In the 2017 customer journey, attention saving moments are frequently invisible. And the customer will only appreciate them the first time round. Delightful solutions quickly become routine, noticed only when broken. Competitors (within and outside your industry) are working around the clock to reduce friction through incremental improvements and radical shortcuts. If you’re not up to speed on changing expectations you will trigger disappointment, frustration and even a little rage. Yikes.

Why Now

What has driven customer expectations around attention saving so high?

• The On-Demand Decade: No category has remained untouched by on-demand expectations. The decade where mobile-wielding masses have embraced everything from Narcos to narcotics on-demand. Didi Chuxing’s platform can provide 20 million trips a day (yep, more than Uber!), while as of April 2017, Amazon Dash button orders were being placed four times a minute.
  
  
• Verbal Intelligence: Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and other virtual assistants harnessed developments in voice recognition, natural language processing and cloud-based intelligence and leapt from novelty to revolutionary. 76% of all regular voice users say that “using voice technology feels really natural now and I don’t even think about it.” (JWT Intelligence, February 2017). As platforms, they offer a growing range of access to third party services. Along with their awkward cousins, chatbots, they are rewriting expectations around brand interactions: from complex to casual.
  
  
• Status via Busyness: With connected lifestyles the office never closes, as any modern knowledge worker knows. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research found: “status inferences are driven by the belief that the busy individual has higher human capital characteristics and is scarcer and more in demand.” In plain English: an epic cultural shift has occurred, whereby leisure time isn’t always the status symbol it once was. On the contrary, being so busy one needs time-saving apps, within-the-hour services (and not-so-smart juicers) to survive is a sign that the individual is a very big deal.

Where Next

How can your Customer Experience outpace expectations around attention saving?

• Go Off The Map: When asking which parts of the customer experience to make disappear, think beyond the typical route of your customer's’ journey with your brand. What experiences, outside that journey, in daily life would do well to just disappear?
  
  
• Make Multitasking Easy: Attention maximizers love to layer hands-free, eyeball-free escapism or education on to otherwise lost time (see how sales of audiobooks boom while ebooks flicker). How might you empower customers to cram in additional experiences?
  
  
• Guilt: Outsourced: Even the world’s most conscious customer doesn’t want to idle in the supermarket aisle weighing up which eggs came from the happiest chickens. Free up their attention by assuring negative eco or social impacts are minimized.
  
  
• Don't Be Evil: The dark side of easy and invisible experiences is they can encourage customers to overindulge or pursue harmful behavior (such as driving for longer hours with Uber) in pursuit of profit. Make sure your nudging is not nefarious.

Attracting and maintaining customer attention gets harder by the microsecond. Some days it’s the major players (mammoth marketing budgets, distribution and all the product trimmings) with an unfair advantage. Other days it’s the niche and the nimble, the upstart startups. The truth? No brand has it easy. If your products, services and experiences don’t reward attention with one-of-a-kind stories, self-actualization, redemption, connection to others, or the uniquely powerful feeling of being understood and served as an individual, they will flop.

Why Now

What has driven customer expectations around attention seizing so high?

• Broken Rules of Engagement: With skyrocketing digital media consumption and growing choice in (almost) every marketplace, attention is scarce. To get consumers to engage, brands have been breaking loose from their vertical to pop up in surprising places and delight new customers. Today there are few remaining B2C categories (tweet @maxluthy if you can think of any) that haven’t had their toes stepped on by a startup, or multinational, from ‘outside’ their space.
  
  
• Status Sandcastles: The shift towards an Experience Economy began at the tail end of the 20th century. This was supercharged by social media, the perfect platform to share and show off experiences in pursuit of likes. Yet in 2017, carefully curated photo albums of a once-in-a-lifetime vacation are about as valuable as your MySpace friend count. The shift towards ephemeral (read: more authentic) 'stories' means exploits–Status Sandcastles–must be rebuilt daily. And livestreaming will only push this further as people flaunt how amazing their lives are, right now.
  
  
• Connoisseur Masses: In a marketplace with endless choices to make, customers flip from purchasing the cheapest/fastest/easiest option in one category, to fussing over every little detail (whether it’s the discovery, the packaging, the delivery, the consumption or something else) in another. It’s the latter where they want to spend their attention and be seen doing it. Is your brand instant coffee or AeroPress? Are you Apple Music or Amoeba Music? Are you Kraft or MAST?

Where Next

How can your Customer Experience outpace expectations around attention seizing?

• Personal, Contextual, Unforgettable: The best way to capture a customer’s attention at any given moment? Harness their unique data and circumstance to prove to them that you understand their exact needs at that point in time. Mass marketing/design/pricing/delivery won’t capture attention forever.
  
  
• Less Fuss, More Attention: Don’t assume this side of Customer Experience is purely about maximalism and cramming bells and whistles into your CX. Of course that can seize attention! But there are whole strands of product or service design where minimalism still rules the day (and we're not just talking about Apple!).
  
  
• Seize With Substance: Consider how you can facilitate self-improvement, not just in a physical manner, but at a deeper, perhaps even spiritual, level. Yesterday's brands were for profit. Today they have purpose. Tomorrow’s brands, through everything from pricing to production, to packaging, will help the customer pursue their own purpose.
  
  
• Questification: Do you really believe there are only 2.6 billion gamers out there? Beyond gamification (with its progress bars and cutesy badges), what would it look like if you accompanied the customer on a quest? Design an adventure that makes your CX unforgettable and your competitor's look like Pac-Man.
  
  

Hybrid Theory

We said right at the start that your brand’s role would vary. It’s unlikely your optimal strategy is to be a saver at every step in the customer journey, or a seizer throughout.

Consider Netflix, the media and entertainment giant wants to seize users attention with as much compelling content as it can, hence the USD 6 billion it is investing in original programming in 2017. Yet Netflix was able to celebrate (with a steak dinner, no less) reaching 100 million subscribers because it endeavors to make trials, purchasing, logging in, refunds, updates, discovery, cross-device access and more as seamless as possible.

Meal kit subscriptions are another compelling hybrid solution for millions of customers. Even if Blue Apron goes belly up before its impending IPO, the expectation it has created won’t go anywhere. The value-add (versus takeout and home cooking) is that they involve just the right amount of convenient-yet-rewarding preparation. Blue Apron is approaching USD 1 billion in annual revenue by expertly walking the CX tightrope.

So the answer may vary from touchpoint to touchpoint. From your pricing to your packaging to your return policy. The optimal strategy may even vary from one customer segment to another. What is absolutely vital is that you ask the question.

Before You Go! Go! Go!

We’d like to take this moment to THANK YOU for giving us your in-demand attention. We cherish it. Now go grab your team and ask them how your brand can be the best in class at seizing or saving attention at every 👏 single 👏 encounter 👏 with the customer. Your customer deserves it.

Wait… you’re still here?

You want to spend more attention on this? ;) Then sign up below to download the complete free report on The Future of Customer Experience. More examples, insights and opportunities are waiting to inspire your winning CX strategy!