Fixing the customer experience gap: a 4-staged journey

Ideas on how to power your marketing strategy using technology

I’ve been working in the intersection between marketing and tech for a few years now, and lately I’ve been thinking about some interesting things that happen in that space. I think there is a gap (or 3, actually) between marketing needs/efforts and customer needs/efforts, and the way technology is used to bridge that gap (or gaps) is understood as necessary, but not really understood all too well. So this article is an exercise: I wanted to lay it all out and see what useful ideas come up.

Designing a marketing strategy is an endeavor that points towards a universal goal: maximizing customer satisfaction. And in that endeavor, marketers and marketing teams tend to go through 4 stages. Each of these stages is defined by a main question or course of action that resonates in our heads constantly like a mosquito on a hot summer night, until we manage to somehow solve it, and then we can move on to the next stage, where another premise is waiting to do the mosquito night dance in our mind.

First stage: chasing after the category leaders

If you work in Marketing (or in any kind of business that has to deal with real people, face-to-face, in real time), I’m willing to bet you have spent some time turning some of these questions -or all of them- in your head:

• Is it better to have a brick & mortar store, or to go full digital?
• If we choose to do both, how can we find a good balance between the two?
• Why do people come to the store, look around, and then go home and buy online?
• If they’re going to buy online, why do we bother having stores?
• If we get rid of the physical stores, will customers still find our products online?
• Is ecommerce a way to kill the business or a way to help it survive?
• Are Amazon, ebay and the rest friends or foes?

Usually, the answer most businesses and organizations come up with, to deal with the bulk of these questions, is: do whatever is working for the guys who are doing well.

This is also referred to as ‘Best Practices’, and it’s what took businesses on a breakneck ride from investing in banner advertising, to SEO, to paid search, to social media marketing, to influencer marketing, to account-based marketing, and so on and so forth, over the past couple of decades.

During this stage, your mind will bend over backwards trying to find out what these best practices are, and you and your team will spend hours upon hours combing the desert until you find them. Eventually, you will leave this stage behind when the nerve racking question is brought forward:

Second stage: are there even ‘Best practices’ where you operate?

It’s now become a part of the common-sensical jargon, but you probably never stopped to think about what ‘Best practice’ means and entails, and that’s fine. Let us travel back in time, right before the turn of the century, to a time called “the 90s”, when Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework, a tool for decision-making that offers five decision-making contexts or “domains”:

1. Simple / Obvious / Clear: this domain represents the “known knowns”. This means that there are rules in place (or best practices), the situation is stable, and the relationship between cause and effect is clear: if you do X, expect Y.
2. Complicated: this domain consists of the “known unknowns”. The relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or expertise; there is a range of right answers.
3. Complex: this domain represents the “unknown unknowns”. Cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect, and there are no right answers.
4. Chaotic: in this domain, cause and effect are unclear. Events in this domain are too confusing to wait for a knowledge-based response. Action — any action — is the first and only way to respond appropriately.
5. Disorder: this domain represents situations where there is no clarity about which of the other domains apply. By definition, it is hard to see when this domain applies. The way out of this realm is to break down the situation into constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms.

So, why are we going through the pain of unpacking a framework?, you may be wondering. To make a point. And what is the point? That doing whatever is working for the guys who are doing well is a valid approach only in a situation we can define as part of the Simple / Obvious / Clear domain.

Most people who own businesses and run organizations haven’t heard about the Cynefin framework, so it takes them a heartbreaking amount of time to exit this stage. You have probably lived through something like this, trying out stuff that doesn’t work, and wondering if anything ever will. Eventually, you reach a point where you decide that trying to find the recipe for success just doesn’t make sense, and then you move on. Knowing about this framework could have saved you a bunch of time. But now you know, and knowledge is power. Or at least it gives you the power to move out from these murky waters onto the next stage:

Third stage: figuring out what your context looks (and behaves) like

When there are clear rules in place, when the situation is stable, and when the relationship between cause and effect is clear, you can -and probably should- apply best practices. But I’m pretty sure your current state of affairs doesn’t have all those qualities at once, and most likely none of them. That being said, it is my duty to inform you that no, you do not qualify for best practices.

What to do, then? Well, during this stage you need to work on understanding what realm or domain you’re operating in, and what that means, in order to act accordingly.

Businesses — and marketers working for said businesses — struggle to find ways to connect all the disperse experiences their customers go through when interacting with their brand: what goes on in the physical stores is usually far and disconnected from what takes place on the website, or on social media, and we’re all pretty convinced that word-of-mouth comes into this equation at some point, but we are not really sure where, or how. And on the customers’ side, they want to solve their problems, fulfill their desires, satisfy their needs, and all we marketers and businesses seem to be doing is getting in their way. It’s frustrating for everyone.

If everything we’ve talked about so far resonates with you, and I bet it does if you got to this point, we can start to heal this broken process by agreeing that we don’t have clear rules in place, that the situation is not too stable, and certainly the relationship between cause and effect is, to say the least, unclear. Acceptance is freeing.

First conclusion: there is room for best practices, yes, but it’s getting smaller and smaller.

Second conclusion: if you want to apply what “the guys who are doing well” are doing, you need to realize that just because a few things are working well for them now, it does not mean that is how they got there. Not only that, but you need to check as well if they are operating in the domain of the Simple, the Obvious and the Clear and, if so, proceed to check if you are also in that domain or not.

This is a tricky question and, to answer it, maybe we could approach it at an angle, and ask a different question, one that also helps us figure out how to make your customers happy (or at least happier) and while doing that, gather some valuable insight to tackle some or all of the questions that we started out with in the first stage.

To do that, a big question we should be asking revolves around integration:

Is there a way to integrate all these scattered experiences into a seamless one that makes our operation almost transparent to our customers?

Fourth stage: Jekyll & Hyde’s gaps

In this stage, you will begin to tackle the ugly side of the relationship between your business and your customers. We have been talking about this gap in a matter-of-fact way, and that can make it sound like something natural, almost inevitable. But when you take a closer look, you can see what the gap is really made of: advertising that doesn’t match what goes on at the store, an in-store experience that doesn’t correlate with the online experience, and a wide array of customer care interactions alternating and overlapping between phones, online chats, in person attention, email and (yes, still) physical mail, and it all points us in the direction of the same ugly monster: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The problem with Jekyll and Hyde is the same problem most businesses deal with: they each do their own thing, while ignoring what their counterpart is doing. The ugly gap between what businesses want and what customers want is actually made of 3 gaps: first of all, a gap in knowledge; second, a gap in understanding regarding that knowledge; and third, a gap in action based on the understanding of that knowledge. And in this stage, you will try to find a way to bridge these 3 gaps, in order to realign customer and business needs.

The gap in Knowledge

The gap in knowledge consists of a divide between data that businesses gather in their online portals and data that they gather at their physical stores. If you have a bank account, a cable TV account or almost any other kind of account, and at one point you had a problem and needed assistance, which made you reach out to the company behind it, you most certainly have come in close contact with this gap:

On your first interaction, you are required to provide some personal information like your ID, date of birth, account number (maybe some, maybe all, maybe a combination of those), only to reach a second instance of interaction, where (no suspense) you are required to provide some or all of that information once more. Are we supposed to believe that they don’t already have all that information, and possibly much more? Not in 2020, if I had to guess. But the Knowledge in gap is a real thing, and this is how she manifests.

If you are rolling your eyes at this, reminiscing of past encounters with these services providers, I’d like to invite you to look inwards at your own business: Is the information you’re gathering on different outlets integrated? Are you leveraging that information to drive and improve customer interactions? Do you have systems in place to keep track of everything you know and can know about your customers?

You can probably make an educated guess about the nature and quality of that experience, but chances are you don’t know for a fact. It’s not your fault: the larger your business gets, the harder it is to keep a pulse on it. Furthermore, it’s quite possible that this disconnect between what you know, what you think you know and reality, also happens at the level of your customer care / customer service team, and that’s a bit more worrying. Again, not your fault; but definitely something you can work on.

The gap in Understanding

Some businesses do have systems in place to gather information about their customers and their experience. These are the companies who do know your client ID, where you live, what you are subscribed to, etc., and their problem is one step further along the customer experience pathway: they’re not really sure what all that information amounts to.

The bigger the business, the bigger the dataset. Does that mean that we know more? Or does it simply mean that we have a bigger mess to make sense of? It’s not unusual to find leaders and businesses who are sitting on an incredible pile of information, some of them without a clue that they actually have access to it, and others without a clue where to begin making sense of it all. They have so much data on you that they should know who you are, what you like and dislike, and how to leverage that to their own commercial advantage. But they don’t.

Having the data is nowhere near as important as making sense of that data. The world around us is constantly giving us valuable information, and the better we understand what that information means, the better our decisions will be and, ergo, the better and more efficient our actions.

The gap in Action

Last, but certainly not least, some businesses have the information, they have taken the trouble to organize it, they have the visualization tools to help them make sense of it all at a glance, and they understand their customers with clarity. They seem to be doing everything right. Yay! And yet, they don’t seem to be acting on it.

This may ring a bell: you go into a meeting, issues get thrown around, people discuss, and (after a considerable amount of time, of course) the thing ends, and everyone seems to be (kind of) on the same page. People do that thing where they slap their thighs, say “well..!” and head for the door. You leave with a sense of accomplishment after getting everyone to agree on a course of action. But then, a week goes by, and then another.. and nothing seems to have changed. You don’t get it… What happened?

It may sound counterintuitive, even illogical, but having all the information and making sense of it isn’t enough; it is necessary, yes, but not sufficient to actually make change happen. To make change happen, the stakes need to be raised: either something really good is to be gained from action, or something really bad is going to happen unless we take action.

Things that we agree on don’t translate into action when there is nothing to lose, or when it isn’t clear who gets the blamed it doesn’t, or when the benefit of acting on it isn’t seductive enough. To put it harshly, people ask themselves, “who cares?”, and when no urgent answer comes to mind, the thing probably won’t go any further.

So, if we read this right:

• Some organizations don’t know what information they already have: they are gathering data for sure, but they lack systems to do so in an orderly fashion
• Some organizations do know what information they have, but aren’t sure how to use it: they lack systems to comprehensively understand their information in a way that makes it easier for them to make decisions
• Some organizations have the information, have systems in place to understand it, and have even come to make comprehensive decisions on it, but aren’t moving into action: the stakes aren’t high enough.

What to do with these conclusions

Having reached this point, you might be thinking that the solution will come from technology. After all, it’s what Amazon (“the guys who are doing well”) did. They took a decent shot at this whole thing with Amazon Go!, a brick and mortar store with no employees and no check-out lines, that relies on a combo of computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to make magic happen as customers go in the store, pick up whatever they want and leave, as everything gets automatically billed to their Amazon account.

Even if you aren’t Amazon, chances are you are still right: technology might bring the solution to some — or all— of your marketing problems. But before you embark on such a journey, that noise in your head telling you to incorporate technology needs to be fine tuned, until you can hear some kind of melody in it.

Nothing is worse than being successful in solving the wrong problem.

The question, of course, isn’t whether or not technology can save us all. It probably can. The question is what kind of technology is that, how should you approach it, and what implementation strategy better fits your situation. And all of this hinges on a previous step: clearly defining what kind of problem you’re trying to solve.

Coming towards the end of this journey, you probably guessed it: there is no foolproof recipe to bridge this gap and make things magically better at the tip of your fingers. Each business, each market, each context and each domain has its own particularities, and the combinations are, if not endless, definitely too many to be solved by a single, straightforward approach. However, since every organization goes through these stages during the development of their marketing strategy, you can use this model to organize that process, and to determine what to focus at every point along the way.

You can use this knowledge, first and foremost, to understand what stage you are going through. But you can also use it to decide whether or not to chase the category leader and, if so, how; or to figure out if best practices apply or not; or to get a clear definition of the context you are operating in, and adjust accordingly.

Most importantly, I think you can use this model to acknowledge and work on bridging your Jekyll & Hyde gaps. And that will have a direct and immediate impact on your customers and their experience.

about Martín Pettinati:

I want you to communicate better. When I’m not communicating the awesome stuff that gets done at Manas.Tech, I write, talk, design and execute trainings on communication, marketing, presentations, public speaking, leading teams, and several other things, always within the field of communication, always focused on doing, and with the purpose of creating and sharing useful and applicable things.