Where Did “CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE” Come From?
Several years ago, one of my clients was the company that owned ACT!, at the time the world’s undisputed leading contact management software. I remember walking into the senior product manager’s office and being stopped cold by the look on her face. She was sitting in her chair behind the nicely appointed desk with only what can be termed a devastated look on her face.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Yesterday when I left the office, we were the world’s #1 contact management software program,” she said. “Today, I come in and they have ranked us as the fifth largest ‘customer relationship management’ provider. Where was the memo that we changed an entire category’s definition, while what we do and have done so well has not changed at all?”
Despite much hoopla and game-playing with word definitions, strong revenue growth in the customer information business has created a similar occurrence in an industry once called market research to that which this product manager faced. Today, there are firms popping into existence as customer experience consultants, customer experience analytics companies, customer experience management firms, and many many other variations on the “customer experience” theme.
Yet, when you scratch the surface, the vast majority of these firms are driving without a license! The majority are simply re-positioning and re-purposing good old fashioned market research processes and claiming they have discovered the gold standard of tomorrows business operations. All while having no practical expertise to speak of and no benchmarks for their “new” findings.
So, here’s the question that separates the players from the posers – do you know why the term “customer experience” came to be, and what it was intended to mean?
It had a definite starting time in history (we can quibble over the exact moment in time perhaps) and was to be a description of something NEW that was just beginning to happen at the time.
Think about it! Answer coming later.
