Like everyone else, marketing and communication professionals have had a challenging few weeks. As the pandemic expands, marketers and customer experience professionals have done their best to keep up with and bridge swiftly shifting consumer and brand needs.

We rapidly transitioned from a period when brands debated if they should communicate about COVID-19 to now, with brands tripping over each other to broadcast their coronavirus email messages to customers. If your inbox is like mine, you received almost no brand emails about the virus before a week ago. But in the past week, the volume has exploded. Brands seemed to go from COVID-19 denial to COVID-19 FOMO in a matter of days.

The global pandemic may or may not be a business opportunity for your company, but trying to make it a marketing opportunity for your brand is risky.

On Friday, I received more than two dozen brand emails about COVID-19. The problem is that few of these messages took a customer-centric approach; instead, the race to email consumers reflects a growing sense of brand virtue signaling or outright desperation for business. Consider what customers need and want to hear from your organization to best help your brand while dodging potential risks.
 

Avoid Virtue Signaling

Virtue signaling is when your brand conspicuously expresses its values without actually taking actions to live by those values. Today, it is not enough to tell consumers you are aware of and reacting to the pandemic — everyone is. We also don't need to know that your brand is keeping your employees safe — we hope that's business as usual. Finally, no one needs to hear how your brand is striving to continue its operations uninterrupted — it would be real news worth sharing if you weren't! If that is all your brand has to report to customers, then you do not need a special COVID-19-themed brand communication at this time.

For example, my mortgage company, with whom I have a completely digital relationship, felt it needed to email me "An important message" simply to say, "The health and safety of our customers and team members is — as always — the most important thing to us." How does this company, which merely processes my auto-payments once a month, have any impact on my physical health? And why would it be necessary for any organization to state it cares about the health of its team members? Put that on the list of the many things I assume is true of every brand and thus need not be said, such as that it follows laws and that its CEO puts pants on one leg at a time.

The problem with marketing messages that merely signal your brand's virtue without doing anything further is that they waste customers' time and do little to impact your relationship. In fact, messages like that do more to hurt brands because of what's missing — anything meaningful for customers. What one might expect of "an important message" from a mortgage processor during this global health crisis is information about what will happen if customers are unable to pay their mortgage. This email didn't address this topic, and the glaring omission of content to help or comfort customers only makes the brand-centric virtue-signaling that much more evident and damaging.
 

Don't Signal Your Brands Desperation

These are tough times for businesses large and small, and they are going to get tougher in the coming weeks and months. Companies can be excused for wanting to keep customers buying. But they cannot be forgiven for making their self-interest and desperation evident in marketing communications.

About a quarter of the COVID-19 messages I received Friday came from businesses with physical locations that wanted me to know they are regularly cleaning, urging employees who are sick to say home, and are still open for business. Those sorts of notices, absent any offer or helpful content, do nothing to differentiate the brand from every other brand that is saying the same thing.

Furthermore, if your company is considering a message to drive physical traffic to real-world locations this coming week, hit the pause button long enough to consider if that train has already left the station. Here in the US, the CDC is recommending social distancing of six feet, the media is full of guidance that urges people to stay home, and the social pressure to take action that saves lives is growing — this morning on Twitter, "#StayTheFHome" is trending. Unless your business is essential (to others, not just to you), then it may be time to shift strategies away from driving physical visits.

For example, a Sonoma winery sent me a message intended to seem comforting but instead sounded tone-deaf: "Our doors will remain open, the live music will carry on, and our staff would love to say hello and treat you to a cup of coffee." Nothing conveys how much your brand cares for customers like telling them to violate CDC instructions that save lives amid a global pandemic.

The other three-quarters of COVID-19 messages in my inbox are from digital brands with little to tell me other than "we still want your business." A clothing brand I love disappointed me by sending a seven-paragraph, 382-word missive that said, well, absolutely nothing. This brand thanked me, told me communication is key in times like this, expressed its commitment to my health and safety, disclosed it set up a COVID-19 task force, suggested I monitor the CDC site, and reminded me it has a website. At first glance, that may seem harmless enough, but what part of the message says anything that isn't painfully self-apparent? It was a three-minute read to convey nothing unexpected or meaningful to the customer during troubling times.

That sort of message may have seemed helpful and differentiated last week before customer inboxes were flooded with soundalike brand emails. But, broadcasting such a message now will only make your real intent clear — not "We care deeply for our customers," but "We're still here, need your business, and hope you'll spend money with us." This isn't to say your brand doesn't have something important and valuable to say during this crisis, but the onus is on you to make sure your message is essential and useful to your customers and not just to your brand. Don't forget the WIIFM.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of proactive customer communications during the unsettling period of rapid change caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and COVID-19 disease. Brands are already acting to intercept potential brand problems and offer support to uncertain and concerned customers.

This health event will continue to evolve for months to come, creating unprecedented disruptions to business operations and significantly altering the needs, wants, and expectations of customers. Being proactive now is an opportunity to create a win-win, allowing your brand to simultaneously solve brand and customer problems.

Among the difficulties your organization may face are a host of customer concerns that can deter them from conducting business with your company, such as:

• Customer anxiety about visiting your location or purchasing your product. Is your product safe? What steps are you taking to ensure customer health in your physical site?
• Customer worries about your ability to deliver on promises: If I purchase from you versus a competitor, can you deliver on time? Will your inventory or logistics issues cause delays or frustrations?
• Customer hesitancy about making commitments: If I purchase advance travel, can I cancel if my situation changes or I am prevented from going? If I buy a ticket to your event, what happens if I'm unable to attend or the event is canceled? What are your timeframes or conditions for refunds?

If customers wonder about these questions, then they are becoming obstacles to your business maintaining its revenue in a difficult period. Furthermore, questions like these can raise your call volume, increase expenses, and further strain your staff as people seek answers.

Proactive action and communications during this epidemic can do more than minimize customer objections. They also represent a chance for your brand to demonstrate its customer centricity, earn trust, and build relationships. Brands that act quickly can differentiate themselves with decisions and information that decrease customer anxiety and solve customer problems before they develop.

If you are not yet communicating to customers on issues around the COVID-19 outbreak, you're already behind organizations that have taken the lead to bring clarity and comfort in a time of growing fear and worry. I will share some examples, but if you have any worthy instances of brand communications you have seen (or launched), please share them in the comments or on Twitter.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease are increasingly making headlines. As you are no doubt aware, the number of known and reported cases will surpass 80,000 today, and more than 2,600 have been killed by the disease. While the first priority is health and safety, CX leaders must give consideration to how this growing epidemic (soon, likely, to be labeled a pandemic) will impact customers.

Customer Experience (CX) is about knowing and responding to customer expectations and needs to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. In typical times, it can difficult to understand what drives satisfaction and dissatisfaction and encourages loyalty and disloyalty. But in those rare moments in time when unexpected, profound, and significant changes are thrust upon the world (so-called "black swan events"), your customer's needs and expectations can evolve in rapid and surprising ways.

At this point, depending on your brand's category, you might think that your primary issues are oriented to your supply chain and not to changes in customer preferences, attitudes, or behaviors. It's sensible to plan ahead for interruptions to your production and operations, but customer-centric organizations will also prepare for how their customers' questions and needs will change rapidly in the coming months.

On the one hand, it might be argued that all brands are on equal footing, so the impact of your words and actions will have little influence on your brand's satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy relative to its competition. After all, today's epidemic was unforeseen just two months ago, and with the news changing daily, your brand, just like all brands and people, is caught in a maelstrom of rapidly evolving knowledge and recommendations.

That's true, but with each passing week, brands will be made unequal based on their preparedness, communications, priorities, and actions. This event, just like any that alters consumer expectations, activities, and motivations, will impact the customer perception of different brands in different ways. Keep in mind our opportunity to excel (or fail) for customers is greatest in instances when emotion and needs are running high versus in regular periods when everything is going as expected.

Today's global health emergency may be without precedent for generations, but that doesn't mean our brands cannot find ways to prepare for different customer scenarios and maintain a customer-centric approach in the face of the unexpected. Traditional crisis response along with CX best practices provide some guidance you can use and consider:

Year-end articles and blog posts about hot trends are popular. People enjoy reading speculative predictions, and writers are happy to collect the clicks earned by lofty and alarming statements about the pace and breadth of change. Since both writers and readers love them, the annual slew of CX predictions are arriving, and you can find plenty of posts and articles about the Customer Experience trends you “must be aware of” and “must get ready for” in 2020. But must you? Really?

I’ll share some observations on CX trends in this blog post, but at the same time, I also want to caution you from taking too much from the flood of similar articles you will see this month. Most organizations do not struggle with CX because they don’t see or execute the buzziest new trends; they struggle because the foundational basics of CX are often neglected. To a CX leader grappling with limited resources and influence, it may seem appealing to chase some talkable new tech rather than encourage customer-centric changes across the enterprise, but focusing on CX blocking and tackling will almost always have a much greater impact.

As you read this year’s crop of articles about the CX trends you absolutely must act upon or risk immediate consequences, keep in mind these three cautions:

1. There is often much less to those “hot” trends than meets the eye

One of the ways to create attention for a dubious trend is to focus on the innovative business model for a well-publicized startup with a rapidly growing private valuation. The eye-catching valuation gives the appearance of success, but we should know by now that private valuations and impressive IPO prices are not an accurate harbinger of future performance. From Theranos to WeWork to Uber to Magic Leap, it should be evident that impressive growth and inordinate financing rounds are no guarantee of sustainable, profitable success.

Take Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) strategies, which were all the buzz earlier this year. I’m not suggesting DTC isn’t right for your brand or won’t be important in the future, but are you aware those well-known envy-inducing DTC brands aren’t actually profitable as of yet? Casper hopes it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis in 2019. Dollar Shave Club wasn’t profitable when Unilever purchased the company, and subscriber growth has slowed since the acquisition. The Honest Company made headlines in 2017 for a down-round that stripped the company of its “unicorn” status, and the CFO recently shared The Honest Company generates half of its total revenue from stores and not DTC. Lastly, SmileDirectClub was one of the five worst IPOs of 2019, with its shares losing over 60% from its September IPO price.

I am not casting aspersions on these brands or the DTC strategy, which may continue to grow more common and profitable in the coming years, but given the deafening level of hype about the DTC trend, you’d be forgiven for thinking these companies were printing money and not struggling to get into the black. By all means, research the value of DTC strategies, but don’t buy into this or any other hot trend simply because some unprofitable, VC-funded companies have gained market share by selling products or services at a loss. If that were a repeatable and scalable recipe for success, we’d all be billionaires.

Real CX Trend: Back to Basics: Corporate websites have been with us for 25 years, mobile apps for 15 years, and social media for more than a decade. Yet, many brands still struggle to offer good, customer-centric experiences on these channels. Focus your efforts on learning the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction you have on today’s widely adopted-platforms and channels rather than racing to launch a technology, platform, or strategy that may (or may not) be the next big thing in 2025. No brand will fail in 2020 because it lacks a Virtual Reality application or Alexa Skill, but many brands are already failing because they cannot deliver the experience customers want and expect in the real world, on desktops, and on mobile phones.

To continue reading the blog post, please click through to my blog on Gartner's website. There, you'll get information on two more CX cautions ("The first focus of CX is on what customers want, need and expect; not on trends, tech or competitors" and "CX trends are not as 'hot' as you probably think") and two CX tips or trends ("The tech that matters most is the tech that helps improve your customer understanding" and "Hold your existing vendors responsible for keeping you up to date on new tech trends.")

I often see customer experience (CX) programs that connect point A directly to point B, equating the actions the brand does to the value it derives from those actions. A straightforward example of this is when a martech vendor claims, "We improve the brand's CX by enhancing offers and 'next best actions,' resulting in more clickthroughs and conversions." Or, you might hear an executive say, "We improved our CX by implementing self-service, which reduced call volume and headcount, thus saving us money."

Those are both excellent business outcomes, but is either a CX outcome? In neither of those examples do we know the impact on the customer. Are customers happier? Do they perceive more value? Have we changed their attitude toward the brand or themselves? Are they more likely to be loyal or tell others? We don't know because, in both of those examples, we skipped the customer. If you are doing CX, you cannot go from point A--what we do--to point B--what we get--without going through point C--the customer.

When we skip the customer and tie our "CX" projects only to the value the brand receives, we convert our customers into objects rather than the subjects of our efforts. In your life, objects fit into one of three broad categories: They are tools for you to exploit, barriers for you to overcome, or they are nothing. In those examples, we made the customer a tool (a wallet for us to pluck) and a barrier (an annoyance for us to eliminate). In neither case did we treat customers as people: Human beings with wants, needs, and expectations. Nor did we, in either example, measure (or even care about) the impact on the customer.

To make the customer the subject of what you do and not merely an object that is acted upon to get what your brand wants, go from point A to C to B. That means connecting what you do to how it changes customer perception, and then recognizing how those changes in perception drive behavioral shifts that deliver long-term brand value. That may sound complicated, but it's not. We just have to listen to customer perception and tie that to the loyalty behaviors that drive brand value, such as retention, sales growth, purchase frequency, the cost to serve or retain, and brand advocacy and WOM.



If you start with what you want (more sales or lower costs), develop a plan to enhance your brand's immediate financial outcomes, and measure only brand impact and not how or if customer perception has changed, you may deliver short-term ROI but cannot know if you've provided a better customer experience. More to the point, you cannot know if you've traded improved financial results today for powerful, lasting relationships that drive growth, margin, and profit tomorrow.

To change the customer from an object to the subject of your CX program, start with what customers want and need, develop a plan to lift customer satisfaction, and measure how you improve the customer and their relationship with your brand. Here's how (along with links to relevant research reports for Garter subscribers):

• Listen to customer needs, perceptions, and feedback. (Clients of Gartner for Marketing Leaders can learn more from the report, "Build a Voice-of-the-Customer Strategy to Harness the Power of Customer Data").
• Bring your attitudinal and behavioral data together to understand the ROI of CX ("Tailor Customer Experience Data and Metrics to Improve Customer Centricity, Drive Action and Validate Business Outcomes").
• Start with customer wants and needs by developing the right personas ("How to Make Your Customer Personas Actionable Using Data-Driven Insights").
• Collaborate across functional silos to understand and identify customers' desired journeys ("How to Turn Persona-Driven Customer Journey Maps Into an Actionable, Cross-Functional Customer Experience Plan").
• Measure impact on customers and not merely the effect on your brand ("How Much Customer Satisfaction Is Enough to Foster Loyalty and Differentiate Your Brand?")

I checked into a hotel late last night after a long evening of travel. When it came time to go to bed, I was unable to locate the switch for the lamp over my desk. I spent five minutes testing every switch, feeling the underside of the ledge over the desk, and searching behind curtains for hidden switchplates, all in vain. Finally, I made an awkward call to the front desk to ask how to turn off the lights.

The response from the front desk sounded unsurprised and well-practiced. Look for a white button on the desk she told me. The magic button that controls the desk lamp is this:
 

Photo by Thomas Q on Unsplash

There is a lot of focus today on omnichannel marketing and engagement, but brands would be well advised to focus first on omnichannel service. Getting omnichannel service right is not just a tech problem; far from it. In too many of today's customer interactions, organizational silos are evident, channel adoption and maturity is variable, brands' self-interest is apparent, and employee training and empowerment is weak. All of this contributes to a fractured customer experience that undermines trust, loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.

This was brought to mind as a result of a rough experience I had with a telecommunications provider. In the end, I am happy with the services and where we landed, but getting there--whew, what a frustrating and unpleasant ride.

I moved to a new home, and I used the telecom provider's website to purchase a set of services, including a set-top box, a channel and movie package, and internet services. The installation process was tortured, and it didn't need to be:

• Day One: The installer comes to my new condo. She can't find a way to wire a set-top box adjacent to my TV, tells me I needed a rewiring specialist, and promises to arrange the appointment.
• Day Two: The technician who is about to arrive calls and asks if I've been rewired. I tell her that is what she's supposed to do. She cannot--she's only an installer. Someone entered the wrong data, so I need to reschedule, yet again.
• Day Three: I need to wait two days for a rewiring specialist, but in the interim, I reach out to the company on Twitter and ask if there is a streaming option that would avoid the time and hassles of rewiring. There is, but Twitter support cannot help. I need to call.
• Still Day Three: I call the company and learn there's an easy streaming option using my provider's app on Roku. So, I cancel the rewiring appointment and replace it with yet another installer visit.
• Day Four: While we've changed the appointment schedule, nothing has changed with the services I ordered, and I wonder if I have the right package. So, I reach out to Twitter support and ask. They cannot help and tell me I have to call.
• Still Day Four: I call and speak to a person who confirms the package I ordered will not work with streaming. After a lengthy discussion, I settle on the right streaming package. I assume I'm done, but nope, the person to whom I'm speaking cannot make the changes. I need to talk to a sales rep, and so I'm transferred.
• Still Day Four: Another long and torturous discussion ensues, and it seems to me the salesperson with whom I'm speaking did not review the lengthy and detailed notes captured by the first rep. After almost 55 minutes on the phone, I finally have the original order canceled and the new streaming services set.
• Day Five: I'm frustrated and angry, but this is the turning point. The installer arrives, and installation goes fast. Roku and the provider's app work like a charm. Everything is right with the world.

All's well that ends well, or is it? To explore the adverse impact of this experience and why this company needs to focus not just on tech but on org structure, job descriptions, employee empowerment, and product complexity, please finish reading this post on my Gartner blog.

Photo by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash

The other day, I was talking to a peer about customer experience (CX), and she said, "It's not as if we're curing cancer here." We're not, but there are countless ways, both overt and imperceptible, that your brand's customer centricity and employees' commitment to customers can become matters of life or death. The decisions employees make, large and small, that impact the welfare of your customers are not theirs alone but are shaped by the priorities, goals, processes, and expectations set by your leaders.

What do your employees do when no one is looking? What decisions are made that can impact the safety of one or more customers? And how will customers be affected by and perceive those decisions? These are questions that will affect your brand's customer experience, its customer relationships, and the customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy your brand deserves.

Issues of CX, risk, customer welfare, brand perception, and corporate culture are complex, as exemplified by the recent news reports about the Boeing 737, its cockpit alert systems, and two fatal air disasters. Boeing has acknowledged that some within the company knew in 2017 that its display system failed to meet the company's own angle of attack (AOA) alert requirements. Boeing engineers decided not to take any action, even though the missing alert could have notified pilots that a sensor was malfunctioning. It is, in fact, this same sensor that investigators are exploring as one possible contributor of two fatal crashes that resulted in 346 deaths. Boeing's statement notes that a Safety Review Board was convened to consider whether the absence of the AOA Disagree alert presented a safety issue, and the board "confirmed Boeing’s prior conclusion that it did not."

Investigations are underway, and time will tell to what extent the AOA sensors, the missing alert, and the aircraft's anti-stall software did or did not contribute to these fatal accidents, but people reading the news won't wait for official inquiries to end before asking themselves what Boeing engineers put first--the company or the customer? Many will conclude that fixing a broken alert seems the obvious customer-centric decision for a brand responsible for the wellbeing of ourselves, family and peers while traveling six miles above the ground at 500 miles per hour. In fact, a recent survey found that 53% of Americans said they would not want to fly on a Boeing 737 Max, even after the FAA clears the plane for service. None of this is lost on Boeing's leaders, and last week the company CEO apologized to the families and acknowledged, "We clearly fell short.”

This all acts as a potent reminder that what matters is not what your brand intends but what is perceived. It also reinforces that leadership and culture influence day-to-day CX and customer centricity in ways that affect the safety of your customers and the reputation of your brand.

There are many examples where corporations' bias toward revenue, profitability, and cost avoidance conflict with protecting the health and safety of customers. We now know that tobacco companies not only conspired to cover up the risks of smoking but intentionally made cigarettes more addictive. Oil companies knew of their products' tie to global warming for decades, even as they funded groups that cast doubt on climate science. And in the 1970s, Ford once infamously decided to avoid safety improvements to the Pinto after calculating the $11-per-car cost was more expensive than dealing with the claims from 180 burn deaths and 180 serious burn injuries.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Virtually every customer experience (CX) leader struggles with one common issue: How do I acquire the attention and commitment I need from bosses and peers? How do I get them to care so that the CX program can secure the necessary budgets, collaboration, and resources?

Some CX leaders turn to benchmarks--the relative scores received by the company versus its competitors--to gain consideration within their organizations. These leaders hope to earn attention by demonstrating their brand lags in key CX measures such as net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and other operational metrics (such as average hold time, abandon rate, etc.) Telling those inside the company that a hated competitor is beating your brand’s NPS may seem an excellent way to engage your peers’ competitive spirit, but there are problems and dangers with relying on third-party benchmarks to drive attention. These problems include:

• Consistency and quality of data: A company’s NPS or CSAT score scraped off the internet is an unreliable measure. Too much depends on who the company asks (the sample), what questions precede the NPS questions (the survey design), any preceding interactions that trigger the survey (the methodology), and other factors. The only reliable and consistent way to compare one company’s score against another is to ensure uniformity of sample, survey, and methodology, and this is best done within a single study. This is why brands interested in benchmarks rely on services that collect brand perception and customer satisfaction data using consistent, objective processes, such as those managed by JD Powers or the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
    
• Pertinence: Every category, every brand, and every audience will have unique factors that impact customer satisfaction. We wouldn’t expect the CES scores for a value brand to compare to a luxury brand, or for a brand focused on selling in retail store aisles to correspond to one that controls the entire end-to-end experience with direct-to-consumer e-commerce. By selecting benchmarks that may lack relevance to your brand’s unique situation, you could be setting the bar too high or too low. Many CX leaders with whom I speak wish to benchmark themselves against the best companies in the world, such as USAA or Amazon, but few companies share the same customer base, mission, leadership, history, offerings, and strategies as these companies. Your brand needs to be the best in its unique situation—just as USAA and Amazon have done in theirs.
    
• Goals: The goal of CX is not to achieve a better score than someone else; it is to improve customer relationships in ways that drive financial success. If all a brand delivers with its CX efforts is to beat competitors’ scores, has it really achieved anything vital to business outcomes? Even if your company earns better ratings than competitors, who’s to say there isn’t more financial benefit to be created by driving to even greater levers of satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy? Brands that achieve game-changing CX don’t only attain higher scores than others but use their NPS, CSAT and CES data to recognize what drives customer dissatisfaction, uncover problems, reveal unmet needs, and learn what earns the most durable trust, retention, repeat purchases, and WOM. Benchmarking yourself against competitors does not uncover those critical drivers of business success.
    
• Focus: And, one of the primary problems with benchmarks in CX is that they encourage a focus not on the customer—which is, after all, the whole intent of CX—but on the competition. The strongest CX efforts are those aimed at knowing and delivering on customer wants, needs, and motivations, not ones that focus on the actions or scores of competitors.

In our experience, benchmarks do not drive more attention, commitment, and support within organizations. What does is using your data to demonstrate the relationship between customer perception scores (such as NPS) and customer behaviors that drive business results. Using your data, from your customers, buying your products, can help you prove that your promoters (when compared to detractors) buy more frequently, spend more, churn less, have a lower cost to service, refer more business, and offer better online ratings that drive more sales. If you can demonstrate that your most-satisfied customers provide more top- and bottom-line financial results than do your least-satisfied customers, you’ll crush the barriers that prevent you from attaining the attention and support your CX initiatives require.

Senior executives have a hard time knowing how much (or whether) to invest in improving customer experience when the only goal is to beat some other brand’s score. Sure, it feels good to beat the competition at something, but you cannot take NPS to the bank. The most successful CX leaders are the ones that focus not on competitive benchmarks but on ways to validate why CX matters to business outcomes. Current Gartner clients can learn more in our research report, “Tailor Customer Experience Data and Metrics to Improve Customer Centricity, Drive Action and Validate Business Outcomes.”

We get the language of customer retention and attrition all wrong. We say things like "customers abandon us," "they leave," or "they attrite." But in framing our brand's retention issues in this manner, we swap the subject and object of our sentences. We make the customer the subject and our brand the object, as if they've done something to us, but the reality is precisely the opposite. We are the subject--our organizations are the ones accountable for the customer experience (CX), for ensuring customer satisfaction, and for earning customers' loyalty and dollars. Our brand is not victimized by ungrateful customers who leave us but has a duty to create an experience that invites customers to remain.

This isn't just about language but about the way we think and act. Our mental models influence the language we use, and the language then reinforces those same mental models.

Your brand may not intentionally "fire" the customer, but make no mistake: If you neglect customer needs and expectations, ignore their feedback, consistently prioritize profit over customer satisfaction, and expect loyalty in return for mediocre and undifferentiated experiences, you may as well engrave an invitation for your customers to quit your brand. To influence customer-centric change in your organization, start with the right vocabulary and mentality. Stop blaming your customers for leaving, and embrace your obligation to offer experiences that invite customers to stay.

Another example of the way our language betrays us is the term "moment of truth," which has been popular in CX for years. The idea that your brand has some limited number of consistent and eternal "moments of truth" that are essential to every customer in every situation falls apart pretty quickly when you poke at it gently.

Any moment can be a moment of truth if your brand disappoints or harms a customer. Moreover, satisfied and loyal customers don't abruptly seek competitive solutions simply because your brand dropped the ball in one, big, predictable moment of truth; instead, you lose customers when your brand suffers a sustained loss of trust, loyalty, and satisfaction due to a series of effortful, disappointing or frustrating experiences. In the battle for customer retention, every touchpoint is a moment of truth, and the decision on which moments matter most is not yours but each customers'.

Photo by patricia serna on Unsplash

I generally hate blog posts and articles that suggest there is a single trick, hack or tip that can change your world. (I swear if I see one more headline promising the one habit that can turn me into Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet, my head will explode.) But, there is one powerful tip that, I have found, can help you avoid costly mistakes and turn a weak business or marketing strategy into a powerful one: Define your goals and metrics first, then develop the plan to deliver on those.

That's it. That's the entire tip. Not exactly rocket science, huh?

The problem is that, far too often, we do the opposite. We commit to a strategy we like or a technology that intrigues us, and after our plan is set, we then figure out how to measure the outcomes. The problem with this approach is that we develop metrics to fit the strategy rather than developing a strategy to match what we want to accomplish and what our business needs. By figuring how we'll measure what we have already committed to doing, we end up with vanity metrics rather than important business KPIs.

The 2008 to 2015 social media strategies of virtually every brand illustrates this problem. Every company in the world jumped into social media for reasons that ranged from weak ("our competitors are doing it!") to incomplete ("our customers are adopting it!") So, after an organization committed to a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn strategy, all that was left was to determine how to measure it. Thus, we ended up with meaningless metrics such as likes, retweets, fans, and comments. And, having committed to measures that have little to no link to our business goals, brands then spent a lot of money to achieve results that didn't matter. How many brands learned the hard way that Twitter sweepstakes, Farmville giveaways, vapid content, and fan contests were useful only for lifting useless metrics while doing nothing to improve brand health or results?

We can see the same thing happening today with voice devices. Brands continue to jump onto the Alexa and Google Home bandwagon because voice devices are rapidly becoming common in US homes ("our customers are adopting it!") And, as a result, brands are rapidly jumping into developing voice applications such as Alexa Skills, the number of which doubled in 2018 ("our competitors are doing it!")

The problem is that too many brands commit to developing voice apps without really understanding how consumers use them or establishing what the brand wants to accomplish and how it will measure success. The outcome is that a lot of voice applications with little evidence they get used. Amazon doesn't release data on monthly active users of skills (hmm, I wonder why?), but what we do know is that 60% of Alexa skills have zero ratings and only 5% have more than ten. We also understand why people use their voice devices, and every one of the top reasons is core functionality provided by the device makers (time, alarms, online search, directions), entertainment (music, fun questions) or media (news and weather).

The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the language of customer experience. I have hundreds of conversations with clients every year, and my job is to efficiently get to the heart of a CX problem and expeditiously offer practical guidance. My advisory sessions start with clients describing their CX goals or challenges, and I've come to realize there are a handful of words that catch my attention and suggest an area of possible concern worthy of further exploration. Those words are digital, personalization, and buyer.

Before we explore why those words might signify a potential problem with your CX efforts, let me first point you to last month's two-part blog series examining the language of customer experience. Part 1 was about thinking like a customer and part 2 about framing your marketing and business strategies from the customer's perspective. Today's blog post is again focused on language and seems like an appropriate conclusion for the series.

"Digital," "personalization" and "buyer" are powerful and common words used within marketing departments, and the potential CX dangers of each may not be readily apparent. Here is why these words are deserving of attention and further consideration:

Digital

Your brand must constantly strive to get its digital channels, interactions, and experiences right, but a single-minded preoccupation on a "digital journey" can lead your CX program astray. Customers may be embracing digital channels, devices, and habits, but none of us are wholly digital. We are all analog creatures living in an increasingly digital world. As a result, it is rare for customers to complete an end-to-end journey--from need to purchase to loyalty to advocacy--entirely in digital channels. Understanding the ways customers want to navigate back and forth between physical and online interactions permits you to best define your brand's opportunities in both domains.

It's easy to find examples of how merging the best of the real world and digital helps brands. For example, Best Buy, a brand many thought would be "showroomed" out of existence a few years ago, has thrived thanks to a strategy that combines the best of e-commerce and physical retail for customers. Retailers have seen tremendous growth in "click-and-collect" behaviors where customers buy online and pick up at a store; Adobe found that click-and-collect orders grew 46% year over year during a recent one-month period. Meanwhile, another study found that opening and closing a physical store can have a measurable impact on online traffic and image.

All brands--even exclusively digital ones--benefit by recognizing the role of digital and real-world behaviors in improving the customer experience. And if you're in a digital role siloed from physical operations (or vice versa), your success still depends on your ability to recognize how customers want their online and offline experiences merged. (Gartner clients can learn more with the report, "Create Actionable, Insight-Driven Journey Maps.")

Personalization

Like "digital," the word "personalization" represents a positive approach to customer experience--people want and appreciate personalized experiences. The reason this word can raise CX concerns is in how personalization is used by marketers. The critical question is whether your personalization strategies are intended to improve the brand or the customer. The two are not at all mutually exclusive, but a CX strategy is not a CX strategy if it is measured only in increased revenue and not in changes to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

To do personalization right for CX, it is essential to be "outside-in," which means understanding and meeting customer expectations and measuring the impact to the customer. One place to start is to develop, study and understand your different personas, which helps you to define the varied sorts of content, experiences, and features desired by different groups of customers.

A good personalization strategy can lift inbound traffic, clicks, conversions and sales while also delivering more satisfied, loyal customers, but you must be careful not to presume more purchases equate to a stronger sense of loyalty and advocacy. Bridging the gap between behavioral and attitudinal measures of loyalty is vital. (Gartner clients interested in more information on the topic of attitudinal and behavioral loyalty can access our recent report, "Move Customers to Deeper Levels of Loyalty That Strengthen Brand Health.")

To learn of the dangers of the word "buyer," please visit my Gartner blog for the complete blog post.

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In part one of this blog post, we explored how the language of marketing and business pervades our work lives and discourages the customer centricity our organizations seek. For example, at work, we use language like "content" and "engagement," but at home, have you ever said "I saw some good content on Netflix last night" or "I had some terrific Facebook engagement today"? By subtly changing our language from what customers want and need to what brands do, we alter the way we think and the decisions we make.

This isn't merely a matter of style. Language matters. Studies demonstrate that the words we use do more than just describe a problem; they shape our perception of reality, influence the solutions we consider, and rewire our brain for different cognitive abilities. Corporate talk leads to corporate think and corporate actions.

So, how do you start to transition your language from brand to customer, and what benefits might that bring? Try adopting a structured format for stating your business and marketing strategies from the customer's perspective using customer terminology.

As an exercise, let's say you're a marketer at a financial service provider tasked with promoting a new 529 college savings plan, and your approach will be to use an educational content strategy. Your plan might be summarized as this: "To offer educational content that engages new parents, teaching them about the high cost of their children's future college education and promoting the benefits of initiating savings early in their child's life, with the goal of producing more inbound traffic to our new 529 page and more leads for our financial advisors."

Now, try to phrase that with customer language from the customer perspective. You may find it difficult, and that's the whole idea. If you cannot frame your business or marketing concept in a way that makes sense from the customer perspective, that is a concerning omen. To help, here is a format you might follow to put yourselves in the shoes of the customer:

• I,
• A customer with these needs, wants, and motivations,
• In this specific situation,
• Who has this relationship with the brand,
• Will interact with the brand for this reason,
• Resulting in this benefit.

This approach forces you to think like a customer in some key ways, and it also suggests the level of customer understanding you'll need. Without the right data and insight, you may be able to write a nice piece of fiction, but you must base your strategy on something more than what you imagine or hope. Step by step, this format cuts through the fog created by business and marketing lingo and forces a true customer-centric perspective.

To see how this approach changes our hypothetical 529 plan and consider the impact this customer-centric approach will have on our metrics and success, please continue reading on my Gartner blog. 

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"We want to become a more customer-centric organization." As a customer experience researcher and advisor, I hear that phrase every single week. I suspect you may, too.

Achieving this is, of course, important for brand health and financial success. Customer-centric organizations are eating the world. Amazon, which seeks to “become Earth's most customer-centric company,” is close to capturing half of all US e-commerce dollars. Southwest Airlines, which is dedicated to "the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit,” has seen its revenue passenger miles grow 67% in seven years and now possesses a market share virtually equal to the US airline leader, American.

But saying you want to improve customer centricity is easy; achieving it is not. The struggle for many business leaders is that many of the tools to transform company culture are out of their reach. It's easy to recognize, for example, that our primary business KPIs (like revenue, margin, and stock price) are largely disconnected from customer-centric aims (such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy), but how many of us get to set our company's top goals and measures?

So how can one individual help to transform their corner of the organization to be more customer-centric? One place to start--and a particularly powerful strategy for marketers--is to begin to use the language of people and not business. Our corporate and marketing vernacular too often obscures the customer and what he or she wants and expects. It alters our perspective, encouraging us to consider the value we wish to extract from customers, not what our customers desire and need from us. The language of marketing and commerce damages rather than cultivates customer centricity.

For example, does your organization have an "engagement strategy" to build "stronger customer bonds?" Are you striving to execute a "content strategy" to make your brand "top of mind?" Do you seek to make "more meaningful connections?" Are you working to foster "more authentic customer relationships?" Chances are, you are so steeped in the lingo of marketing and business you merely nodded in response to each of these questions, but those are merely brand-centric statements obfuscated beneath a thin veneer of customer jargon. Those statements all make perfect sense--from the selfish perspective of your brand.

Now, instead of thinking like a marketing or corporate leader, think like a customer. You have around 500 brands in your life, between your kitchen, bathroom, closets, devices, car, TV, and desk. With how many of those 500 do you want to "engage" today? How many of the 500 do you actively and regularly seek out and make time to read, watch, listen, and consider their "content?" Of those 500, how many do you wish to so preoccupy your thoughts and attention that they push your family, job, friends, hobbies, and health out of the way to become "top of mind?" Honestly, how many of those hundreds of brands will you invest the time and care to "bond" with--to make a "meaningful connection" and have an "authentic relationship?"

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Is there any business catchphrase more ubiquitous nowadays than "digital transformation"? Everyone craves the agility, innovation, relevance, engagement, reputation, loyalty, and brand advocacy that digital transformation promises. But how many are willing to do what it takes to achieve the sort of digital transformation that matters? If your organization wants a meaningful digital transformation, then it must be willing to do enough to make it worthwhile; otherwise, you are just putting band-aids on a gaping wound.

What does "doing enough" mean? That depends on many factors, such as your category, legacy systems, culture, the frequency of acquisitions, disparate systems, centralization, global footprint, and other attributes, but the most important factors are your openness to risk and your willingness to invest what it takes. In short: No pain, no gain.

Today, many traditional organizations cast a desiring eye upon their upstart competition having "benefits" such as agility, private equity, and newer technology unburdened by legacy systems. (Few, however, would take the corresponding drawbacks of cashflow urgency, bootstrap mentality, and--ironically enough--the lack of legacy reputation, customer base, and institutional knowledge.) The difference is that startups are permitted (in fact, encouraged ) to take business risks, invest heavily in building the right tech stack, and take losses against future gains. Meanwhile, traditional public companies are beholden to Wall Street expectations for consistent quarterly results.

This is why the key to digital transformation isn't going to be found in your IT department but in the C-suite. What risks are you willing to take? Can you put a portion of today's business model at risk to create tomorrow's? How much are you willing to invest? Can you tell your shareholders that transforming your company for success tomorrow will involve increased costs today?

I regularly speak with business leaders who tell me they want to emulate Amazon, but Amazon lost almost $3 billion before turning its first profit. And well after Amazon established itself, it continued to prioritize innovation and market share over margin. And Amazon took risks—significant risks. It launched Amazon Prime and AWS and won; and it lost on the Amazon Fire Phone, which Amazon pulled little more than a year after it debuted. Of course, few want to emulate Amazon's losses, its purposeful reduced margin, its considerable R&D costs, and its risks. They want to be Amazon without doing Amazon.

Understand your next best action before you leap! Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

• The next best action to what end?
• The next best action to produce what measurable outcome?
• And, finally, the next best action for whom?

Why do it: To what end?  

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The business world loves easy answers, but the secret to success is often shrouded in nuance. Take the current trend in customer experience (CX): Effortless and frictionless experiences. In a world of “unexpectedly high call volumes,” complicated return policies, and mobile apps that make us want to hurl our phones, it’s pretty clear that most brands tend to make it unnecessarily difficult for customers. It is also evident that brands that remove unnecessary friction improve their ability to foster strong customer relationships. But take note of those qualifiers in those last two sentences—“unnecessarily difficult” and “unnecessary friction”—because the proper CX for your brand demands you make smart decisions about where and when customer effort is not only necessary but even a good thing for the customer and your brand.

Being effortless is not a simple goal for you to strive for in every touchpoint of your customer journey. There are times effort is good. Effort sometimes produces feelings of pride and accomplishment. Effort can imbue a product or brand with emotion. Effort can reduce risk and costs. And one customer's effort can add value for other customers. There are times when the customer and brand both benefit by having the customers get their hands (metaphorically) a little dirty.

For example, which is more effortless: Buying a teddy bear off the shelf or spending an hour crafting your own at a Build-A-Bear Workshop? The reason children (and parents) love their Happy Hugs Teddies Bears and Kabu Catlynns is that they take the time to personalize the product, adding clothes, shoes, sounds, and scents. Each bear is special, like no one else’s, and that is thanks to the customer's effort. A completely tricked-out Build-A-Bear plush will cost you time, effort, and a 300% or more premium on the teddy bears sitting waiting on the shelf, but your kids will treasure it forever.

Which is more effortless: Having a TV stand delivered to your home or spending two hours making an IKEA BESTÅ? The “IKEA effect” is so well known, it even has its own Wikipedia entry. It is described as “a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.” IKEA has said that having customers build their own furniture is a reason for their attractive pricing, but it is also true that your effort constructing IKEA furniture provides a sense of “stolthet” (which is Swedish for pride), and it’s a big part of IKEA’s success. In one study of the Ikea effect, researchers found people who built their own products were willing to pay 63% more for the product than would non-builders. (Of course, not everyone wants to put in that effort, so IKEA has partnered with TaskRabbit to provide assembly services—an important reminder of the need to understand your personas and craft different journeys for different needs.)

Which is more effortless: Being done with your transaction once you get out of a cab or taking time to rate and review your rideshare driver’s friendliness, cleanliness, and skill? While transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft have been effective at removing friction from the on-demand transit experience, there are key moments when they add, rather than subtract, effort. Rating your driver gives you a sense of control, makes you feel valued, and encourages a sense of community where every rider helps out everyone else to weed out bad drivers. The Lyft experience would be less without the customer effort required to rate each driver.

The problem with effort isn’t that effort is inherently bad; it is that brands add effort for the wrong, often careless reasons. To learn more about the science of effort, why brands often get effort wrong, and how CEB's pioneering research helps brands understand why and where to be effortless, please read the complete blog post on Gartner.com. 

Step back in time with me: It’s December 1994, Boyz II Men is crooning “I'll Make Love to You” on the radio, Prodigy opens up the Internet to users of its online service, and a guy with a giant love for Disney decides it would be fun to create a web page. I launched a single-page called Lampwick’s Guide to Disney on the Web, never expecting doing so would turn into a five-year life-changing journey leading to a voluminous Disney fan site, a free trip to Disney World, and a new career in the nascent field of Internet marketing. I'd like to share three lessons that I learned from my experience as a Disney influencer and advocate.

My old Lampwick website