"Today's customer is different -- demanding, empowered, increasingly impatient, and even angry. Even one poor experience can 'go viral,' rippling across the social networks at light speed."

Opening Statement

Over the past year on the weekly podcast, The Customer Experience Show, I've interviewed companies, customers, and customer experience experts from around the world. When the subject turns to technology, horror stories abound. It seems that everyone has a story about how technology has enraged customers.

At the same time, there has been a sea change in customer attitudes. Today's customer is different -- demanding, empowered, increasingly impatient, and even angry. Thanks to the incredible success of social media, our customers are sharing information and becoming increasingly well informed. Where the company, its staff, and (in latter days) its Web site were once the primary information sources for customers wanting to make a purchase, today they rely on and trust their peers. And if customer experience is more difficult today, it's also more visible. If you aren't one of the more than 9 million people who have viewed "United Breaks Guitars" on YouTube, you need to see what the consequences of poor service can look like in the age of social media. Even one poor experience can "go viral," rippling across the social networks at light speed.

The status quo -- where technology disappoints -- is no longer an option. It's time for a quantum shift, for a reboot. In this edition of Cutter IT Journal, we will focus on how technology can contribute to -- not detract from -- the customer experience.

Our authors explore a number of approaches and solutions. They come from around the world and from a variety of areas and experiences. But some common themes are consistent among all our contributors. All stress ideas that we don't often hear mentioned in discussions about technology -- emotion, context, engaging the senses. But don't get the impression that these are purely theoretical discussions. We challenged the authors to give us practical applications and examples, and they have risen to that challenge. From start to finish, the issue is full of ideas and takeaways that you can use in your organization.

SO FAR, SO GOOD ... BUT NOT YET GREAT

In our first article, independent consultant Paul Clermont argues that "as bad as customer service may be in some enterprises, information technology has, overall, made it dramatically better today than anyone could have imagined three or four decades ago." From ATMs to Internet shopping, from booking travel to paying bills online, Clermont points out that we have a range of conveniences and accessibility to services that would simply not be possible without technology. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there are indeed real problems where IT fails to live up to its potential in creating a compelling customer experience. To his credit, Clermont provides a great checklist not only of the problems, but also of the potential solutions. Using two factors, complexity and uniqueness, he gives us a framework for understanding where technology will enrich the customer experience and where it might hinder or even destroy it.

CONTEXTABILITY

Context is king. So says IBM's Michael Hughes in our next article, observing that in a world of Web 2.0 and software as a service, "few applications stand alone." Hughes urges us to take a broader look at the story of user interaction from start to finish, something that will require us to truly engage with the end customer. It's a real eye-opener to see how many times requirements are delivered by surrogates -- who often prove the old adage "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Hughes challenges us to connect with end users within the real context of their work by direct observation. His motto might be "Don't tell me; show me." Research had found that when you ask end users what they do, they'll give you a story that is very consistent with documented policies. But if you ask them to show you what they do, their actual behavior is often very different from what is written.

Pursuit of context breaks the artificial world of the "use case." When you look at the context of a user action, you find that the real triggers of the behavior start well before most use cases begin. In Hughes's view, the start of the ubiquitous ATM training scenario shouldn't be "User inserts card into ATM." The actual trigger is "User needs cash." Contextual analysis roots our software in real-life behavior -- not the technical fantasy world that most specifications inhabit.

ENHANCING THE CONVERSATION

In our next article, nsquared founder Neil Roodyn continues the theme of considering the complete context of the user experience. Here's a question: When was the last time your encounter with an application was so engaging that you referred to it as a "conversation"? Roodyn argues that a conversational approach to customer experience leads to true customer engagement, and he challenges us to remove the barriers that technology poses to such conversations. Some barriers are conceptual and permeate the very language we use -- for example, technology has "users," not "participants." Other barriers are physical. The classic keyboard-and-screen configuration keeps us from truly experiencing social engagement and collaboration -- at a time when the success of social media indicates that there is a real desire for it.

Roodyn's response is to change the approach to the user interface in a fundamental way. Using the new tabletop interface developed by Microsoft, he and his team have delivered a solution that mirrors an archetypal social situation -- sitting around a tabletop. Unlike the solitary, cerebral keyboard-and-screen approach, the tabletop engages the user both physically and emotionally in a familiar environment. Here Roodyn sounds a theme that runs through the entire issue: customer experience is not about logic -- it's about emotion. It's about how we feel.

Roodyn writes that when designing the tabletop application, "simplicity [was] the killer feature." In fact, the team's dedication to simplicity permeated each aspect of the design. Members even went so far as to leave out selective "critical pieces of information" to get participants to "discuss that which is missing." It seems that this team learned a lesson that every great writer knows -- if you want to engage your audience, leave a little bit of suspense.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

Our next author, Suresh Malladi, also focuses on serving the customer's emotional needs. To do this, he says, customer-centric firms "initiate and sustain meaningful interactions with the customers in order to understand them better, so the firm can create unique context-sensitive experiences for them." When we look at the technical capabilities Malladi says are required to support this vision -- intuitive Web sites that allow customers to interact, flexible back-end architectures, data management and business analytics -- there is nothing revolutionary. So why are we struggling?

Malladi points out that even the best technology is not enough. Some necessary organizational practices make the technical challenges seem minor in comparison. These range from empowering customer-facing employees to creating processes that work the way real people work. According to Malladi, we need to move beyond words to showing the customer through our actions that they are being heard. We need to move beyond the "sense and respond" approach that allows us to meet customer needs to a "predict and act" approach that enables us to exceed customer expectations. But if we truly hope to serve the customer's emotional needs, Malladi issues us one last challenge: to really understand what is at the core of our customer's values -- and of our value propositions -- and focus on delivering the "one thing" they come for. Customer centricity is not a marketing slogan; it's a relentless pursuit of the essential experience that differentiates our company in a large and crowded marketplace.

FACTS VS. POLITICS

It's somehow fitting that we end with the article by Martin Bauer of the London-based digital agency Vision With Technology. Bauer addresses the essential question, "How is it that we start out with the best of intentions, but somehow those intentions get sidetracked along the way?" Echoing Hughes's earlier warning about the use of "surrogates," Bauer brings to life the politics that get in the way of application design.

In one of many vignettes, we meet Jason, a 35-year-old male developer who needs to sign off on a function designed for an 18- to 25-year-old female. Jason is convinced his opinion is right, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bauer points out how rampant this phenomenon is in our industry. There are managers who speak for their staff. There are marketing people who tell us how the end customer will use our Web sites and our software. There are technical people who tell us to focus on what is really important and not the "nice to have" items or things for which there are "workarounds." And when it's our own personal opinion, how willing are we to ignore the proof of direct observation and engagement with the real end customer in favor of the frequently ill-informed opinions of stand-ins? In fact, Bauer suggests that when push comes to shove, we often ignore the facts entirely.

THE YIN AND YANG OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

All this makes us understand what a challenge customer experience can be. Each of our authors, in one way or another, has shown us that customer experience requires balancing two potential contradictions. On the one hand, it demands a true dedication to the facts, using direct observation and avoiding the traps of surrogates and secondhand sources. On the other, it's clearly about things we might normally regard as subjective -- context, intangibles, emotion, and engaging our senses. How we feel is both relevant and irrelevant.

That is certainly a big part of the challenge. Subjectivity, complexity, and politics are significant barriers because they aren't binary. If they were, we could easily use technology to solve them. In the absence of that, we have to know when it is appropriate to use technology and when we need to rely on our imperfect selves -- subjective, complex, and political, but at the same time capable of real insight and of creating compelling experiences.

Reconciling these complex and seemingly contradictory positions is something that could never be done by a computer program. Logic is not enough. We are going to need wisdom and experience -- and a whole new set of tools and approaches.

There is clearly a problem in the area of customer experience -- it's a challenge to our traditional ways of doing things. As we've tried to show in this issue of Cutter IT Journal, though, there are some hopeful signs and new directions that are worth examining and celebrating.

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