Concepts like engagement, customer experience, and brand advocacy are all quite familiar to digital marketers. But during the course of a recent, 60-minute microconference, "The New Experience Economy," 20 speakers fit these topics into a framework that provides a new way to see how they work together.
Kerry Bodine, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester, set the stage with a timeline of business history from the Age of Manufacturing (1900-1960) through the Age of Distribution (1960-1990) and the Age of Information (1990-2010). In each of these periods, she said, owning the namesake technology meant owning the market. Now, though, we're in the Age of the Customer--and that’s not something any marketer can own.
Instead, businesses need to provide the “Integral Customer Experience,” a concept based on the Integral Theory of philosopher and consciousness theorist Ken Wilber. The Integral Customer Experience balances what's Inside the customer (feelings and desires) with what's the Outside (measurable actions), as well as the experience of the One (the individual) with that of the Many. Laying these dualisms on top of each other creates four quadrants of customer experience (diagram, right).
1. Think & Feel (Inside + One)
The Think & Feel segment opened with Customer Bliss founder Jeanne Bliss urging companies to focus on delivering the memories they want to create for their customers. Bliss said she asks her clients, "Are you hiring memory creators, or are you only hiring technicians?"
On the same subject, Chip Conley, founder of boutique hotel group Joie de Vivre, brought up Abraham Maslow's familiar Hierarchy of Needs. According to Conley, meeting customer expectations is the lowest level of customer interaction--just enough to make sure they survive as a customer. But that's not enough these days, he argued. The next step up is meeting customers' desires: "When you feel your desires are met. . .you feel the company gets who you are." But the most effective companies create "transformational or self-actualized customers" by understanding their unrecognized needs.
2. Act & Engage (Outside + One)
Susan Abbott, founder of Abbott Research and Consulting, also referred to Maslow's pyramid. When people spend their money, they're looking for more than satisfying their basis needs. "They're looking to enhance their identity," she said. "They're looking to create happy memories." What that boils down to is that "not sucking is not adequate; you need to be great."
Kevin Cochrane, Adobe’s vice president of enterprise marketing and customer experience, said that the key to being great is to "get a consistent customer experience across all interactions and touchpoints." That's what the company's digital marketing platform is intended to enable businesses to do.
Beth Smits, vice president of service operations for Best Buy, spoke of data that her company has collected that suggests loyal service customers spend more in the long run than customers who have had no service experience. Her conclusion: "Regardless of how much money you make in a given interaction, it's about driving loyalty and intimacy with the customer. Every action needs to have that as an outcome, as opposed to every interaction necessarily driving revenue.”
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