C/DXE as part of the product
Author: Jürgen Rösger
Customer Experience Excellence is now a central component of the product and is already a key competitive differentiator!
How does this affect the customers?
Quite simple: The customers are comfortable because everything is easier and quicker; they feel they are taken seriously; they get what they need, what is (momentarily) relevant for them and corresponds to their (current) mood and needs. And it is primarily about what the customers get and how they get it, not about the communicative accompanying aspects (marketing communication) or dedicated product information. In essence, it is quite simple: relevance meets context or how can the product orientation of the providers be linked in the best possible way with the world of consumer needs through data-based empathy.
What does this mean? It is particularly important for customers to be understood. The handling personal relevance becomes the central product component and is an elementary part of experience-centered product and service offerings. To analyze this relevance is the starting point for a data-based empathy. Further data points on different customer interactions along the customer journey provide valuable insights to dynamically optimize the experience and thus provide further triggers for data-based empathy. Ultimately, this then ensures that the offers are tailored to the customer's needs and managed as a contextual link between the world of the company’s products and the world of the customer's needs.
It can be assumed that experience quality will increasingly dominate product and brand perception. The product elements in terms of content (e.g. music, video, car sharing, shopping) are becoming a commodity, while the quality of the experience is becoming the central competitive differentiator.
What used to be accessible only in the luxury product and service sector (hotels, restaurants, fashion, travel, ...) and thus only accessible to a small group of buyers, is becoming scalable thanks to digitalization and the data insights that come with it, democratizing it for everyone. Data and its smart usage become the central raw material of an "empathic" digital experience excellence.
Digital Experience Excellence ensures that enablers such as Data & Analytics, AI, and contextually controlled digital and analog touch points connect the customer with the company and enable them to consistently experience a high quality in all contact and interaction moments as well as a delightful individual experience.
At the same time, the resulting "data-based empathy" is used to permanently and iteratively improve products, services and experiences, test additional innovations, derive further customer-relevant services and products and, after successful testing, integrate them into the "experience logic". In terms of content, the focus is always on the best possible end-to-end convenience, customization, steerability and costs.
How does the industry deal with this?
The importance of C/DXE has now reached almost all decision makers in the industry. For more than 4,000 C-level managers of classic companies interviewed it is clear that C/DXE is the "next best activity" for their organization, their products and services and, above all, their customers.
There is a lot to do. And there is little clarity on how companies should approach this. After all, it's not about classic product and/or service features, but about an attitude that aims to delight customers. The function and service silos of comapiens, trimmed for efficiency, are too static, the decision and budget requirements of all areas and their stakeholders are too consolidated to consequently establish and live C/DXE as an ethos.
