Customer as competitive advantage

I mean… Einstein was so close, but he should have said:

Insanity is doing the same thing as everyone else expecting different results.

The customer is the most underutilized resource in any organization. not because they are not already visible, listened to and included, but because we are utilizing at most only a few percentage points of the potential they are offering us. We are neither innovating, imagining or pushing the boundaries when it comes to the customer. We are going backwards*

*several research reports suggest customer satisfaction and customer experience quality is dropping over the last few years (1).

We are not getting better at our customers. We are getting worse.

A few examples to challenge the thinking:

(please remember that most of these tools / approaches were very good ideas at the time of their invention, but that they still mirror the environment and technology limitations of that time)

• We still use surveys to learn about our customers
• We treat people as if their purpose is to buy things
• We still use events / ceremony based innovation processes
• We filter and bias our insights through tools that limit us
• We are using digital and data to do more of the same only faster and cheaper
• We measure experiences in terms of engagement
• We see the customer as charity
• We assume customers care about efficiency as much as we do
• We railroad our customers as if they are algorithms that we just need to get to do things: open email, click on link, visit website, sign up for webinar, join, repeat

The goal here is to be provocative. Everything can be improved, even if we don’t see it yet (and when we do it’s usually because someone else is already doing it). We need to ask more questions.

Examples:

Let me take a few of these just to demonstrate my point that we need to keep pushing the status quo to do better.