CXDay organised by the CXPA took place yesterday. At the invitation of Marco Rodrigues, I found myself at the CXDay event taking place in London. Here is what I took away from that event:
The terms customer-centric, Customer Experience, and innovation are empty. They are so empty that each person can fill them up whatever meaning they wish. And they do. Then the debates occur as to what customer-centric means, what customer experience is and is not, what counts as innovation or not. Some academics see an opportunity here: to define Customer Experience as a set of capabilities backed by empirical data and thus put in a place an established framework for assessing Customer Experience maturity and benchmarking.
Life is difficult/frustrating on those who find themselves either preaching and making a living from Customer Experience. And it is perhaps even more difficult for those who find themselves part of the Customer Experience team within a large corporate. One such person told me that she found it frustrating to make sense of what Customer Experience involves. Dive into it and you realise it is a many headed monster. There are many questions and no ready made silver bullets. To deal with the Customer Experience challenge you have to get pretty much everyone else in the organisation to work with you to tame the monster. And these folks are not interested. To them Customer Experience is irrelevant to what they have to do on a day to day basis. And for them the folks in the Customer Experience show up as an irrelevant annoyance.
Customer Experience has been and continues to be a blessing for one set of folks: the VoC vendors. These folks cannot believe their luck: listening to the voice of the customer has become a mandatory exercise for just about every organisation and their is an endless appetite for what the VoC vendors are selling. Yet all is not as great as it sounds. The more intelligent VoC folks (at VoC vendors) are concerned. Why? Because they are wondering when someone is going to wake up, notice and call it as it is. How is it? Corporations may be listening to VoC, they certainly aren’t doing much about it. And so from a practical perspective they are not listening to their customers. So the most rational course of action is to put a stop to their relationship with VoC vendor and scrap their Customer Experience team.
A handful of people get it and are living it. What do they get? They get what the whole Customer Experience thing is all about. Renata Wallace, the owner and managing director of Wallacespace gets it. As soon as I walked into Wallacespace (the venue for the CXDay event) I found myself saying “This is a meeting space with soul!”. Then I listened to Renata share her story and I got that Renata embodies the soul that is so manifest in the look+feel of Wallacespace. What struck me most forcefully about Renata is how she is so different to just about every senior person in meet in big corporate land. What makes her distinct for me? She oozes the kind of humanity that is rare in corporate environments.
It’s great to meet up with people in person. I enjoyed meeting up with Marcio Rodrigues – who reminded me of the event and encouraged me to attend. I enjoyed meeting up with Ian J. Golding a customer experience evangelist and consultant. I enjoyed meeting Nadine Dyer, a Customer Experience Manager, who shared with me how that which I speak her lands for her. I enjoyed meeting Renata Wallace……. For me nothing takes the place of face to face encounters with human beings. And in that respect I thank the folks from Wallacespace who supplied us with drinks, canopies, and friendly service.
I wish you a great day and thank you for making the time to listen and in some cases share that which I speak here. Live well, be a source of positive difference in the world. Be a Renata Wallace! A human being in touch with his/her humanity and revelling in it. This is an invitation you can accept or reject – as human beings you and I are ‘condemned to be free’ to always be the chooser who chooses, even choosing not to choose and just going with the way that it has been set up for us.
The Customer Blog 
Maz,
You say that “Corporations may be listening to VoC, they certainly aren’t doing much about it.” And consequently the VOC industry should be concerned.
I don’t think they need worry. The exercise equipment industry appears to be going from strength to strength yet we get more and more obese. Our power of self delusion is a wonderful one.
James
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