Reimagining experience management

The Shift coming in the current paradigm in experience management is going to be inescapable and those without vision will perish.

This is the first in a series of blogs about how to reimagine the way your company generates insights to accelerate value from your investments in CX. We’re excited to collaborate to combine Lou’s pragmatic, scalable methodologies to design, deliver and sustain emotionally engaging customer experiences with Matt’s focus on helping companies enhance their organizational effectiveness and build capabilities that fuse human-centered design with data science and analytics.

The most significant development in the past four decades in business is the realization that the experiences customers, employees, patients, etc. have are the ultimate value created. It is the total experience that creates value, and a return on investment.

But, the critical question is why we so many organizations are not achieving their goals and maximizing the power of experience. The simple answer is that we continue to apply the same paradigms, approaches, and tools to the Age of Experiences that come from Industrial Age thinking. Thinking that is rooted in break-fix vs. distinctive value creation.

As long as organizations continue to bury their heads in the sand they will not reach lofty heights and will wallow in the folly of thinking doing what we always have done will bring different results.

To make this most valuable for you, we’re focusing on a series of Experience Management Absolutes that companies of all sizes across industries can put into practice based on currently available technology. In our next blog we will feature Experience Management Absolute #1 which has to do with narrowing the "brand canyon," the gap between how customers feel about themselves at moments that matter along the customer journey rather than just what they think about your brand.

We look forward to dedicating ongoing blogs that will change the lives of people in the practice, customers, employees, patients, etc. This is a mission to improve experiences broadly making a difference in the world.

In 1994 Lou Carbone and Steve Haeckel collaborated on a seminal early article on experience management titled "Engineering Customer Experiences," where they defined experience as "the 'takeaway' impression formed by people's encounters with products, services, and businesses — a perception produced when humans consolidate sensory information." They argued that the new approach must focus on total experience as the key customer value proposition.

The concept reached a wide audience in 1999 when it was popularized by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in their book Experience Economy. In the same year, Bernd Schmitt published Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands.

In the 2000s, experience management emerged as a complex field unifying the experiences of brands, employees, products, and more. It was acknowledged that generating new experiences for end customers requires designing better experiences for internal players of an organization. Value is created by focusing on the experiences of everyone involved in or affected by a new offer, such as customers, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

For more on a fundamental part of Lou’s body of work and to comprehend these principles, see Matt’s summary of Lou’s book, Clued In here.

We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation together. Please feel free at any time to reach out to understand more about the “Distinctive Experience Management Paradigm Shift." It is a shift in mindset in your life and the lives you touch will never be the same.