“Customer experience – in the era of the Experience Economy”
(from the perspective of external and internal clients)
Love and death in the age of Experience Economy
We all like to buy, but no one likes to be sold to.
At the same time, we have in our mind a faded, black-and-white image of the saleswoman breathing down our necks while we look at the offer in the store, and then she assures us that something fits us perfectly, without even looking at the expression on our face, which clearly shows that we – do not like it. Or a salesperson who convinces us so eagerly that we need to take an additional product that we didn’t come for, that we get the impression that he is trying to cross us.
Globally, poverty lines have moved, and most of us don’t buy something because we need it, but because we want it (yes, yes, we say: “I have nothing to wear”, but… ). The general perception of sales has also changed; the paradigm in which the manufacturer and its salesperson want to manipulate you to “inject” something into you is no longer valid. Today, they strive to build trust and a long-term relationship with us, their customers – that’s why the issue of branding on the market is so important today. They want us to come back for more. That’s why today everyone is everyone’s competition. Not only different manufacturers of sports equipment, but literally all of them – how many times have you gone to the shopping center to buy a winter coat, and bought a new mobile phone plan, just because that girl at the stand was nice to you?
We live in the time of the Experience Economy – in the time of advertisements that arouse feelings in us, give us chills, excite us, move us, and associate us with a state of need that the advertised product will readily satisfy (Coca-Cola Christmas commercials, “Just do it!”, travel advertisements that promise to delight us…).
*Source: official Facebook page “Coca-Cola”
All of them promise us an unforgettable experience, they are personalized, so we have the impression that they are addressing us (customer service employees address us by our name in phone conversations, Coca-Cola has printed different personal names on its bottles – and especially young people seem to are special if they find their own among them…). That’s why salesperson first introduce themselves to you by name, and when you tell them your story, they continue to address you by that name during the conversation. This phenomenon is known in psychology as the cocktail party phenomenon and refers to selective listening, and its name comes from the phenomenon that out of a bunch of sounds that we perceive as background noise, we hear our name when someone says it and it attracts our attention (explained in more detail in the article “The Cocktail Party Phenomenon: A Review on Speech Intelligibility in Multiple-Talker Conditions”, Acta Acustica united with Acustica 86: 117–128, by Adelbert W. Bronkhorst).
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect
Manufacturers from various industries and contractors of various services include us and enter into interaction with us, and we readily give them our mobile phone number and email address so that they can inform us about actions and special offers. We are looking for feedback; on how satisfied we were with the taxi driver, the delivered food and the delivery man, the customer service of the telecom company, and the new kitchen that we ordered through the webshop. The customer is in the center, not the producer/manufacturer.
Our wishes and needs are in the center, not their product/service – they will attract our attention more easily if we get the impression that we are important to them, that they understand us, that they are there to help us satisfy our wishes and needs. And it’s much easier than if they bombard us with the technical specifications of their latest product and the story of how great they are for producing it. That is why a good salesperson after you have exchanged names, will try to get to know you as well as possible in a short period in order to be able to offer you a product or service that meets exactly your needs and wishes (because it is not the same whether you are buying a sports car or a family car). When you gain confidence in it, you’re more likely to buy some accessories that you didn’t originally intend to buy – and that now seems like a perfectly logical choice. And it is genius that it is so!
A good salesperson today is much more than “supplier” of a product that you pointed your finger at from the shelf. A multidisciplinary approach is required, detailed knowledge of the range of goods they sell is no longer enough. Top sellers are interested, involved, and helpful. They have developed sales and communication skills, they know the competition, they are practically our consultants – which is genius, because who today would find the time to study all the relevant products on the market by themselves (each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages), when there is someone I consider myself an expert in that field.
And now the question arises – what if the top management of the manufacturer understands the Experience Economy and this whole previously described approach to Customer Experience (the client’s experience in the sales process, seeing it “through his eyes”), but the seller in the store has no idea what it is all about? You come to the store, attracted by advertisements and marketing in which a huge amount of money has been invested, and you are greeted by a scowling “delivery man”, with a generic: „Please?”, without even looking at you, and his body language actually tells you: “did you really need me now?”. And that’s where the whole story about Customer Experience falls into the water! That salesman obviously did not “buy” the philosophy and products of the company he works for. The question is, did any of his superiors even try to “sell” to him? He may even believe in the products he sells, so much so that he believes they sell themselves. But why bother?
Maybe because of the bonus, yes, but the employer can never provide the employee with as many financial incentives as he thinks he deserves if he plans to maintain the company’s competitiveness. Thus, the employee often begins to feel as if he is being “lured” with a carrot tied to a stick he is carrying, so it always eludes him. And if he doesn’t manage to complete the assigned targets, he rolls his eyes thinking : „Endless tirades at another meeting that could have been an e-mail„. You must have heard: “You can’t pay me so little, how little I can work”, at least as a joke.
New employees are demotivated by “old people„ who convince them that it is pointless to work hard. Motivation decreases, and team leaders in the absence of more adequate skills make promises and threats, sometimes alternately and sometimes simultaneously. Interpersonal relations become strained, creating a negative company climate and culture, productivity and satisfaction decrease of employees, employee turnover is increasing, which is favored by the current crisis in the labor market.
Some estimates say that earlier there were five potential employees for one job, while today there are five potential jobs for one employee. In the business setting, I often hear: “in today’s labor market, there are no more unemployed, only unemployable”. How to retain employees is a huge challenge, and an additional one is how to attract them in the first place. The need for top professional HR consultants and business skills trainers is growing, and an increasing number of employers no longer consider their engagement an unnecessary luxury, but rather a necessity for maintaining, let alone developing, the company.
Today everything is sales, to the extent that the term “sale” has outgrown its former narrow meaning. When a superior delegates certain tasks to a member of his team, he must be aware that he has to “sell” them to him, in order for him to truly accept them and perform them well. If the employee does not “buy” them, he will perceive them as imposed (“now I still have to do that”), and it is clear how this will affect his productivity. The team leader’s awareness of this alone is not enough – it includes his understanding of why it is necessary, but he also needs the knowledge and skills to do it.
Employees are the employer’s most important client because if it is not “sold” to them, it will not succeed in selling even to the end customer. Involving employees in that process is only one part of the Customer Experience paradigm in working with them – the company’s internal, first and most important clients.
How to get employees to internalize company and team goals, and is this even possible?
*Source: Facebook group “Officialworkmemes”
How to motivate employees when today they have so many opportunities to look for another job and the fear of the future and job loss no longer keeps them tied to their workplace? Even when you increase their salary, announce a raise if you successfully finish the quarter, increase the bonuses – you still see that they do not give their best and look more at each other (“she told me…”) than at the goal that you want them to achieve together. It’s as if the football team is looking more at who should have done what and who has made a mistake again, than at the goal and how to score a goal together. They wouldn’t be very successful, you agree, right?
Modern Leadership must also include the paradigm of Customer Experience (although this is not enough in itself – but it is necessary), looking at things through the eyes of the client, the employee, and their needs and desires. In doing so, it is important not to fall into the trap of looking for ways to make the employee satisfied. It is a real challenge to help the employee develop his awareness so that he can become aware of his own needs and desires, as well as the necessary skills to achieve his goals. Leadership is, in so many ways, Parentship. But the question is what kind of “parent” do you want to be, and what kind of “child” do you want to raise. The parent who buys things for the child and gives him a bigger allowance because he doesn’t have time to deal with him, or the one who helps him develop into a thinking and self-transforming adult human being?
Conscious and self-transforming individuals – employees, teams, and companies are the answer to the challenges of the modern world and economy. But how to transform resistance to change into fuel for the change we want but resist (a fantastic model described in the book “Immunity to Change” by Lisa Lahey Laskow, Robert Kegan)? How to help our people, but also ourselves, to become aware of why we do what we do and what really moves us (from the book “Why We do What We Do”, by Richard Flasta, Edward L. Deci), and that with a generic answer : “for the sake of money” we essentially enslave ourselves and reduce ourselves to less than what we are as human beings?
Source: idc.com
In capitalism, we would all be capitalists, and let someone else be a worker. At job interviews, we emphasize that work-life balance is important to us, but when you ask people what they do in their free time they mostly answer that they watch TV. Then they complain that they work a job that allows them just enough to have a place to sleep when they come home from work, to buy the food they need to survive, and a car to drive home from work and back the next day. This is the life that caused me to grow up in such a hurry as a child, adding those “and a half” behind the number of my age?
Is it really – that?
Who am I? – is an eternal question that is more relevant today than ever. There have never been more self-help books in libraries than there are now, more techniques and methods for working on yourself, and more people involved in psychotherapy, especially after the pandemic. As the boundaries of poverty have moved, we are no longer focused on survival, we are looking for depth, we are looking for meaning, we are looking for ourselves.
The world has become incredibly complex (or has our awareness of it expanded?), and unpredictable. What will happen next? Anxiety, which we unsuccessfully try to suppress in an effort to regain a sense of control, persistently tries to wake us up to the present moment and the acceptance that there is no control. This is what we Westerners arrogantly and unfoundedly concluded, overemphasizing our own importance. And the truth is that we never even had it. Just because we can’t tame the waves, doesn’t mean we can’t learn to surf them.
In my team, which I consciously chose, we consciously chose the following credo, which we teach others:
Meaning awakens inspiration.
Boldness drives.
Commitment creates results.
Without meaning there is no inspiration, and without inspiration – motivation is just a dead letter on paper. The big picture, the meaning, is a necessary upgrade of the Customer Experience paradigm, resulting from its limitations that we have become aware of over time. Social awareness today goes hand in hand with capitalism. The first wave of “import of foreign labor” (forgive me for the politically incorrect expression) has passed, are you really surprised that foreign workers who came to you in search of a better life, leave you on the first day of the contract expiration to some “promised” countries? Let’s look at the world through their eyes (if you can do that, you’ve understood Customer Experience). What did you do to stay? Haven’t you considered that it will cost you more if you have to “import cheap labor” again and again than to find a way to keep those PEOPLE and homogenize them with the existing team? Are we going to be disgusted with foreigners on our streets along with so many of our own who went abroad in search of a better life, and are still leaving today? Let’s blame employers who just exploit people, that’s the easiest. Let’s blame the boss, the colleague, the parents, let’s blame anyone, everything, unless we look at ourselves and take personal responsibility. And personal responsibility is the beginning and the end of everything. The more personal power we become aware of and accept, the greater our power of influence. Otherwise, we remain victims, and without the awareness that we choose it ourselves.
In the VUCA world we live in (an acronym coined in 1987, based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis, Burt Nanus, to describe the concepts of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations) it is necessary to lead ourselves, teams and the company from the coming future, and not looking back and repeating what we’ve done so far (“I’m like that”, “that’s how we’ve always done things”).
Source: knowledgehut.com
And when we expand that picture with the question of meaning, we can hope that people won’t roll their eyes at ideas that make them think, and that we won’t have to pay to protect ourselves from aggressive advertisements that attack us from all sides, although they often use very well basic principles of Customer Experience.
Ana Jadrešin, Senior HR Consultant
Mentmove d.o.o., for education and consulting
