Customer science: A new CIO imperative
In a world where every customer has a broadcast platform, failure to meet or exceed customer expectations can have material impacts.
On February 21, 2018, Snapchat lost $1.
In a world where every customer has a broadcast platform, failure to meet or exceed customer expectations can have material impacts.
On February 21, 2018, Snapchat lost $1.3 billion in market value in a single day after a Kylie Jenner tweet about unhappiness with the app’s new layout. She simply said: “Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.” In 2016, US companies lost $1.6 trillion from customer switching caused by poor service.
The paradox in practice
The path to customer science is fraught with paradoxes. The organizational paradox is that if the “Customer is King” why is there no one in the enterprise with the authority to ensure that every interaction meets or exceeds expectations. Is this the role of the now very much in vogue chief customer officer? The chief experience officer?
Glenn Laverty, now retired and former president and CEO at Ricoh Canada, finessed this responsibility/authority paradox tying every employees’ compensation to customer experience/satisfaction metrics.
What gets measured and what gets rewarded drive behavior. At Boeing, the indication is that production throughput compensation metrics trumped safety considerations. Customer science can inform calibrated and nuanced linkage in everyone’s compensation to customer experience metrics.
Claes Fornell, American Customer Satisfaction Index founder and Distinguished Donald C. Cook Professor (Emeritus) of Business at the University of Michigan, describes the customer science data paradox. Organizations are collecting more information about their customers than ever before and yet, “paradoxically, the more data companies collect about their customers, the less they seem to know about how to satisfy them.” This has to change.
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