Why Companies Fail to Deliver Exceptional Experiences
In this article, I want to talk about why companies and institutions fail to deliver exceptional experiences. But first, you have to know that customer experience is a responsibility that sits on everyone’s shoulders, a truth that many companies either don’t know or choose to ignore. They dump the entire responsibility onto a single department, and then are surprised when that department’s initiatives fail and its talent keeps walking out the door, without ever pausing to ask where the real source of the problem lies.
This article is aimed at companies that have recently set up a dedicated customer experience function, or are planning to set one up soon.
The Origins of the Field
There is no single agreed-upon date for the field’s emergence, but discussion around it started spreading in the early 1990s and reached its peak in the twenty-first century, in step with shifting consumption dynamics and the repeated invocation of “customer experience” by the founders and leaders of the world’s largest companies as a key to their success.
The Branches of the Field
The field has branched out into specialised sub-disciplines, which is natural given the variety of experiences people go through and the differences in how interactions take place from one industry to another. These sub-specialisations include: citizen experience, patient experience, viewer experience, tourist/visitor experience, user experience, student experience, and so on. Each niche has developed its own body of academic work, even though they all draw from the same general principles of the parent discipline.
The Field’s Reliance on Other Disciplines
A fact: there are no practices or frameworks that are accepted and agreed upon by all practitioners in the way they are for, say, project management. And all practitioners come into the field from varied backgrounds (meaning you won’t find any current practitioner who holds a bachelor’s degree in customer experience). The specialisation isn’t yet available at the undergraduate level, although it has started to spread at the master’s level.
Customer experience is a hybrid discipline in its make-up and draws its principles and practices from several administrative and social sciences. The field is still developing and growing because of the explosion of knowledge and because of its overlap with every department in the company (whose members all touch the customer experience directly or indirectly). This makes engaging with it a real challenge: anyone walking this path has to broaden their knowledge horizontally across multiple disciplines. There’s no doubt that creative discoveries are born at the intersection of specialisations. The American physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) said: “Big scientific leaps come from the conflict of ideas, more than from the accumulation of facts.”
Why Don’t Companies Succeed in Delivering Exceptional Experiences?
After that deliberately long introduction, I’ll start listing some of the reasons companies fail to deliver exceptional experiences, based on my personal experience. If I’m right, that’s from God; if I’m wrong, that’s from me. The order has no meaning, these are simply the reasons that came to mind when I posed the question, and they’re not exhaustive.
1. A flawed intention (purpose)
“The desire to build something for personal success is a fine experience, but its impact is limited by the nature of the intention and its short-term horizon. By contrast, the desire to create a positive human impact means that this echo will keep resonating long beyond your personal lifetime.” Intentions create meaning in the experience.
If the decision-maker’s intention is just to ride a wave, or to show off and boast, or to confirm their pre-existing assumptions about points of failure (to prove to the board that they were right, a personal drive for self-validation rather than a real desire to bring about change), this kind of intention will only produce misery.
2. The company isn’t serious about driving real, tangible change
Many companies have just jumped onto a trend or a fad that swept through the corporate world, with everyone racing to imitate it without any real awareness or understanding of what they were getting into. Opening a customer experience department simply because it’s the in thing right now won’t change anything about the level of service. As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Nothing will change if this department is set up for the sake of being set up, rather than to drive real change and a fundamental transformation in the level of service.
3. The company doesn’t grasp that customer experience is everyone’s responsibility
Opening a department or function under the label “customer experience” will not produce any tangible change in the short term. It’s not a responsibility that gets handed off to a single department or a single executive. Customer experience is the responsibility of the entire company, from the top of the pyramid (specifically the CEO) all the way down to the bottom. See also Customer-Centric Operating Model.
4. The company is serious about change but has picked the wrong people
There are competencies and personal skills you cannot afford to take lightly or overlook in the people who will work in this department. In another article, titled “If Customer Experience Were a Woman, I’d Marry Her”, I went into detail about the competencies and personal traits required.
5. The company brought in a heavyweight in the field, but they couldn’t drive change
The fact that the customer experience field depends on so many disciplines means, in short, that you won’t find a single person on the planet who has full command of every dimension and branch of the field, theoretical or practical. Can you really find someone who has spent two years in project management, two in marketing research, two in corporate strategy, two in change management (culture), two in a customer service centre handling complaints, two in governance, two in IT, and two… and two… and has read at least 10 foundational books in the field? It’s impossible.
I’m reminded of Abu Hanifa’s school of jurisprudence, where they would deliberate on legal questions to issue a ruling on them. What made that school distinctive was that Abu Hanifa gathered specialists from different fields to weigh in, and they collectively arrived at the soundest ruling for the questions they were discussing. Because passing judgement on something is part of understanding it (a jurisprudential principle), this is why cross-functional teams matter so much. They are far more effective at driving change than relying absolutely on a single department.
Even if you succeed in attracting the most knowledgeable person on Earth in the field, that absolutely doesn’t mean they’ll have Moses’s staff to strike with or Aladdin’s lamp to rub so the genie can come out and grant their wishes. And rest assured, they didn’t inherit Solomon’s ring from one of their ancestors to command the jinn either. Be realistic.
Jeff Bezos hired Larry Tesler, the greatest specialist in human-computer interaction, then Larry resigned after three years because Jeff didn’t take much of his guidance on board. Sometimes the problem is at the top of the pyramid: he hires smart people but only lets them see what he sees.
6. The company picked the right people, but the hierarchy was binding them
Sometimes you’ll find strong individuals or teams in some companies, but their position in the management hierarchy has tied their hands and prevented the company from getting the most out of them. Although there’s no general rule for the best position for this department, what is certain is that it has to sit in a context that is neutral and empowered: neutral, in that no other department can influence their decisions; and empowered, in that they can speak up about the problems in any department without favouritism or other considerations.
Does it really make sense, for instance, for the customer experience function to sit under Operations, with the head of Operations being both the defendant and the judge at the same time? The same goes for putting them under Marketing, where they will fail to close the gap between the brand promise and the experience delivered on the ground.
While we’re on the subject, an organisation’s influence isn’t shaped only by its hierarchy but also by its culture. The spread of a siloed culture (also known as organisational silos) makes any meaningful change in customer experience extremely difficult.
7. The company leans too heavily on external consultants
Exactly like the Japanese management experience: when it was applied to the letter in other countries, it didn’t succeed because of cultural factors. The same will happen when you rely on the best practices that consultants hand you, which they have often borrowed from events that took place in another country (an entirely different culture and context).
Let’s assume they had the answer (a complete framework). Believe me, the years these companies spent reaching practical solutions, they won’t hand them to you on a silver platter. Based on my personal experience (which can’t be generalised to all consulting firms), the consultant gives you part of the solution to keep you tied to them. They will give you the fish, gradually, but they will never teach you to fish for yourself.
In Closing
The state of things speaks louder than any words. After talking about why companies fail to deliver exceptional experiences, the key takeaway is that driving real change in the experience delivered to customers requires collective effort from everyone in the company, and requires the adoption of a customer-centric culture from the top of the pyramid down. I look forward to readers sharing additional reasons or discussing the ones I’ve mentioned above from their own perspective to enrich the article.
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