Google Trends is a cool new feature pointed out by MannyMo's blog. You can compare the volume of searches for any two terms since 2004. The red bar represents searches for "customer service." The flat blue line (appearing only in 2005) represents searches for the term "customer experience." So, despite the success of The Experience Economy
in 1999, and people like Mark Hurst, who have been teaching about customer experience for ten years, it's still flatlined out there in the Google consciousness.Why? Well, for one thing, the term customer experience got appropriated by a very specific, narrow set of parameters in business called CEM, for customer experience management, which focuses mainly on improving the performance of call centers. I have a Google news feed set up to fetch articles including the term customer experience; for the last six months it's netted only press releases from companies or consultants focusing on CEM.
A search on Amazon gave me 41,488 books tagged "customer service" and only 3,147 books on "customer experience." So, believe it or not, we're still on the leading edge of this discussion. There's still a lot of room for fresh ways of looking at the customer experience, from Danny Meyer's book Setting the Table (reviewed here) to Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber's new book, Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough.
Why do you think the concept of customer experience still seems "new?"
Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer service, visitor experience, consultant
i think "customer experience" hasn't taken off for a few reasons.
ReplyDelete1) It can sometimes be too "soft" a skill/mindset
2) It requires culture change throughout an organization which is the most difficult to achieve
3) It's tough to measure - satisfaction scores or NPSs sometimes don't cut it and if it can't be measured, management has a tough time understanding it
4) It's too long-term for management - for public companies, delivering quarterly is still the primary focus
It's interesting though that there are a lot of people talking about it, but only a few really doing it. Maybe it's still not well defined.