This session deals with experience as something that never reaches a finished state. Its starting point is that customer expectations reset continuously: the previous best experience becomes the baseline for the next one. The evidence it opens with is that only 8 percent of customers say they have good customer experiences.
Key findings
- Delivering ever-evolving experiences separates the two performance groups sharply, at 81 percent against 32 percent.
- The competitive problem is named as a sea of digital sameness, where digital execution converges and stops differentiating anything.
- Overperformers are described through a disposition rather than a process. They embrace being always beautifully dissatisfied.
- The economic frame is Joseph Pine’s progression from commodities through goods and services to experiences, where each stage is pulled back toward commoditization unless it is customized.
- The endpoint the deck argues for is beyond experience altogether. It asks teams to think in terms of community or movement, using a running club as the example of the shift.
Journey mapping at scale
The Adecco example shows what a serious journey mapping exercise involves. It combined storytelling circles, branch immersions, focus groups, and 50 interviews with branch managers and consultants.
It also reached outside the company and outside the current customer base, with ideation sessions run with start-ups, insight sessions with Gen Z, executive team interviews, and hundreds of interactions with candidates and clients in France and the Netherlands.
One finding is offered as the kind of insight the work produces: consultants spend 70 percent of their time on administrative tasks.
The output was a funnel of options rather than a single answer. More than a hundred solutions were co-created with Adecco experts, customer experience experts and start-ups, each specifying its business owner, timing, branch and digital impact, and the pain or gain involved.
What good practice looks like
The practices listed start with design thinking and the customer journey, then move to a posture: being empathetic and thinking like a host.
Two more are about challenging what a category takes for granted and about technology. The deck calls for fighting sacred industry norms, and for leveraging AI as well as augmented and virtual reality.
The Ubras case illustrates a norm being broken. A one-size-fits-all product with no underwiring fits a trend of women dressing for comfort, is easy to buy in direct-to-consumer channels, and carries lower production and inventory costs.
Physical retail examples make the same point about variety. Livestreamed shopping events and the Starbucks limited edition cup in China are cited as ways to make the in-store experience more varied and interesting.
The marketing leader’s part in it
The role described is organizational rather than creative. It is about creating empowered teams in flattened organizations, leading the cross-silo discussion, and starting where you already have influence.
Two further duties follow: managing a portfolio of initiatives rather than one program, and ensuring humanity at key touchpoints.
Participants are then asked to place themselves. Individually, where they are leading and lagging on evolving experiences, what enables or blocks success, and what they could do more or less of. In groups, they prioritize the best practices that would enable it.
Scope and limitations
The customer experience statistic is attributed to a single external source rather than to IRG’s own research.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Experiences, by Institute for Real Growth, 2021.