I was chatting with my friend’s mom when she asked me, “what do you do?”
And then I was, hmmm… That would take some time to explain.
“I am a management consultant. I work in customer experience,” I said.
She looked at me with a perplexed look that tells me what does that even mean.
I guess so many people don’t know what does customer experience really means. Is it customer service? Marketing? Sales? Strategy? Operations? Wait… Designer?
No, it’s none of the above, and yet we do touch upon all of the above.
Wait, what?
Read: Is customer experience the same as customer service?
Customer experience is everything the customer goes through from the moment they think about a brand, a product a brand offers or a need that a brand offers, and all the way up until they buy, buy again or never buy again, and in either case, they might tell their friends.
We observe the customer experience, figure out what pisses the customers off, and work to “fix” those issues to make them happy.
And when we “fix” those issues, we “design” the new experiences, and nope, I am not a graphic designer, although deep down, I wish I could do the amazing work that they could do.
Designing those new experiences would be putting some changes in place. Be that new tools that the customer could use, steps that we could remove altogether, new ways to connect with them and reassure them, better ways to solve their issues and understand their situation, or by making them feel they are understood even without having to explain themselves too much.
This is when we in customer experience start to think about everything. The customer service, the marketing message, the operations, people management, and also the strategy.
After I explained to my friend’s mom what is customer experience, she said, “Those new jobs were never there when we started working.”
That is so true, and that makes me think.
This job wasn’t there because there weren’t many options for customers to choose from. Back then, people were only going to the same hair salon at the end of the street and the grocery store down the building. There wasn’t much competition.
Yeah, competition is so massive right now, but why do even companies who are the only providers of some services work on improving their customer experience?
It’s because customers no longer compare brands with similar brands, they compare their experience with the best experience they ever had, regardless of that specific product, service, or brand.
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash