Transform Customer Experience

Foreword by Don Peppers

There’s an evolutionary feature known to biologists as ‘the Red Queen effect’ based on a tale in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice meets a chess piece — the Red Queen — who explains that in Looking-Glass Land, everyone has to keep running ever faster, but they never seem to get very far because the landscape is moving with them: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’

In the natural world, biologists have found that species must continually adapt and evolve just to keep in the same place, both with respect to other species competing with them for food and to avoid predators. Every time squirrels get quicker, foxes need to develop faster reflexes, because only the fastest foxes will catch enough prey, which means the squirrels have to become a little bit quicker still, because only the quickest squirrels will live long enough to pass on their own genes.

The Red Queen effect also applies to the business world, and to the customer experience space. Companies work hard to deliver a better experience so they can prosper by winning more customers, keeping them longer, and growing them bigger than their competitors. But their competitors are also innovating and evolving, so every successful CX initiative is soon replicated by other companies, which means that to be competitively successful, a company has to differentiate its own CX even more effectively.

We can call it ...