Transform Customer Experience

Chapter 1Customer experience today

Many of the world’s great organisations have won customers’ loyalty in a highly contested global marketplace. The Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of this world have put their creativity into forging brands that offer customers a consistent, distinctive experience with a clear value proposition they can respond to. These are also companies that make it a point of pride to nurture, train and retain their staff.

Meanwhile, other organisations that were once everywhere are now nowhere. An instructive example is Blockbuster Video. The company rode the video boom into the late 1990s, when it started making most of its money out of charging very high fees to customers who were late returning their videos. One of those customers was a youngish man called Reed Hastings, who was trying to work out what to do with the money he’d made from selling a software start-up. He was so irritated when Blockbuster charged him a $40 late fee that he went away and founded his own company, which he called Netflix. By mid 2018, Netflix was riding the digital wave with 125 million subscribers, and Blockbuster was down to just one store in the USA.¹

Creating delighted customers has never been more important than it is today. With globalisation, the impact of digital technology and the emergence of an ever-increasing number of channels, customers have access to a vast range of choice, and they are quick to drop organisations who rub them up the wrong way. In the words ...