A glimpse into the future of CX: Autonomous Liberty (Part 1 / 2)

Forrester’s research about self-service shows what we all suspected: there is a growing thirst for it. Self-service should be available across the many channels and it is important that these services be comprehensive enough to solve the complete problem. Self-service has to deliver.

Nowadays we believe this means customers (especially millennials) want their problems solved when they want, how they want and as fast as possible. They do not want to interact with a human if they do not feel like doing so. They do not accept well waiting times nor lines.

As for the future, the desire for perceived Autonomy will only increase. The desire for self-service is just one of the ways in which this phenomenon is manifesting itself. Another is the increasing number of choice options, which means:

“I can have precisely the product/service I want to”

You can get a feeling of it if you go check a local grocery store. In spite of this trend, if we stop and analyze how competitive strategy takes place, we’ll see there are many strategies that aim at locking customers in.

Companies like SAP do this by creating a million different barriers to change –or isolation mechanisms. With the iPod, Apple adopted strategies to create a dependency that I doubt would work today. This is the keyword here Autonomy <> Dependency. The desire for freedom is manifesting itself as the need to achieve the highest possible Autonomy.

So what happens to all those management practices that aim at creating some sort of dependency? They are doomed, that’s what. We’ll have to do better, we’ll have to conquer our customers and make them feel they have absolute control . We’ll have to break all barriers to change. No locks, period. Customers not only desire to feel like they can change they also want to feel empowered. Change empowered. It will be our job to be the first choice every time they decide to test their decision-making skills.

Imagine a time line and some points of decision on it. These points represent the POSSIBILITY of making a decision. They used to be in fixed places, but for the change empowered customer, the points of decision are actually a continuous line. The change empowered customer decides when to decide.

No matter how crazy and counter-intuitive this sounds, that is the future: change empowerment guided by abundant options and simplicity as principles. These two apparently paradoxical principles work together and I’ll explain how.

Abundant options are exactly what it sounds like and demands no explanation. Simplicity can be achieved by the combination of two factors:

1. Easy transitions: come/ go, start/stop, initiate/terminate should be facilitated as much as possible. The point here is in making it as easy for the customer to leave you and move to a competitor as leaving a competitor and come to you. By “easy” think in terms of value created to the customer in two dimensions: time to value –the time it takes to the point the customer starts perceiving value– and value perception– the total value the customer perceives.
2. Set expectations: Setting the right expectations for the different experiences the customer might choose from, including all possible options.

By following these two principles , all of the factors related to the burden of having too many options to choose from are neutralized. Expectations are properly set, opportunities are well known and available, trade-offs can be reversed, adaptation gives way to experimentation. Reasons for regret and blame are extinguished and some social comparisons become pointless.

Think for a second. Why has Apple recently allowed iOS 10 users to uninstall some of the native apps they decide to? That sure is a move toward change empowerment.

I particularly believe this is a positive movement, many of the dependencies created are actually ways to slow progress. SAP would offer much better services if their clients could immediately switch to other solutions. In this example, the other solutions (if abundant) would be the abundant options and the simplicity would facilitate the customer’s decision-making and changing processes.

Change empowerment will mean an increase in competition, which means tension, which means progress over time. Usually, this progress takes the form of better customer listening skills and that can’t be bad. As we have already seen, self- service is just a part of this process.

In today’s uncertain scenario, making predictions is a hard thing, nevertheless, there’s one thing I can say with a certain confidence. Significant changes will come where there are disproportionate dependencies and opportunities for change empowerment to take place.

In the next article, I’ll explain change empowerment in more detail and discuss the Amazon’s case to show in practical terms how change empowerment is employed.