What we get wrong about customer experience

We can all learn from Blockbuster, says digital transformation chief Nick Hodder

Blockbuster was right, said Nick Hodder, assistant digital transformation director at Imperial War Museum, speaking at Computing’s IT Leaders Summit on Wednesday. “We all love watching movies at home, now more than ever before.”

Of course, Blockbuster was wrong too. The company knew what its customers wanted, but in the end it couldn't deliver it in the way they wanted.

The fate of Blockbuster, Kodak and other companies that failed to adapt their customer experience (CX) to tastes changed by advancing technologies holds lessons for organisations of all types.

Unfortunately, most aren't agile enough to adapt to what customers want at a time of exponential change, when technology is marching forward rapidly on many fronts.

The first mistake is to confuse CX with customer services; the latter is just one type of contact, often after something has gone wrong.

A second common error, said Hodder, is to create a dedicated CX department and expect it to drive changes. Creating good CX is a multidimensional, cross departmental endeavour that requires consistent leadership from the top. Therefore, the new department is almost certainly doomed.

Third, companies often delegate initial interactions to immature technologies, a classic example being phone answering bots that can only cope with a small range of accents, leaving customers feeling enraged and powerless.

"Technology doesn't come first, people come first," Hodder reminded delegates.

And fourth, some firms are over-reliant on market research. "Market research will tell you what customers want, but how much will it tell you about how they want it?"

The service design approach to CX

Market research, user experience research, technology, communications, and human centred design are all essential elements of CX, but they must be combined in the right way.

Having experimented with all of these elements, Imperial War Museum is now joining them into a coherent whole using a service design approach.

"We want visitors to our London branch to have a great experience," said Hodder. "But first we have to ask, what does a great experience look like?"

Hodder likened the service design approach to agile software development or DevOps: "Research, develop insights, ideate, develop prototypes, iterate". By contrast, traditional practices around customer experience are more like waterfall, too rigid and unresponsive for tech driven times.

"Most organisation aren't thinking in this way," he said. "They're not thinking about service design, and they're not thinking about their products and services. The reason most digital transformations fail is that they shouldn't be digital transformations, they should be organisational transformations."

The stakes couldn't be higher, he added.

"Your CX is your product or service, it's the people that enable it. It shouldn't be left to a single department."