Digital CX is Dead. Long Live Digital CX

Good data consists really of three things: customer perspective, employee perspective, and
operational data. Those three pools of information, synthesized, are where real insights reside. And the gift with purchase? Those insights are at once people, systems, and budget informed.

No sense in asking customers what they want if you cannot afford to provide it. Employees are hardened survivors of flip-chart exercises for recording suggestions that never see the light of day. And to rely entirely on witness accounts without checking the proverbial camera footage to see what really happens is, at best, well intended, and more often a colossal waste of time.

We persist in pursuing the promise of digitalization, without asking customers what they want or need. Instead, we pivot, this time to AI. I have seen this technique before: sneaking the new technology alongside the last Big Thing, to ensure no-one is ever quite optimized enough.

Digitalization has not delivered. Another big consulting group found a gap between perception (higher) and reality (lower) with respect to firms’ views of their own digitalization/penetration. Interestingly, we don’t seem to think technology itself is accountable, but rather the inability or unwillingness (or both) of humans to adopt and adapt to new tools and capabilities.

Over the three decades I was in the decision-making seat for customer service sales and marketing operation transformation, every vendor and consultant promised efficiency and effective improvements to the behemoth that was telco customer operations. Our business case discipline sensibly required we find benefits to pay for the transformative tech. We virtually never claimed revenue lifts to justify the cost. Instead, customer operations had to come up with a headcount (aka “FTE” for the finance crowd) for removal to ensure the efficiency could be taken to the bank.

There was more than one occasion in which our enthusiasm to get approval scrambled accuracy in counting the operational costs of installing testing and rolling out the new tools and capabilities. Making matters worse, the “risk-mitigating pilot” phase slowed down the rollout of the technology upon which the business case assumptions were made. The grim reality of this in operational terms meant our budget headcount reductions were baked in without the corresponding efficiency lifts taking effect.

What that means in practice is less responsive customer service and more repeat calls — the “doom loop” of call center volume spikes. Of course, the new product pilot (or incubation, as we lovingly called it) provided a different risk. Any carefully watched operation, with high stakes and career-limiting risks, will perform well. If the product is truly customer life-enhancing, user enthusiasm buoys the entire experience. However, successful product pilots grow rapidly, if we are lucky, and pilot to full scale (or to life, as we called it in my day), but wobbly tech with untested processes and a steep customer learning curve can spiral the wrong way.

The gap in organization intelligence is what makes the embedding of anything new a challenge, let alone complex technology, even if it is supposed to make things better. One way — perhaps the only way — to realize the benefits of digitalization by any name, is to use the Operating Model to analyze & document all operating processes, not just channels, and their transaction systems that touch customers and/or people that support customers.

When organizations’ budget and title holders are faced with the big picture, the immediacy of today, this quarter and this annual performance plan, makes it impossible to act outside of one’s job description, department, or function. Simply stated, people do what they are paid to do. Silos are not real, they are certainly not recommended in organizational design, but they can stop anything, even digitalization or AI initiatives that actually do aid people — customers and employees — in doing what they need and want to do.

As a kid I spent summers on a vast cattle ranch that crossed public and private roads and bordered other ranches. Cattle guards stopped cattle from crossing roads for their own safety. Eventually, the shallow trenches, fitted with rolling bars that made the surface unpleasantly unstable for cows, were replaced. Painted lines on the road did the same job: cows couldn’t tell the difference, so they didn’t cross painted lines.

Start crossing painted lines, then apply technology. Your customers will be glad you did.