Experience is the truth of a brand.
Yet research shows a profound disconnect between what brands promise and the reality of the customer experience.
75% of consumers say they expect consistency in their interactions with a company, yet 58% say they “feel they are communicating with separate departments and not one company.”
Most businesses still organise functions independently across business units; each has a separate leadership, channel, touchpoints, budgets, data pools and more. It's a legacy of pre-digital 20th century business thinking and its limiting growth, profitability and relevance.
At a time when every company is thinking about how to emerge stronger from the pandemic, we must move beyond the belief that branded touch points are where great experiences begin and end and re-imagine the entire business through the lens of experience.
Source: Growth it comes down to Experience, Accenture (2020).
- BX vs CX
BX isn’t the same as CX.
Customer Experience (CX) focuses on improving the experience people have while interacting with a company (i.e. customer service online and offline, ease of purchase, etc.)
The Business of Experience (BX) is a more holistic approach that allows organisations to become customer-obsessed and re-ignite growth.
It’s a mindset shift that starts with a redefinition of business - drawn not from your business model, capabilities or what product you sell but how you create value for customers.
This defines everything you do: what customers you serve, how you serve them, whom you compete against, what external forces you regard as relevant, how you interpret those forces, what strategies you pursue and how you innovate.
Take Domino’s. It isn't just a pizza company. But a technology company that delivers pizza.
This redefinition helped Domino's re-focus on customer needs, be an early adopter of technology and realign internal operations to fulfill its 30 minute delivery guarantee.
Today, Domino's controls 70% of India’s pizza market by value-- holding its own against delivery aggregators like Swiggy and Zomato.
- Brand vs bland.
The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and the move to omnichannel. Huge focus has been given to areas such as technical and systems integration, but this needs to go hand-in-hand with brand.
The over industrialisation of CX has turned it into an efficiency production line for too many brands — delivering formulaic, frictionless and forgettable experiences.
We need to move beyond bland best practice and create uncommon moments of impact. Every interaction is a chance to matter.
- Syncing the tech, data and human agenda.
Experience is not the responsibility of just one member of the C-suite anymore—it’s everybody’s business. Every person and every part of the business must be interconnected and collaborative, functioning as one cohesive, customer- obsessed unit with experience as its north star.
BX is ultimately about fusing your front office of sales, marketing, service and product functions and connecting it to the back office (e.g., HR, supply chain, etc.). It is an operating model change across the board that flips the focus from engaging customers at touch points to building engagement in every customer’s journey instead.
New tools and new approaches are required to sync diverse perspectives, insights and data together. This is new for many organizations and still poorly acted on.
Today every company must find new ways to offer meaningful experiences to customers.
There is no better time than now to discover what a BX versus CX approach can do for your business.
Is it easy? No. But it's essential.
BX is a significant mindset shift that we believe is going to be an incredible engine for meaningful disruption, market differentiation and customer satisfaction.
Our methodology can help you work out how.
If you'd like to reimagine your business through an experience lens, get in touch .
