Why is providing the customer a good 'experience' so difficult? McKinsey offers it thoughts – so do I

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It took me a long time to realise that much of the work I do is about ‘improving the customer experience’. My focus is on older customers, but whatever I recommend to clients cannot be at the expense of younger people. In most instances, if you improve the customer experience for older customers, it benefits all ages.

My focus is on one single part of the customer experience, that involved with physiological ageing. Over the years I have noticed how difficult it is for companies to implement effective changes to the processes that customers use. Often, the changes that need to be made are obvious and nobody disagrees they need to be made. Yet, when it comes to ‘making it happen’ the initial enthusiasm for change gets lost. Why does this happen?

It is encouraging that I am not alone in  witnessing these problems. McKinsey must have seen it happen so often that it has published a paper titled ‘Avoiding the seven deadly sins of customer experience transformations‘.

I cannot disagree with any of these ‘sins’ and would add a couple of others to the list.

Marketers have very short attention spans. The problems this creates is compounded by way that the demands on their time is governed by the urgency of the task rather than its importance. On Monday the CX project is the most important thing on their agenda, by Friday it is fighting for attention with another half a dozen, vital initiatives.

The organisational structure that is used to implement CX change is often the cause of the failure. As soon as the task is established as a multi-disceplanary project, with seconded staff, who are also doing their ‘day job’ then you might as well abandon all hopes of success.

It really is amazing that large companies are able to implement any systemic change to their business processes. Dick Stroud

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