Читать книгу Managing Customer Experience and Relationships - Don Peppers - Страница 39

When an enterprise seeks to treat different customers differently, to keep them longer and grow them bigger, it must start by trying to see its own business through its customers' eyes, experiencing what the customer experiences, and then treating each different customer in the way that customer wants to be treated. Only by pursuing this goal effectively can an enterprise manage and continually improve the customer experience delivered by whatever brand or product the enterprise is selling. In an ideal world, the enterprise would deliver just the right experience to each individual customer at the just right time. The technology to do this has only recently arrived on the business scene, but it continues to evolve rapidly, and technology doesn't slow its pace to allow mere mortals to keep up with it. To be competitively successful, business managers today must upgrade their enterprise's capabilities at a rate that keeps pace with technology's often disruptive cadence.

Over time, every customer can be expected to have a whole series of customer experiences and these experiences compound themselves into the customer's ongoing relationship with whatever enterprise is delivering the experiences. To manage these customer experiences and the relationships they give rise to over time, an enterprise needs data systems, analytics capabilities, and interaction platforms. But in addition to these technological tools, the enterprise must also ensure that its organization is properly aligned, so that it can see and manage each customer's experience rationally, even as its processes are being influenced by the actions and reactions of multiple different business units, across the whole range of channels and through time. No matter how advanced technology becomes, it will never be possible to automate everything, and human-to-human interaction is the most direct and perhaps the only sufficient way to inject authentic humanity into any system of commerce. As a result, the people within the enterprise will need to have the right mindset, one that predisposes them to want to make the right decisions with respect to protecting customer interests, and to take the right actions even in the absence of plans, algorithms, or scripts.

Technology, automation, and increasing levels of artificial intelligence may be driving this massive, worldwide transformation of business competition, in other words, but the fact remains that an individual customer's own experience, by its very nature, is based on the customer's humanity. Computers and automated systems may render products and provide services ever more efficiently, but machines and automated systems have no needs to meet, no problems to solve, no desires to satisfy. Machines never want or need anything. Only people have wants and needs, and only people engage in commerce to satisfy these wants and needs. And while they do recognize the benefits of services and products that have been personalized by automation, they also crave things that only other humans can provide, including empathy, creativity, humor, irony, praise, social engagement, and the sense of emotional fulfillment or accomplishment that comes from doing new things or mastering new tasks. Technology alone will never be able to fulfill these human cravings, but it can still empower and augment the efforts of an enterprise whose managers and employees seek to do so.

The point is that delivering a better customer experience means delivering a better human experience to customers, and because every human being is distinct and different from every other human being, once a business sets out to see things through its customers' eyes and to improve the overall quality of its customer experience, it must embrace the idea of treating different customers differently. This poses an immense problem to solve, even for a company with no cumbersome Industrial-Era baggage. With every new interactive platform or mobile app, the urgency of delivering a better, more personal, and compelling customer experience intensifies. At the same time, customers become even more informed and impatient, while an enterprise's competitors are scrambling to do it first.