Thought Leader & Disruptor
Nov 18 2014
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The Chief Experience Officer (CXO): they are newcomers and have arrived with aplomb.
As I’ve previously written, Experience Design is a consciousness that results from every point of contact a person has with a company, its products, and its services — over time. It follows, then, that if a company is going to be successful and innovative it must be able to predict and deliver on people’s expectations at every single point of contact. A company may be successful in the short term, even if it delivers poor user experiences, but to build a sustainable business for the long term, making the experience a key part of business strategy, practice and process is critical.
A CXO differs from a CMO / marketing director, creative officer or a customer service director (as examples) as they all have very specific viewpoints into the world of the consumer. In contrast, the CXO must understand and advocate for the people, bring together multiple skills and viewpoints across the organisation to identify & solve the people’s problems, and do so in the context of all the biases brought forward by each participant in the process.
Service Design agencies - and the overlap with user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) agencies - are a new breed of Co-agencies (the hybrid offspring of consultancy and agency, strategy and creative) that are successfully providing an end-to-end link between customer-led insights and business operations. The reason why companies like them is not just that they are quick, lean, customer focused and relatively inexpensive (when compared against 3 year, $30M major infrastructure programs), it is because they are also able to cross the divide between emotion and logic that enables them to speak sense to both the CMO / brand evangelist as well as the CFO / COO / Customer Services Director et al. They are providing a solution that everyone on the Board can buy into (if done well). And an aligned Board – well, we all know that is the cornerstone to success.
The issue with Service Design agencies is that all too often they are given a business problem and respond with a shiny tactical solution only to find that they have, in fact, just beautifully fixed the wrong problem. They are arriving too far down the corporate chain, often used by companies that are looking for a quick fix. It is far better if a CXO or experience designer is involved up-front during the strategy development process, engaged in identifying the problems not just in designing the solutions.
This is where there is a need for a fundamental change towards the creation of the true Experience-Led Enterprise. Service Design in itself, is not adequate to design business strategies. However the underlying principles of emotion plus logic are.
In the world of an Experience-led business model, we need to combine the emotive elements of brand, purpose and corporate culture with the logical building blocks of market reviews, research, customer analysis, innovation, prototyping and financial modelling. Think WPP meets McKinsey meets IDEO – without them killing each other!
Engage a CXO or Experience Advisor to amplify your Experience-led business model. Trust me, the CXO is set to become the CEO’s new BFF!