The Future of Customer Experience
Your customer is precious about how she spends her attention. Are you saving or seizing it?
The Future of Customer Experience
Your customer is precious about how she spends her attention. Are you saving or seizing it?
The Customer Experience Wars
A clash of tech-fueled convenience, free flowing media, experimentalism and relentless distraction.
Perhaps it dawned on you while you were sitting in traffic, stuck behind a car using Adaptive Cruise Control. You saw its driver sitting dozily at the wheel – probably tuned into a mindfulness podcast – and realised: these are different times. Traffic moves at a crawl, but information moves so fast a Kickstarter product is plagiarized and produced in Shenzen before its campaign has funded. Meanwhile, Vice makes meal kits and brews beer, breweries open hotels, hotels launch designer apparel, and apparel brands sell bricks, stones and metrocards. Verticals are artifacts from a more timid time. One of long corporate lifespans and easily impressed customers.
You can’t sit out the 21st Century Customer Experience Wars. Shots are fired every second. From Oslo to Ottawa, from Seattle to Santiago. No brand is safe. No wonder, then, that 86% of business leaders agree that customer experience is vital for success (Harvard Business Review, January 2017). Time to get to know the rules of engagement…
The Fundamental Question
When attention is your customer’s most precious resource, are you saving or seizing it?
In a hyper-competitive Experience Economy where consumers are digitally empowered, yet feel forever time-starved, there’s a fundamental choice to make with your Customer Experience strategy. At any particular moment, you must decide if your brand’s offering is a stepping stone on the way to experiences or if you are providing the experience itself. At every interaction or encounter you must ask: is your brand saving the customer’s attention or seizing it?
The answer to that question may change over the course of the customer journey, yet the challenge remains constant. Fail to save or seize attention and you’ll end up wasting it. And wasted attention is unforgivable.
The Fork in the Road
Why is this Customer Experience dichotomy so urgent?
Customers today are beyond fortunate, yet they often feel that ‘paying’ for anything – with time and attention – is an almost intolerable cost. And while the question, “are you functional or delightful?” is as old as commerce itself, it’s more relevant than ever. Here are just four shifts that have brought us here:
• Digitally-supercharged business models deliver everything, from baby food to life advice on-demand, and battle to maximize efficiency.
• Connected devices (with image and voice recognition and more built in) actually work. Meanwhile machine learning and massive data trails empower brands to better decisions on the customer’s behalf.
• The switch to ephemeral social sharing via Snapchat and the Copycats is pouring gasoline on the Experience Economy.
• A chorus of purpose-driven brands, big and small, promise (and increasingly deliver) a path to self-actualization.
In response to the above shifts, many brands will specialize and either seize or save attention. Others are a hybrid, varying at each touchpoint. The core truth to absorb? You must know exactly where you stand in this dichotomy or you will suffer the consequences.
Attention Saving
Automated, data-powered, seamless and happily forgotten. A CX strategy for the future.
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.
3 Ways to Save Attention
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.
Want More?
Read the full PDF, packed with even more insights.
Read MoreAttention Seizing
Your customers are masters at collecting experiences. Only the best deserve their attention.
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?
3 Ways to Seize Attention
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.
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About The Author:
Maxwell Luthy
Maxwell Luthy, Director of Trends & Insights is based in our New York office. He co-authored Trend-Driven Innovation (Wiley, 2015) and delivers lively workshops for leading brands along with insight-packed keynotes at conferences. He previously oversaw the company's 3,000 member spotter network.
Full bioIt takes a team:
This Trend Briefing has many hands on it. A huge thanks to the team that pulled this together with such positivity and enthusiasm, especially: Acacia Leroy, Alida Urban, Anton Bjorklund, Chris Class, Daniela Moya, David Mattin, Denis Rasia, Francesca Coppola, Gillian Harris, Harry Metzger, Harvey Gomez, Henry Mason, Jack Saunders, James Treacher, Jessica Tindle, Jonathan Herbst, Laura Varetto, Laurie Roxby, Lola Pedro, Luciana Stein, Lyubo Popov, Nikki Ritmeijer, Vicki Loomes, Vicky Kim and Xander van Baarsen. THANK YOU!