The Ghosts of Customer Experience Past, Present and Future

If you’re like many companies out there, the subject of customer experiences haunts you.

It haunts you with questions like:

• Are you keeping your customers happy?
• Are you living up to all the bold promises in your marketing materials or are they just baseless words on a page or website?
• And could there be a customer out there who, even now, is making moves to improve their customer experience where yours is stuck in neutral?

Fortunately for you, the holiday season is one of reflection, if nothing else — a time to evaluate and savor the past, contemplate the present, and resolve to do better in the future. Really, there is no better time to take stock of your customer experience and what it needs to become, a sorta Christmas Carol-esque trip down memory lane, before being slingshotted into the possibilities of the future.

Dickens’ immortal tale, for the few uninitiated out there, told the tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and his nocturnal meeting with three spirits: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future. Each ghost provided Scrooge with valuable lessons to take back to improve his present.

Today, on the verge of another Christmas Eve, I want to take you on a similar trip to examine where we’ve been with the customer experience, where it sits presently, and where we need to take it next.

The Ghost of Customer Experience Past

Do you remember what it used to be like to go shopping for shoes, say, 20 years ago? For one thing, with the exception of shopping that happened via catalog, most of that shopping happened in the physical world.

You walked into a store and talked to real, live people to see if they had the shoes you were looking for. While the customer service skills varied depending on their training and personality, much more of your experience consisted of bona fide face time (and not the iPhone kind).

These physical interactions were a sort of double-edged sword for customers. At first, having to approach a real person for help was intimidating socially. We had to get to know them and then update them on our situation, just to give them some context. We also knew there was the high possibility that they were going to try to upsell us and puncture whatever objections we presented. It was a very high-pressure situation.

On the plus side, however, the same in-person interaction also satisfied a deep need within us to socialize with other people, to make eye contact, to be able to read their nonverbal cues. When done right, these in-person interactions built powerful emotional bonds between us and the companies we frequented. The quality of these interactions was where the rubber met the road in terms of closing sales and getting return business. Companies understood this, so they invested much more in the interpersonal training of customer-facing employees.

But there was another negative: the old school customer experience was anything but personalized. Rather than having the experience molded to our needs, we customers were expected to adapt to a cookie cutter experience. Because companies couldn’t see us coming, couldn’t see what we needed before we asked, delivery was often slower, and the whole process was less convenient overall.

In short, the customer experience of the past was decidedly more human with all the warmth, clunkiness, and inconsistency that implies.

The Ghost of Customer Experience Present

Cue the rise of the Internet, social media, and smartphones — and with them the omnichannel customer experience. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, you have a myriad of options at your fingertips. You can — and likely do — research from your laptop, tablet, or phone the pair of shoes you want to get using online reviews or articles from subject matter experts. You can see on a website if a local store has the shoes you want.

And how about the personalization? These websites and tools keep track of all the products in which you show interest. They build a profile of you and what else you might be interested in. And it’s all comfortably anonymous, so you never have to make that awkward introduction to another human being.

Once you decide you want to buy, you can have those shoes mailed right to your house in 2–3 business days or you can pick them up at your nearest store. It’s all built to be incredibly convenient, and, for anyone who still remembers the old days, present-day shopping is nothing short of miraculous.

But even this miracle is missing something: the present-day customer experience is largely faceless and cold, lacking that human connection. As a result, while companies are able to optimize their speed of delivery and the convenience of the experience, they are losing opportunities to bond with customers as people.

Customer service thought leader Ron Kaufman comments:

“While the digital world offers many advantages in speed and scale, it still makes good sense to relate to your customers on a personal level. No matter what business you are in, there is still a human being on the receiving end, and that human being has a name, a face, and feelings.”

In short, the present customer experience is marked by supreme personalization and convenience, but that advantage comes at the price of what might still be the most precious competitive advantage: customer relationships.

The Ghost of Customer Experience Future

This being the transition from one year to the next, you’re likely to see a lot of predictions over the next few weeks. Do a Google search on ‘customer experience predictions’ and, among other results, you’ll see a litany of predictions from early 2016. Not surprisingly, most of them are based on technology:

• Predictive analytics
• Data centralization
• Data-driven marketing

But even then, some thought leaders in the customer experience space were seeing a shortcoming. For instance, Nick Stein, SVP of Marketing at Vision Critical, said:

“Your customers want to feel like they matter to you and to your brand. But in the age of the empowered customer, the traditional survey technology that you use to understand the customer is alienating them and pushing them away.”

While Stein’s statement here was focused specifically on how companies keep track of how happy their customers are, his sentiment can be seen echoed throughout the customer experience discussion: how do we take advantage of all this technology without alienating customers?

Now, you can expect no predictions from me here, but you can expect perhaps a vision of what the future of customer experience could look like. That future will be based around retaining the convenience, data focus, and personalization of the present customer experience, while injecting more human interaction back into it.

Earlier this year, Joseph Michelli, writer at PR Daily, made this insightful observation:

“With so much competition, the way you treat and relate to your customers might be the only thing that defines your brand…The new customer service effort should be part Silicon Valley and part ‘Main Street’. Customer interactions should be efficient but also have compassion and empathy. Consumers want brand representatives to pause and take a moment with them.”

Part Silicon Valley and part Main Street. It’s going to take people to fill that fundamental hole that exists in the present-day customer experience. Faces. Warm smiles. The feeling that this person understands what I’m going through and what I need. The feeling that I’m not just being stalked by a robot who’s coldly analyzing my every move and trying to predict what I will do next.

As Michelli points out, given that the technical side of customer experience is likely to become a commodity — something anyone who can afford the right tools will be able to do —it stands to reasons that companies will have to turn back to the human side to create competitive advantages.

The Choice in 2017

As with Dickens’ Scrooge, the future of customer experience will come down to choices, including: do we simply complete the digital ensemble by teaching bots to talk like humans, while we simply sit back and pull the strings?

Or do we invest in integrating human beings back into what is now a mostly digital experience?

I like to believe that humans are pretty good at spotting a real person from a fake, even if only at the subconscious level. It’s one of those things that nags at them about the current customer experience.

Could companies continue on their technology-heavy course and still keep customers satisfied? Yes. But would that course generate real customer loyalty and connection? Not likely.