Category Archives: Customer Experience

Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity

GUEST POST from Alain Thys

I just finished a presentation for the leadership team of a European travel company that wanted to better understand the barriers they would face on their journey to true customer-centricity. And what they could do about it.

It was a good excuse to give a 2022 update to some of my older thinking on the topic. And while I can’t really share the presentation, I’m including as summary of the Top 3 barriers below. In case you find them of interest.

BARRIER #1: Lack of Clarity

Everyone wants to be customer centric, but no one explains what that means in practice. Not just to agree on what a great customer experience looks like. But also to think through its implications for the business.

What changes does Aïsha need to plan in her logistics department? What return can shareholders expect for investing in ‘happy faces’? What new developments do distributors and ecosystem partners need to plan for? And are any of these implications realistic within available timelines and budgets?

Without this clarity, everyone will interpret ‘being customer-centric’ in its own way, so initiatives will go in a thousand directions. Or simply grind to a halt because of an operational or financial disconnect.

Either way, with the best of intentions, the only certainty is that customers will have a variable experience depending on the touchpoint, person or time of day.

Overcoming the Barrier: Clearly describe your customer experience. What are you promising? How will you make it happen? And what does it mean for each of your internal and external stakeholders? And before you hit the ‘start’ button, check whether all of your ideas are realistic.

BARRIER #2: Lack of Empathy

Whenever a leadership team embraces customer-centricity, the buzzwords and targets start flying around. Metrics like Net Promoter, customer ease or new kid on the block TLM appear in PowerPoint decks and we focus everything on driving the numbers.

But as management teams get excited, those around them care a lot less. Employees prefer meaningful work and decent salaries over KPIs. Shareholders may not see why they should sacrifice short-term profit for customer smiles. Distribution and ecosystem partners have got their hands full in running their own business.

The result is that strategies are implemented because you say so as a leader. This compliance often works in the short-term. But it disintegrates when processes, negotiations, and culture get in the way. Or when the next budget cut or senior executive comes around.

Overcoming the Barrier: Anchor your customer-centricity drive in the culture by reframing it into what matters to your different stakeholders. Connect the customer experience to the values and culture of those who work for you. Show your shareholders how smiles and money go hand in hand. Engage your ecosystem to create a common vision, instead of imposing yours. Make the strategy theirs, instead of yours.

BARRIER #3: Lack of Vision

Customer teams focus most, if not all, of their attention on improving the customer’s experience based on feedback and competitive benchmarks. Rightly so. Dropping the ball on a touchpoint or moment may cost dearly in both loyalty and revenue.

But too much focus on ‘continuous improvement’ can blind us to the experience that ‘should exist’ tomorrow. In today’s economy, the last best experience the customers had anywhere, become their expectation everywhere. It’s just that they can’t tell what it is before they’ve had it. At which point, we’re too late.

Unfair? Totally. But also reality.

Overcoming the Barrier: Keep improving today, but allocate at least 20% of your time to imagining the customer’s future that ‘should exist’. Look at life through the eyes of your customer and prototype experiences they cannot imagine today. Be the one who raises the expectation bar, so it forces others to follow.

I’m not saying these are the only barriers. But if you tackle them, you’ve probably avoided some of the biggest pitfalls to customer-centricity out there.

May the customer force be with you!

Image credit: Pixabay

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Integrating Physical and Virtual Experiences for Impact

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Beyond Digital to Phygital

Integrating Physical and Virtual Experiences for Impact

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For the last two decades, innovation has been synonymous with the digital transformation. We measured success by how quickly we could move processes, transactions, and interactions onto a screen. But this era of pure digitization is reaching its limits. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the next wave of disruptive value creation lies not in the digital realm alone, but in the seamless integration of the physical and virtual worlds. We must move beyond siloed thinking — the “online” store versus the “brick-and-mortar” — and design for a unified, continuous human experience that is exponentially more powerful. This convergence is where true emotional payoff — the feeling of delight, trust, and effortless flow — is created.

This integrated approach, often termed the phygital experience, recognizes a fundamental truth: humans are analog beings living in a digital world. We crave sensory input, spatial context, and tangible interaction, but we also demand the speed, personalization, and efficiency that technology provides. The true challenge for innovators is not simply adding an app to a physical product or a store; it’s strategically weaving digital tools—like Augmented Reality (AR), which layers information directly onto the physical world—into the fabric of the physical experience to remove friction, generate insight, and deliver profound moments of delight and impact. The ethical imperative here is paramount: pervasive data collection must be matched by radical transparency and responsible governance.

The Three Design Principles of Phygital Innovation

To master the symbiotic blend of the physical and virtual, organizations must design around three core principles:

1. Contextual Persistence: The user’s experience must not reset when they move between physical and digital spaces. Knowledge gained in one environment (e.g., viewing a product’s lifecycle history via an AR scan) must immediately inform the next (e.g., customized offers appearing on a self-checkout screen). The state, history, and goals of the customer must persist across the entire journey.
2. Sensory Augmentation and Immersion: Use digital tools (AR, mobile sensors, IoT) to enhance, not replace, the irreplaceable sensory qualities of the physical world. This means using AR in a showroom to visualize hidden customization options, or leveraging immersive VR/AR training tools that provide a realistic, risk-free physical practice environment, turning the physical environment into an information-rich, interactive interface.
3. Data-to-Trust Feedback Loops: The physical interaction must generate invaluable data, but this data must be treated ethically to build trust. Every touchpoint—a heat map of foot traffic, a verbal query, a click on a virtual product twin—must be fed into a single intelligence layer to constantly optimize both environments, while simultaneously ensuring the customer has control and visibility over their personal data.

“Digital innovation focused on screens is only half the story. True value is unlocked when the screen disappears into the environment, enhancing the human experience without distracting from it.”

Case Study 1: Amazon Go – Erasing Friction from the Physical Transaction

The Challenge:

The checkout process is the single greatest point of friction and frustration in physical retail, leading to abandoned purchases and negative customer sentiment. The goal was to remove this analog bottleneck using an invisible digital layer.

The Phygital Solution:

Amazon Go (and Fresh stores) pioneered a truly seamless phygital experience. The physical act of shopping—browsing shelves and picking up items—was maintained, satisfying the human need for tactile interaction. However, the digital layer — a complex array of computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning algorithms — was invisibly woven into the store’s ceiling and shelves. The “Just Walk Out” technology automatically tracked items and charged the customer’s virtual account.

The Innovation Impact:

This innovation completely eliminated the physical queue, removing the primary point of friction and resulting in a profound emotional payoff of effortlessness. The success lies in the digital invisibility — the technology is pervasive yet transparent, focusing the human on the pleasure of product selection rather than the pain of payment. This sets a new standard for physical retail efficiency, provided the data use is transparent and secure.

Case Study 2: Siemens Digital Twin for Industrial Operations

The Challenge:

Industrial organizations face immense complexity in managing highly expensive physical assets (factories, turbines, equipment). Downtime, maintenance planning, and optimization require costly, risky physical testing and limited visibility into real-time performance.

The Phygital Solution:

Siemens created comprehensive Digital Twins — virtual replicas of entire physical systems, factories, or products. These virtual models are continuously updated with real-time data streaming from sensors (IoT) embedded in the physical assets. Engineers and operators can then interact with the digital twin (a virtual environment) to simulate scenarios, optimize performance, predict maintenance needs, or test a new operating parameter before deploying it to the physical system. Crucially, AR overlays are often used to display the twin’s data directly onto the real-world equipment.

The Innovation Impact:

The Digital Twin provides a risk-free laboratory for physical operations, enhancing both safety and efficiency. This integration of the physical and virtual allows for proactive maintenance, dramatically reduces physical downtime, and accelerates innovation by allowing hundreds of design iterations to be tested virtually in a day. It demonstrates that the most impactful digital tools are those that directly and continuously improve the efficiency and safety of high-stakes physical assets and their human operators.

Conclusion: The Future is Fluid and Ethical

The most successful organizations of tomorrow will be those that fluidly navigate the space between atoms and bits. The focus of innovation must shift from asking “Is this digital?” to “How does this enhance the total human experience across all mediums?”

Leaders must mandate a unified design strategy that treats the physical and virtual realms as a singular ecosystem. This requires breaking down departmental silos and creating cross-functional teams focused purely on the continuous customer journey. By embracing contextual persistence, sensory augmentation, and robust data-to-trust feedback loops, we move beyond the limitations of purely digital solutions. The future isn’t just about faster screens; it’s about richer, more ethical, and more impactful experiences where technology elevates, rather than isolates, the human being.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Brewing a Better Customer Experience

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Brewing A Better Customer Experience

by Braden Kelley

There is probably nothing more important to the ongoing success of a business than a consistently excellent customer experience.

How many brands are you loyal to that provide a bad customer experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is more than customer service, more than the brand image your sales and marketing work so hard to project. In simple terms, everything your vendors and employees do on behalf of the company contributes to the customer experience.

But most organizations, and even customer experience professionals don’t think in these terms. It gets too complicated for most organizations. It’s much easier to think about customer touchpoints and pain points that can be identified and improved in a quest to create a great customer experience.

But what defines a great customer experience?

Seven Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience

It’s easy to get to know you
Clear communication
Transparency in what to expect
Effortless transactions (not just shopping, but problem solving and troubleshooting too)
Intentional friction (don’t over-optimize ALL transactions, sometimes waiting actually creates value by teasing the senses)
Interactions that make you feel valued not just as a customer, but as a person too
Occasional unexpected moments of delight

The Seven Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience serve as a set of guiding principles as you train employees, as you engage in service design, and as you pursue technology upgrades.

And what are the most important steps in a successful journey to a great customer experience?

Continue reading on the HCL Technology Blog

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Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

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Former VP Of Amazon Preaches a Frictionless Experience

Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Customers hate friction. They want easy, no hassle, low/no effort experiences. In short, they want convenience. Our 2022 customer experience research findings confirm:

70% of customers would pay more if they knew they would receive a convenient experience.

75% would switch to a competitor if they found it more convenient to do business with.

68% of customers say that a convenient customer experience alone will make them come back to a brand or company.

Examples of friction include long wait times, difficulty finding contact information on a website, too many steps to make a purchase online and more. Frictionless is almost not noticed—until it is. At some point, customers realize how easy it is to do business with a company, and they like it. In fact, they like it so much, as the findings show, they will pay more and keep coming back.

There have been several books that focus on creating a frictionless, convenient experience. The first was The Effortless Experience by Matt Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi, which focused on the customer support experience. Then along came my book The Convenience Revolution, which included the entire customer experience, not just customer support. This was followed by a few more excellent contributions to the subject, the most recent being The Frictionless Organization by Bill Price and David Jaffe.

Bill Price was Amazon’s first global vice-president of customer service. When Jeff Bezos interviewed Price for the job in 1999, he asked Price what his philosophy was for running customer service. Price responded, “The best service is no service,” which became the title of his first book. Price believes that the best customer experience is to have everything set up so well that they don’t need to contact customer support.

Of course, that would be perfection, and perfection is not reality. Amazon may have perfectly executed on its side, but once the package leaves the Amazon warehouse, UPS, USPS, FedEx and other delivery companies take over. If they lose a package, who will the customer call? Amazon, of course. Even if it wasn’t Amazon’s fault, they still received the call and, of course, took ownership of the problem.

Price knows that a frictionless experience often goes unnoticed by the customer until they realize why they like doing business with that company or brand. But it does get noticed by the company providing the experience. It shows up in the form of higher customer satisfaction scores such as NPS (Net Promoter Score). Repeat business and loyalty also go up.

In their book, Price and Jaffe share several reasons why every business should be frictionless:

Being Frictionless Reduces Cost – There is a cost to setting up a process that’s easy for customers (and employees), but the ROI far exceeds the investment. When a company is easy to do business with, it doesn’t get nearly as many customer support calls, which can be a huge drain on the customer service budget. There are fewer returns and refunds. Websites are more effective. And more.

Being Frictionless Drives Customer and Revenue Growth – Price’s experience with Amazon proves that a high customer satisfaction score translates into more business. Amazon has some of the highest ratings in the business world, and its growth proves this model works.

Being Frictionless Delivers a True Competitive Advantage – The stats at the beginning of this article prove that point. No/low friction and convenience can help bulletproof a company from the competition.

Being Frictionless Enables Business Survival – The past several years have tested the best business leaders. Survival during the pandemic, through supply-chain issues, and now a recession proves that the best companies can survive with the right strategies. A frictionless experience is more important than ever.

When I interviewed Price on Amazing Business Radio, he made the perfect closing comments for this article. “It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. What matters is that customers just want things to be easy for them. And if you don’t make it really simple and easy for customers, someone else will.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pixabay

Check out my latest research in his Achieving Customer Amazement Study, Sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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Tailoring Experiences at Scale

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The Power of Personalization

Tailoring Experiences at Scale

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, the dominant logic in business was mass production and mass consumption. The goal was simple: optimize for the average customer. But in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive marketplace, the average customer no longer exists. They are individuals demanding recognition, relevance, and respect for their unique context. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the future of competitive advantage lies in mastering The Power of Personalization — the ability to deliver tailored, meaningful experiences to millions of people, simultaneously and seamlessly. This is the ultimate convergence of human-centered design and technological scale: using data and intelligence to make every single customer feel profoundly understood. Innovation must move beyond simple segmentation to anticipatory intimacy.

Personalization is not just about slapping a name on an email. True personalization is a strategic innovation challenge that addresses the fundamental human need for relevance. When a product, service, or communication is relevant, it eliminates friction, conserves the user’s valuable time, and builds trust. Conversely, irrelevant experiences create “digital noise,” foster annoyance, and actively erode loyalty. The challenge for leaders is to establish the infrastructure—both technical and human—that allows the organization to perceive, remember, and respond to the unique needs and behaviors of its individual customers, moving from a transaction-based relationship to a personalized partnership.

The Three Dimensions of Human-Centered Personalization

Effective personalization at scale requires a deliberate strategic focus across three integrated dimensions, ensuring that technology serves human purpose:

1. Contextual Intelligence (The When and Where): Personalization fails when it is delivered out of context. This dimension involves using real-time behavioral data, location, time, and device context to deliver the right message at the exact moment of need. It’s about being helpful, not just interruptive. For example, offering a specific type of coffee to a regular when they step within range of their usual store, not hours later at home.
2. Behavioral Prediction (The Anticipatory Insight): Moving beyond “what they bought” to “what they are about to need.” This requires deep data analytics to model future behavior and latent needs. The innovation here is in creating proactive experiences—solving a problem the customer hasn’t even fully articulated yet. This is the difference between recommending a product and recommending a solution to a future pain point.
3. Ethical Transparency (The Trust Equation): The more personal your service, the higher the need for trust. Personalization must be built on a foundation of ethical consent and clarity. Customers must understand what data is being used, why it benefits them, and have meaningful control over it. Lack of transparency transforms personalization from helpful to “creepy,” immediately destroying the human relationship you were trying to build.

“The best personalization doesn’t guess the customer’s mind; it anticipates their next human need.”

Case Study 1: Netflix – Personalizing the Discovery Experience

The Challenge:

With thousands of titles in its library, Netflix faced a monumental human-centered challenge: choice overload. An average customer who spends too long searching often quits out of frustration, leading to churn. The vastness of the library became a liability rather than an asset.

The Personalization Solution:

Netflix innovated by turning its entire platform into a hyper-personalized discovery engine. Their personalization extends far beyond basic recommendation rows. They use data to:

Personalize Artwork: Displaying different title images for the same movie based on the viewer’s previous habits (e.g., showing a romantic image to a romance watcher, or an action scene to a thriller fan).
Personalize Rows: Creating unique rows that reflect highly specific taste segments (e.g., “Visually Stunning Sci-Fi Movies with a Strong Female Lead”).
Behavioral Prediction: Using complex algorithms to anticipate the titles most likely to be watched next, drastically reducing the cognitive effort required to choose.

The result is a service where the entire interface is tailored to the individual, solving the human problem of choice overload.

The Human-Centered Result:

By investing in personalization as its core product strategy, Netflix dramatically increased customer engagement and reduced churn. The experience feels curated and intimate, creating a strong sense of value. It proved that in the digital age, relevance is the killer feature, and the best way to innovate around a huge catalog is to make it feel small and tailored to each person.

Case Study 2: Spotify – Tailoring the Moment of Discovery

The Challenge:

The music world is characterized by an infinite library of new content. For Spotify, the challenge was helping users feel connected to new artists and music they would love, without relying solely on manual searching or static genre lists. The innovation needed to capture the highly personal, emotional nature of music discovery.

The Personalization Solution:

Spotify’s innovation, particularly the Discover Weekly playlist, is a masterclass in anticipatory personalization. The system uses a complex blend of collaborative filtering (what similar users like) and natural language processing (analyzing articles and blogs about music) to create a wholly unique, algorithmically-generated playlist for each user, delivered every Monday.

Contextual Delivery: The timing (Monday morning) positions the playlist as a fresh start and a soundtrack for the week.
Ethical Partnership: The playlist format feels like a gift from a trustworthy, knowledgeable friend, minimizing the “creepy” factor because the value exchange is clear: “We observe your taste, and in return, we give you this high-quality, personalized content.”

This system essentially turns data analysis into an act of creative, personalized curation.

The Human-Centered Result:

Discover Weekly became one of Spotify’s most successful features, driving massive engagement. It demonstrated that personalization can be an act of generosity, giving the user a valuable, curated product that is better than anything they could have created themselves. It solidified Spotify’s role not just as a music player, but as a trusted curator and partner in the user’s emotional relationship with music.

Conclusion: The Future of Business is Individual

The Power of Personalization is the core strategic challenge of our time. It requires leaders to embrace a fundamental truth: human connection scales. You don’t need to choose between mass market reach and intimate relationships; technology has finally allowed us to achieve both.

To succeed, organizations must move from seeing personalization as a marketing tactic to recognizing it as a holistic innovation imperative — a guiding principle for product design, service delivery, and ethical governance. By leveraging contextual intelligence and behavioral prediction with unwavering ethical transparency, we can create a future where every customer feels understood, valued, and served with a precision that delights. The most profitable innovations will be those that master the art of the individual experience, delivered on a global stage.

Image credit: Pexels

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Engaging Users in the Design Process

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Co-Creation for Experience

Engaging Users in the Design Process - Co-Creation for Experience

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the world of design and innovation, we have long operated under a traditional model. We observe users from a distance, conduct market research, and then retreat to our labs and conference rooms to design a solution that we believe they will love. We call this “customer-centric” design, but it’s a one-way street. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that this model is no longer enough. The future of innovation belongs to those who move beyond designing **for** their users to designing **with** them. This is the power of **co-creation**, a strategic shift that transforms customers from passive recipients of a product into active, invaluable partners in its creation.

Co-creation is the ultimate form of empathy. It’s an open invitation for your most passionate users to contribute their insights, skills, and creativity directly to the design process. This isn’t just about collecting feedback; it’s about treating your customers as equal partners in the journey of innovation. The benefits are profound. By involving the people you serve, you bypass the risk of building something they don’t genuinely need. You uncover unarticulated pain points and desires that a traditional survey could never reveal. And perhaps most importantly, you build a powerful sense of ownership and community. When customers have a hand in creating a product, they don’t just use it; they become an army of loyal advocates, invested in its success and eager to spread the word.

The Co-Creation Framework: A Human-Centered Approach

Successful co-creation is not a random act of crowdsourcing; it is a structured, human-centered process. It requires a clear framework to ensure that the collaboration is meaningful, productive, and respectful. Here are four essential steps:

1. Define the Challenge, Not the Solution: The starting point is crucial. Don’t ask users to validate a product you’ve already built. Instead, present them with a clear, compelling problem to solve. For example, instead of “How do you like our new app?”, ask, “How might we make your daily commute more enjoyable?” This opens the door to a wider range of creative solutions.
2. Build the Right Platform: Co-creation can happen in many forms. It could be a series of in-person workshops, a dedicated online community, a digital platform for ideation and voting, or a private beta program. Choose a platform that is accessible, easy to use, and facilitates collaboration among all participants.
3. Empower the Co-Creator: Treat your users as equal partners. Give them the information they need, and make their role in the process explicit. Whether they are ideating, prototyping, or providing feedback, ensure they understand how their contributions will be used and how they fit into the bigger picture.
4. Close the Loop: This is arguably the most important step. A co-creation initiative is not a one-off event. It requires transparency and a continuous feedback loop. Be sure to show participants what happened to their ideas. Even if an idea wasn’t chosen, explain why and thank them for their contribution. This builds trust and encourages continued participation, turning a single project into a long-term community.

“The best innovations are not born in a lab; they are born in the conversations between creators and the people they are creating for.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Threadless – Building a Business on Collective Creativity

The Challenge:

In the highly competitive world of apparel, fashion trends are traditionally dictated from the top-down by designers and major retailers. This process is inherently risky and often disconnected from what consumers actually want to wear. A small t-shirt company needed a new model that could consistently produce fresh, relevant designs with minimal risk while building an authentic brand.

The Co-Creation Solution:

Threadless launched a revolutionary business model based entirely on co-creation. The company’s platform is a digital community where artists from around the world submit t-shirt designs. The community then votes on their favorite submissions. Each week, the designs with the highest votes are put into production. The winning artists receive prize money and royalties on their designs. This model is a masterclass in crowdsourced innovation.

Empowered Co-Creators: Threadless gives artists a clear incentive and platform to contribute their creativity. They are not just submitting work; they are participating in a creative community.
Reduced Risk: The voting process acts as powerful market validation. Threadless knows a design is likely to be a commercial success before it ever spends a dollar on production, significantly reducing inventory and design risk.
Built-in Community: The platform fostered a vibrant, global community of artists and fans who felt a deep sense of ownership. This turned a transactional relationship into a collaborative partnership, leading to immense brand loyalty.

The Result:

Threadless became a major success story, proving that a company’s most valuable design team might be its own customers. By co-creating with its community, Threadless not only built a profitable business but also created an authentic, beloved brand known for its originality and its dedication to the collective voice of its creators. The company’s model demonstrates that the best way to predict what consumers want is to simply ask them to create it.

Case Study 2: L’Oréal’s Open Innovation Platform – Co-Creating Science and Beauty

The Challenge:

As a global beauty giant, L’Oréal’s R&D model was powerful but also traditional and at times, slow. The company needed to accelerate its innovation pipeline, especially in cutting-edge fields like green chemistry, artificial intelligence, and new biotech ingredients. The challenge was how to access and integrate external expertise from the world’s most brilliant scientists, researchers, and startups in a way that was agile and efficient.

The Co-Creation Solution:

L’Oréal adopted a strategic open innovation approach, which is a sophisticated form of co-creation. Instead of relying solely on internal labs, the company actively seeks partnerships with independent scientists, researchers, and startups through dedicated platforms and venture capital initiatives. L’Oréal presents specific scientific or technological challenges and invites external experts to co-develop solutions. For example, they might partner with a startup to develop a new sustainable ingredient or collaborate with a university lab to create a new method for personalized skincare.

Defined Challenges: L’Oréal clearly articulates its technological and scientific needs, empowering a global network of experts to contribute.
Empowered Partners: The company treats these external collaborators as true partners, not just vendors. This approach fosters a culture of shared purpose and mutual trust.
Continuous Innovation: This model is not a one-time project; it is a permanent innovation channel that allows the company to continuously learn from and adapt to the rapid advancements in science and technology.

The Result:

By implementing a co-creation strategy on a massive scale, L’Oréal has been able to significantly accelerate its innovation cycle and develop groundbreaking products that would have been impossible to create internally alone. The approach has led to new patents, new product categories, and a more agile business model. This case study demonstrates that co-creation is not limited to consumer-facing products; it is a powerful strategic tool for even the largest and most complex organizations to stay at the forefront of their industries.

Conclusion: The Future of Innovation is Collaborative

The era of closed-door design is over. In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, the most successful organizations will be those that open their doors and invite their users to the innovation table. Co-creation is not a marketing gimmick; it is a fundamental strategic shift from “customer-centric” to “customer-led.” It is an acknowledgment that your users are not just consumers; they are a wellspring of insight, creativity, and passion.

As leaders, our role is to create the platforms and the culture that enable this collaboration. By treating your users as partners, you will not only build better products and services but also forge a deeper, more resilient connection to the people you serve. The future of innovation is not solitary; it is collaborative, and it is waiting for you to invite the first person in.

Image credit: Pexels

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Holistic Metrics for Customer Experience Innovation

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Beyond NPS

Holistic Metrics for Customer Experience Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the world of customer experience (CX), the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the gold standard. With its simple, elegant question — “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” — it has given leaders a seemingly clear and powerful metric to track customer loyalty. And while NPS has served its purpose, it has, in my opinion, become a crutch. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that chasing a single score is a dangerous oversimplification. It tells you what is happening, but it provides almost no insight into why or how to fix it. The future of customer experience innovation belongs to organizations that move beyond a single number and embrace a holistic, multi-dimensional metric framework that captures the full, rich tapestry of the customer journey.

The problem with a metric like NPS is that it is a lagging indicator. It measures the outcome of an experience, but it doesn’t diagnose the cause. It’s like a doctor taking your temperature and knowing you have a fever, but having no idea if the cause is a minor cold or a serious infection. This singular focus can lead to a host of negative consequences: a lack of actionable insight, a disconnection from real customer behavior, and a dangerous internal obsession with “gaming the number” at the expense of genuine customer value. To truly innovate the customer experience, we must stop chasing a score and start understanding the human story behind it. We need to measure not just what customers say, but what they do and how they feel.

Building a Holistic CX Metric Framework: The Three Dimensions

A more effective approach to measuring customer experience involves a framework that looks at three distinct, yet interconnected, dimensions. These are your essential innovation levers:

1. Behavioral Metrics (The “What”): These are the objective data points that show what your customers are actually doing. Metrics like repeat purchase rate, average session time, feature adoption, time to resolution for a support ticket, or product usage frequency provide hard, undeniable facts about customer engagement. These tell you if your product or service is truly creating value.
2. Perceptual Metrics (The “How They Think”): This is where traditional scores can be useful, but in a more nuanced way. Metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) — “How much effort did you have to put in to get your issue resolved?” — or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) on a specific interaction are incredibly powerful. They tell you if the experience was easy, simple, and satisfying.
3. Emotional Metrics (The “How They Feel”): This is the most critical and often overlooked dimension. It goes beyond a simple number to capture the emotional state of the customer. Use sentiment analysis on open-ended survey responses, call center transcripts, or social media comments. Qualitative feedback, such as an interview where a customer shares a story of a “wow” moment or a frustrating interaction, provides the color and context that no score ever could.

In the pursuit of holistic experience management, many of my clients are turning to strategic partners to help them build the necessary infrastructure. A great example of this is the work being done by companies like HCLTech, which helps clients implement Experience Management Offices (XMOs). These are not just new departments; they are a centralized command center for an organization’s entire experience ecosystem. By creating a dedicated XMO, companies can move beyond siloed efforts and begin to measure and manage experiences for their customers, partners, and employees as a unified whole. This includes the deployment of Experience Level Measures (XLMs), a set of sophisticated metrics that go far beyond a simple NPS score. XLMs capture the full journey, measuring everything from emotional sentiment and perceived effort to behavioral data and digital engagement. It’s a fundamental shift from a reactive, score-based approach to a proactive, human-centered one, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized for a truly superior experience.

“The best metric is not a score; it’s a story. And a holistic framework gives you the chapters, the characters, and the plot points you need to innovate.”

Case Study 1: Zappos and the Obsession with “Wow”

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Zappos faced the monumental challenge of building a viable e-commerce business for shoes, a category that many believed would never succeed online due to the need for a physical try-on. The challenge was not just to sell shoes but to create a customer experience so exceptional that it would overcome the inherent friction of online retail and build a brand on trust and loyalty.

The Holistic Metrics Response:

Zappos’ innovation was not just in their business model, but in their metric framework. While they tracked revenue, they were obsessed with delivering “wow” moments. They didn’t just measure Customer Satisfaction; they actively encouraged employees to spend a minimum of an hour on a single customer service call to build a deep, human connection. They measured the number of free shipping upgrades to delight customers. The company was willing to spend money on a customer call or shipping because they understood the immense, long-term value of an emotional connection. Their core metric wasn’t NPS; it was the number of times they could surprise and delight a customer. Their behavioral metric was the high rate of repeat purchases, which they knew was a direct result of the positive emotions they fostered.

The Result:

Zappos became famous for its customer service. The emotional and behavioral metrics they prioritized directly led to high customer lifetime value and an army of loyal brand advocates. This focus on the holistic experience was their primary innovation, and it created a level of brand love that was almost impossible for competitors to replicate. The lesson: by measuring the moments that matter, you can build a more resilient and beloved business.

Case Study 2: HubSpot’s Proactive Customer Health Score

The Challenge:

In the world of B2B SaaS, customer churn is a constant threat. Historically, companies would rely on a lagging indicator — cancellation — to know when a customer was at risk. The challenge for HubSpot, a leader in marketing and sales software, was to move from a reactive posture to a proactive one. They wanted to know a customer was unhappy or disengaged long before they decided to leave.

The Holistic Metrics Response:

HubSpot developed a “Customer Health Score” as their primary innovation metric. This wasn’t a simple survey result; it was a holistic metric composed of three key dimensions:

Behavioral: How often were they logging in? Were they adopting and using the key features of the software? Was their team size expanding or contracting?
Perceptual: What was their satisfaction with the support team?
Emotional: What was the sentiment from a recent check-in call with their account manager?

By combining these dimensions, HubSpot could see a comprehensive view of a customer’s health. For example, a customer who was logging in less frequently and had a recent low satisfaction score would be flagged as at-risk, even if they hadn’t expressed a desire to leave. This gave the team a chance to intervene and innovate the experience — by offering more training, providing personalized support, or addressing a specific pain point — before it was too late.

The Result:

HubSpot’s proactive, holistic approach to customer health significantly reduced churn and increased customer lifetime value. By moving beyond a single metric like NPS and instead focusing on the full story of customer behavior, perception, and emotion, they were able to build a more resilient customer base and a product that continuously evolved to meet customer needs. This case study proves that a holistic metric framework is not just a tool for measurement but a powerful engine for continuous innovation.

Conclusion: The Future of Experience is Human

A single score, no matter how elegant, is an oversimplification of the complex human experience. It is a tool for the passive manager, not the human-centered innovator. The most successful organizations of the future will be those that have the courage to move beyond the comfort of a single number and embrace the messy, beautiful complexity of their customers’ lives. By building a holistic metric framework that measures what people do, how they think, and how they feel, we can move from simply managing customer satisfaction to truly innovating the human experience.

The time has come to stop chasing a number and start listening to the human story. The next great innovation is not hiding in a spreadsheet; it’s waiting for you to find it in the heart of your customer’s journey.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Unsplash

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The Future of Service

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Innovating for Seamless and Delightful Interactions

The Future of Service

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In a world where products are increasingly commoditized and competition is just a click away, the true and lasting competitive advantage lies in the quality of your service. But the very definition of “service” is undergoing a profound transformation. It’s no longer just about fixing a problem or answering a question; it’s about creating seamless and delightful interactions that anticipate needs, remove friction, and build deep, lasting relationships. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I believe the future of service is not just about being reactive, but about being proactively human-centric, leveraging technology to amplify empathy and deliver truly exceptional experiences.

The traditional service model often operates in silos, with fragmented touchpoints and a rigid, transactional approach. A customer calls one department, is transferred to another, and has to repeat their story multiple times. This isn’t service; it’s a series of frustrations. The future, however, is unified and intelligent. It’s about designing a holistic service journey that anticipates what the customer needs before they even ask, making every interaction feel intuitive and effortless. This shift requires a fundamental change in mindset, moving from a cost-center view of service to a strategic, value-creation engine.

The Four Pillars of Future-Ready Service Innovation

Building a service model for tomorrow requires a focus on four key pillars:

Proactive & Predictive: Leveraging data and AI to anticipate customer needs and issues. This means resolving a problem before the customer even knows they have one, such as notifying them of a potential shipping delay and offering a solution preemptively.
Seamless & Omni-Channel: Ensuring that the customer journey is fluid and consistent across all channels—from a website chatbot to a phone call to a social media message. The customer should never have to repeat themselves.
Personalized & Empathetic: Using data not just for efficiency, but for personalization. This means interactions feel tailored and human, remembering past conversations and preferences to build a genuine rapport.
Delightful & Unexpected: Moving beyond just meeting expectations to exceeding them. This involves small, surprising moments of delight that create memorable experiences and foster brand loyalty.

“The best service is so seamless, it’s invisible. The next best service is so delightful, it’s unforgettable.”

Integrating Technology to Amplify the Human Touch

Technology, particularly AI, is not the enemy of human-centered service; it is the ultimate enabler. When used correctly, it frees up human agents from repetitive, mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on complex, empathetic, and relationship-building interactions. It allows us to scale empathy in ways previously unimaginable.

AI for Triage & Efficiency: Use AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants to handle simple, high-volume queries, and to intelligently route complex issues to the right human expert with all the necessary context.
Data Analytics for Foresight: Analyze customer data to predict churn risk, identify opportunities for upselling, and proactively address pain points before they escalate.
Automation for Seamlessness: Automate routine tasks—like order tracking, appointment scheduling, and password resets—to eliminate friction and create an effortless experience.
CRM for Personalization: Equip human agents with a unified view of the customer’s history, preferences, and past interactions across all channels, enabling them to provide highly personalized and empathetic support.

Case Study 1: The Modern Banking Experience – A Shift from Transactional to Relationship-Driven

The Challenge:

For years, banking was a transactional experience. Customers only interacted with their bank when something went wrong, they needed a loan, or they had a question about a fee. This reactive, low-engagement model was ripe for disruption, especially with the rise of FinTech startups offering more user-friendly digital experiences.

Innovating for a Seamless and Proactive Service Journey:

Forward-thinking banks and FinTechs have used technology to fundamentally redefine the customer relationship:

Predictive Insights: Instead of just showing a balance, banking apps now use AI to analyze spending habits. They might send a notification that “you’re close to your budget limit on dining out” or “you have a recurring subscription you might have forgotten about.” This is a proactive, helpful service that anticipates a customer’s financial health.
Unified Channels: A customer can start a conversation with a chatbot on the app, and if the issue is complex, seamlessly transition to a human agent who has the full chat history and customer context instantly available. There is no need to repeat the problem.
Automated Problem Solving: Basic issues like a temporary debit card freeze or a disputed charge can be handled instantly through the app, without ever needing to call a representative, removing a massive point of friction.

The Result:

This shift from a purely transactional model to a seamless, proactive, and relationship-driven service has drastically improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. By using technology to anticipate needs and remove friction, these institutions have transformed banking from a chore into a tool that genuinely helps customers manage their financial lives. The innovation isn’t in a new product, but in a fundamentally better, more human-centric service experience.

Case Study 2: The E-commerce Returns Process – Turning a Pain Point into a Moment of Delight

The Challenge:

The returns process is often the most frustrating part of the e-commerce experience. It’s a key moment of truth that can either cement brand loyalty or destroy it. Traditional returns often involve printing labels, finding boxes, and a lengthy wait for a refund, all of which creates a high-friction, low-delight experience.

Innovating for a Delightful and Effortless Service Experience:

Some innovative retailers have re-engineered the returns process to be a moment of delight, using technology to enable a human-centered design:

Frictionless Returns: Companies like Nordstrom and Amazon have partnered with services that allow for no-box, no-label returns at local drop-off points. The customer simply brings the item in a bag, and the service center scans a QR code. This is an innovation that removes multiple points of friction.
Proactive Communication: Customers receive automated, real-time updates on their return status, from “item received” to “refund initiated” to “refund processed.” This removes anxiety and the need to call customer service.
AI-Powered Recommendations: Some companies use AI to analyze the reason for a return (e.g., “wrong size”) and then proactively suggest a replacement product that is a better fit, turning a potential lost sale into a new one and creating a helpful, personalized service.

The Result:

By transforming the returns process from a source of friction into a seamless and proactive service, these companies have significantly improved customer satisfaction and repurchase rates. They recognized that the moment a customer wants to return an item is not an endpoint but a critical inflection point in the relationship. By innovating around this service journey, they built immense brand trust and loyalty, proving that great service can turn even the most negative interactions into positive brand-building opportunities.

Conclusion: The Human-Centered Imperative

The future of service is not about automation for the sake of efficiency; it’s about using intelligent technology to enable a more deeply human-centered experience. It’s about anticipating needs, removing friction, and empowering employees to focus on the moments that truly matter. The organizations that will win in the long run are those that view service not as a cost to be minimized, but as a strategic asset to be innovated upon.

As leaders, our challenge is to break down old silos, foster a culture of empathy, and design service journeys that are as delightful and intuitive as the products they support. The goal is to move beyond simply satisfying customers to genuinely delighting them, building a future where service is the ultimate driver of loyalty, innovation, and growth. The future of service is here, and it’s beautifully human.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Avoiding An Unamazing Customer Experience

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Avoiding An Unamazing Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

NICE isn’t just the right way to treat people. It’s the name of a software company that specializes in helping businesses improve their customer and agent experience. NICE has analyzed billions of customer interactions to better understand customer behavior. They know what customers like and dislike. They know what frustrates customer support agents and what gets them excited about helping their customers. But often, it’s not an agent experience that gets customers to come back.

A recent study from NICE found that 81% of consumers today start with a digital channel when they have a question, a need or want to buy something. They don’t call the company. They go to a website, YouTube, Google search, etc. They want and expect the companies and brands they do business with to have answers readily available. What they don’t want is to call a company, be placed on hold for what seems like an unreasonable period of time, talk to a rep who transfers them to another rep, etc., etc.

I recently interviewed Laura Bassett, Vice President of Product Marketing at NICE, and had a fascinating conversation about how customers’ expectations are changing. She said many experiences are unamazing. They simply disappoint, which doesn’t give a customer the incentive to come back for more. Bassett said NICE’s mission is to rid the world of unamazing customer experiences. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom Bassett shared on how to do exactly that.

1. Customer experience is the entire journey.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that customer experience is customer support. It’s much more than that. While customer support is part of the experience, it really starts when a customer initiates a Google search, finds your company and interacts with your website. The service begins with how easy it is to do business with you regardless of where they are in the customer journey.

2. Customer experience involves every person in the business.

Just as customer experience includes the customer’s entire journey—not just when they reach out for customer support—it also involves every employee. If you aren’t dealing directly with a customer, you support someone who is or is part of the process that will impact the experience. Even people behind the scenes, who never interact with the customer, have impact on the experience. Everyone must understand their role and contribution to the customer experience.

3. Proactive communication is essential to the customer experience.

Companies know many of the questions that customers ask. So, why not be proactive about giving customers information before they have to make the effort to get answers? Bassett said, “Companies should understand and predict when they can answer a question before customers even realize they have it.”

4. Walk in your customer’s shoes.

This is an old expression, yet its meaning is timeless. You must understand what the customer is going through at every step of the journey. Then compare it to the experience you would want. When designing an experience that makes customers want to come back, think about what would make you come back. Is the experience your customers receive different than what you want?

5. Agents are consumers too.

Their expectations have accelerated. They compare what they should be able to deliver to what they experience with other businesses. When they have an amazing experience with another company, they want to repeat that experience for their own customers. They must be equipped with the tools to deliver what they consider to be an amazing experience.

6. Make your customer support agents knowledgeable.

This is a great follow-up to No. 5. Help them understand that they don’t have to follow a script when it is unnecessary. They don’t want to feel held back. They don’t want to feel over-managed or under-enabled. After you hire good people and train them well, you should empower them to do their job. Bassett said, “Turn agents into customer service executives who can really own that experience.”

7. Amazing customer service doesn’t need to have fireworks.

Seamless and simple wins every time. This is the perfect concept to close out this article. Nothing shared in this article is rocket science. It’s common sense. It’s what every customer wants. To be amazing, you don’t have to go over the top and WOW the customer with the most incredible service they have ever experienced. Delivering the simple and seamless actually creates the WOW factor so many businesses believe is unattainable. Just be easy. Eliminate friction. Easy and seamless isn’t that hard—and for customers, it’s the opposite of unamazing!

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

E-commerce hasn’t killed retail—it’s just transformed it.

For years we’ve been hearing that retail is dead, and the rash of store closures in cities across the country would seem to confirm the trend. The local mall no longer serves as a de facto community hub, if it’s even stayed open at all.

Given what we think we know, would it surprise you to learn that retail sales in 2021 were actually up more than 10% over the previous year, topping $4.44 trillion? Although fears of recession loom, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that both personal income and consumer spending continued to rise in June. And while e-commerce may be an unstoppable force, much of this consumer spending is still happening in brick-and-mortar stores.

That said, there’s no question that the retail experience is changing—and must continue to change. E-commerce growth and tech developments, in general, have transformed customer expectations. I always advise my clients to meet customers where they are, and where retail shoppers are right now is standing in an aisle, smartphone in hand, comparing prices and reading online reviews. Technology has become an integral part of the retail experience, and retailers would be fools to ignore that.

Luckily, they aren’t fools. Whether saving their customers time or offering them unique experiences, retailers are incorporating technology to improve the customer experience. Here are three ways they’re doing it:

1. Smart Screens Digitize the In-Store Experience – You probably remember the first time you went to fill your soda cup at your favorite fast-casual spot and found yourself facing a dizzying digital array of fountain soda choices. Smart screens are on the march, and they’re not just in restaurants anymore.

Clothing retailers are using touchscreens to help customers build their wardrobes, while furniture stores use similar tech to let shoppers design rooms in their homes. Smart screens can offer retail customers what they love about online shopping—plentiful product information, eye-catching photos and on-the-spot promotions—in an in-store setting.

Consider the cooler aisle at Walgreens, where high-resolution smart screens from Cooler Screens have transformed the drugstore chain’s fridge and freezer doors. Shoppers no longer have to brave an icy blast—they can see the beverages and frozen treats inside at a glance without even opening the door. Plus, they can get calorie counts and take advantage of instant deals—and soon will also see customer ratings and reviews.

Data showed that 90% of Walgreens customers prefer the new smart screen cooler doors to the traditional kind. For retailers looking to bridge the online/in-store gap, smart screens present the opportunity to both accomplish some point-of-sale digital marketing and enhance the customer experience.

2. Click-and-Collect Services Save Time – Another way retailers are meeting their customers’ hybrid shopping expectations is by beefing up their click-and-collect capabilities. Buying items online and picking them up in person offers consumers the best of both shopping worlds. They can browse a store’s product selection on their desktop or phone, and once their order is assembled, there’s no wait or shipping expense. Curbside pickup goes one better by allowing people to order products online and pick them up without stepping foot in the store.

I admit it’s not rocket science, but I believe that high-quality customer service depends on listening to what customers want, and many of them clearly value this hassle-free shopping experience. The 2022 Click-and-Collect Forecast shows that U.S. buyers will spend $95.87 billion via click-and-collect this year, a 19.4% increase over 2021. Retailers that expand their click-and-collect offerings stand to increase revenue by giving customers more of what they want.

Enabling this experience requires an up-to-date e-commerce website that’s optimized for mobile. Furthermore, retailers will need to achieve seamless integration between their online shopping platforms and on-the-ground operations. Many are already adapting by adding more parking spaces for click-and-collect customers and hiring more personal shoppers to gather orders.

3. Self-Service Improves Convenience – Another thing the e-commerce revolution has changed is customers’ expectations of self-service. From product page to shopping cart to checkout, the typical online shopping experience is a solo affair. While a retail store offers the possibility of assistance from a real person, many shoppers would rather take care of themselves. Smart retailers are using tech to let them.

Digital self-service kiosks help in-store shoppers get their bearings, look up product information, scan prices and see whether the item they want is in stock—and order it on the spot if it’s not. Retailers’ mobile apps enable customers to locate products, read reviews, compare prices and pounce on in-store discounts. By offering the right tech assistance, retailers give their customers a sense of control.

When customers think of self-service, self-checkout is usually the first thing that comes to mind, but even that is evolving. Going beyond the usual “Scan your first item and put it in the bag,” Amazon has launched fully autonomous checkouts. In its Amazon Go stores, customers scan a barcode going in and get charged electronically for purchased items as they leave. Instead of making customers do more work, Amazon employs its “Just Walk Out” technology to make customers’ lives easier and the retail experience friction-free.

Technology has greatly impacted people’s lives, and the retail setting is no exception. Retailers that use tech to improve the customer experience will see increased profit and customer satisfaction. Research has shown that experiences increase happiness more than things, so retailers that can provide both are setting themselves up for success.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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