, with channels promoted from other channels.
3. PULL - To drive channel shift, the channel shifting ‘to’ needs to have a better customer experience.
4. CONSISTENCY - Provide a consistent experience across channels, whilst utilising the benefits of each channel.
5. UNDERSTANDING - Regardless of channel choice, make sure customers gain the understanding they need to effectively engage with the products.
6. ENGAGEMENT - Pull customers into deeper engagement within their preferred channel.
7. OPTIMISATION - Optimise the customer experience of each channel.
8. INTEGRATION - Each channel is aware of previous customer interactions, regardless of channel.
9. PRODUCTS - Produce quality products which meet customer expectations and requirements.
10. MEASUREMENT - Get the right customer experience measures in place.

(Reproduced with permission)

This one chart touches on all of the main themes which form the basis of customer- centricity:

• STRATEGY: Customer-centric organisations are focussed on strategy as determining customer experience outcomes (the first bar).
• PROCESS & GOVERNANCE: Customer-centric organisations design their processes around customer experience outcomes which result from them, and govern their processes on this basis (the last bar). 
• REWARDS: Customer-centric organisations ensure that each individual is motivated to produce good customer experience outcomes (the third bar).
• SYSTEMS: The systems in customer-centric organisations are specified and implemented to produce optimum customer experiences, either directly or indirectly (the last bar).
• MEASURES: Customer-centric organisations measure and analyse the customer experience accurately and track it consistently (the seventh and ninth bars).
• CHANNEL EXPERIENCES: Of course, the result of all of this is that customer-centric organisations produce better customer experiences (the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th bars).

Strong on strategy, weak on operational delivery

The strongest performance is in the adoption of strategies, and it’s clear that customer-centric strategies are really taking hold now, but the operational changes needed to drive results from them are not yet in place. The operational customer experience really sets more CX-mature organisations apart from the rest, and is where many companies are currently stumbling.

How to measure it?

Customer-experience-mature companies recognise that strategy, process, rewards, governance and systems have a major impact on the customer experience, however, very few measure or monitor this impact. Almost all customer experience measures are focussed on measuring the channel customer experiences themselves, but not the operational factors which determine these channel outcomes. It’s hardly surprising then, that companies do not always make the connection between operational causes and customer experience effects.

I predict that the measurement of the impact of strategy, process, rewards, governance and systems on customer experiences will represent the next level in customer experience maturity over the next ten years. These measurements are needed to build the case for the strategic direction required to drive true customer-centricity.

These measures also allow a business case to be built which ties organisational factors to customer experience outcomes, and hence the case can be made, for the organisational changes which are needed for companies to become truly customer-centric. This is when customer-centricity really starts to deliver benefits.

Customer-centricity continues to grow

Over the next ten years, we can expect the economy to be fairly rocky. Increasingly, customer experience will be seen as the main USP and differentiator, especially in the service industries on which so much of the developed world’s economy is based. As channel-level improvements start to reach optimal levels for many companies, we will start to see greater focus on the connections between customer experience outcomes and deeper, organisational and strategic factors.

Earlier this year, Google chairman Eric Schmidt named Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon as the four companies which currently rule consumer technology. It’s not a coincidence that these four companies are among the most customer-centric around. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels puts it “ We want to be the most customer-centric company on the planet ”. Where these 4 companies lead, the rest of us generally follow, so it’s time to sit up and take note of customer-centricity.

As you will see from the results of our Multichannel Report, it’s not easy, and most companies have some way to go. You can download the Multichannel Report here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ZaDZo0z1I&feature=player_embedded

Why Amazon won’t make a phone.

• Consumption: tablets are a great match for Amazon’s business, as they are geared up for content consumption. Mobile handsets are used to read books and watch videos, but it isn’t as rich an experience.
• It’s still a phone: the “phone” aspects of a handset sit well outside Amazon’s core business. Android provides this functionality as standard, but it still needs to sit within Amazon’s customised Android experience. An Amazon phone would still have to be good at calls, messages, email and critical third party integration like Twitter and Facebook. Reviews of the Kindle Fire suggest that the email client isn’t amazing. Given the goals of the tablet, this is an annoyance, but on a phone it could be a deal breaker.
• They’re there already: Amazon is already well embedded on mobile phones. They have their own appstore and custom apps. Do they really need to take the next step? They can’t use a mobile handset as a technology demonstrator in the same style as Google’s Nexus phones. Amazon have to push volume for this to be a worthwhile endeavour.
• Competition: the tablet space was much easier to enter, as there was no dominant Android tablet at the same price point. A phone at the rumoured price of $180-$200 will be up against every other Android handset. It will have to be very good to compete.

Why Amazon might make a phone.

• Customer experience: owning the whole customer experience could be very valuable. Mobile allows Amazon an even greater opportunity to build relationships with customers. For example, imagine a phone that is dedicated to shopping. Seamless product comparison and price matching (using a well implemented barcode scanner) in retail stores, together with Amazon’s great fulfilment process could be quite disruptive.
• Music: for many people, mobile phones have replaced iPods. A mobile handset would be a great match for Amazon’s music services.
• Platform: Amazon might need to have a mobile platform to avoid getting left behind. If the Facebook phone happens and has mass appeal, there is a risk that Amazon could be cut out, or find themselves having to reach customers through a Facebook experience. It would be much better to be the one in control.
• Appstore: a mobile handset would certainly help Amazon to expand their appstore and sell more apps.
• Data: if allowed to, Amazon could collect even more data about their customer’s shopping habits, down to the location level. Time and location based product recommendations, it’s certainly a possibility. If Amazon knows I’m more likely to purchase in a certain place at a certain time, you can bet they’d like to take advantage of that.

The Kindle Fire was a very logical step for Amazon. A mobile phone is a bit more of a reach. There are certainly ways in which it could support their core business and allow them to embed themselves further into the lives of their customers. However, I would argue that for a phone to be a success it will have to be really well thought through and executed. Given that Amazon tend to evolve products, rather than nail them first time out, this may make a phone success less likely. That said, they certainly have the scale and the vision to make the attempt.

Imagine a world where on walking into a store at the mall you are greeted by a shop assistant who welcomes you by name, asks you how you enjoyed your last purchase of brand X and whether you would to go to your personalised changing room to (virtually?) try on a selection of clothes they have identified as possibly interesting to you based on your last purchases (in store and online) with the company. 

E-commerce sites gather data (now a controversial practice, if the EU is to be believed, and one that is newly regulated) that help them understand out how customers shop, which site they came from, and use this to target promotions and advertising even after they have moved on to another site (Visit Lands End for instance and you see ads from them everywhere else you go online: not a coincidence, in case you were wondering). In the bricks-and-mortar world, similar attempts are made through the use of loyalty cards and store credit cards as well as direct mailings but linking to foot traffic is a lot harder.

Footpath technology has now cracked part of the problem and promises to get retailers at least some of the best of both worlds, by leveraging mobile phone signals. The technology, created by UK company Path, monitors the signal (more specifically the unique ID for the phone – a bit like IP addresses for computers) and uses triangulation to track their whereabouts in the mall, providing insights into traffic patterns. Their analytics let retailers get a measure of, for example, how many people walked past an ad and then went to the store. In the words of the CEO, Sharon Biggar  “Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts and perhaps more importantly, we can price the advertising differently at each location.” Similarly in larger retail spaces, as she explains, “We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it. From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what’s going wrong.”  

 (graphic from the Mail article)

Indeed. The analysis can reveal how many people went into, say, both The Gap and Monsoon, or how long the average visitor spends at Starbucks – or which areas get very little traffic. All of which is fascinating, but may not be to the taste of all the mall visitors.

The mall owner trialling this system posted a warning on its signage and stress the company does not collect personally identifiable data (in fact the system is not capable of doing so: carriers are very protective of their customers’ data), they just use the “signal fingerprint”. Personally I think the little notice below is unlikely to be noticed by everyone (do you even look at the map when you go to your local shopping centre?) and that there are some privacy concerns here.

The system does give an accurate enough record of the phone’s path. Mall owners could sell other available data such as CCTV footage (bearing in mind some and this could actually be matched malls actually use face recognition software as a preventative measure to deter shoplifting) which retailers could also match to credit or debit card transactional data – and then would be in a position to make very specific targeted offers to customers as they walk into the store.

In fact there seems to be some uncertainty over the legality of the system since although it does not identify individuals per se, it does provide the means to do so to some extent if matched with the right data. That in itself is a data privacy red flag, especially given recent developments in European data privacy and storage laws.

According to the company the system is already used in Europe and Australia and most shoppers do not opt out (though I would question whether the visitors are really aware of it?). Moreover malls have long been tracking shoppers through other methods – people counters, CCTV, and undercover researchers who will secretly shoppers around – which also generated heatmaps, albeit slightly less hi tech ones.

But what happens the day hackers break into the data store (as has happened to a number of high profile companies this past year – Sony, AT&T…)? Path says to protect information they scramble the data twice…which I would not put much faith in, personally. The last word belongs to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, with whom I agree wholeheartedly on this: “I’m sure as more people get more cell phones, it’s probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource, but I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out”

For this to reach the mainstream it needs to be so embedded in devices that you don’t need an app. I see two routes for this, either you need eyewear that augments the world automatically or (the less high tech approach) your phone buzzes or vibrates or in some way notifies you when near to an AR enabled location.

It’s getting there, the movement handling (so you don’t need to have a rock-steady hold on the device) suggest that the technology is just about ready.

If you are trying to view this video in Internet Explorer (IE)  and it is not showing, just click on this link: http://youtu.be/KRA0SZhKNyo

I’d be very interested to monitor the usage of this wifi. I wonder if customers will be more likely to whip out their mobile devices to check prices as they shop in store? Or, will this move of enabling wifi increase trust in the brand in providing great value products, so that customers don’t feel the need to actually check up on the prices offered? Is it instead going to be used by John Lewis customers to simply check Facebook or read their online copy of the newspaper in the John Lewis café?

Either way, it’s a great move to ensure that customers can make immediate decisions in store and complete purchases there and then, rather than having to do online research separate from their offline experience. The important thing for John Lewis to ensure in rolling this out, is that customers’ mobile online experience is fully aligned to their in store experience, to provide a fully joined up multi channel experience. Done well, this could transform shopping experiences and is a great step in the direction of ensuring that the digitally evolving needs of customers are met throughout the traditional shopping journey.

Having happily purchased from Gap.com, though in a distant past (we are talking around the year 2000) – I was stunned. To me, search boxes are an essential element of a good user experience. For most sites I can think of, an included part of the landscape along with the logo top left and the privacy/contact us links at the bottom. Just to make sure I asked a colleague to take a look, thinking I might have missed it – but no. Not there. So to find those trousers I needed to click on Women, click on trousers and scroll down scanning dozens of images to try and find those cords. Needless to say I gave up.

Gap.eu – missing a search bar, top right.

It niggled though, as I was pretty sure the US site did have a search box. And lo and behold, there it is – top right, where there was a blank space on the .eu site. If anyone from The Gap is listening out there, you might want to put in that search box and close the gap?

 Gap.com – including a search bar, top right.

Eating fast food is my most dubious habit. To me, it is neither a culinary delight, nor a tolerable source of nutrition. However, every once in a while and especially when I am enjoying my passion for travelling foreign countries and getting immersed into different cultures, the chances are high: I will end up in fast food shop. Most of the times, it will be a chain with stores all over the planet. The names are well known. In situations like that, when it comes down to choosing between exciting foreign cuisine and a trusted but maybe less exciting burger, the burger simply seems to be the most reasonable choice.

This choice of experience is no exceptional case for human nature. Albeit the awareness of possibly missing out on a remarkable experience, I am turning myself to a relationship of trust. Even though it might not be the best experience in the world, I know what to expect. In commercial terms, my need can be described as a customer experience of consistency, which is an important driver for the trust relationship between a customer and a brand.

Not surprisingly, the described experience is a major revenue point for international fast food chains, and the example can be related to almost every service or product. For instance, when deciding to try a completely new device experience, such as a tablet computer. For an appreciator of the functionality of an iPhone, it is straightforward to choose an iPad. Despite the significant monetary investment that it requires, a baseline user experience is shared among the devices. Overall this reduces the possibility of the new purchase to be a technologic gamble as well as a source of frustration.

Generally speaking, consistency within multichannel experiences is a design challenge that concerns a wide variety of brands and services. Multichannel experiences exist simultaneously among several customer touch-points. Online as well as offline, a coherent and integrated customer experience builds up trust by mediating competence and direction as well as generating perceived familiarity. Despite the broadness of the problem space of managing a trusted relationship between customers and services, almost all key issues and design requirements can be determined, investigated and revised. Consistency within multichannel experiences in this case is achieved though the following characteristics.

• Coherent – basic idea of the service is perceived as consistent across channels.

• Complementary – coherent service experience delights with specific benefits within chosen service channel.

• Simultaneous – benefits of service channel can be combined as needed.

• Shiftable – service adapts to customer flexibility and present needs.

• Synchronized – service allows shifting between channels and shared features across service a shared among channel.

Characteristics like these not only ensure that the service delivers consistently among websites, microsites, mail, social media, in-store and even call centre experiences. Familiarity and stability also improve the overall quality of the service beyond the perception of trust and allow design space to delight with innovation and significantly increase adoption rates of new features and services.

This article was originally published by the Customer Experience Magazine