Everyone is hurting

There’s a fundamental issue in our digital economy, and it’s affecting everyone. 

The way we engage with customers, the way we handle customer data, the way we build customer experiences - it’s all broken.

And everyone is feeling it. Most of the time, we can’t put our finger on it. It’s like a low grade headache we all have that we just can’t shake.

At its core, this is about how and why our customer relationships are broken.

How businesses try to engage with us. How they design products. How they communicate with us. How they follow us around, apparently to improve their customer products and service. 

It’s about email spam. It’s about one time passwords. It’s about missed notifications. It’s clumsy online forms. It’s repetitive and pointless questions on the phone with contact centres, and cold calls from robo-spammers.

Businesses are too busy trying to ‘acquire us’ and collect information about us that they’ve lost sight of their real purpose: to create long term customer value. 

Organisations everywhere have forgotten what personal data is for, why they really need it. And in doing so, they’ve failed to realise they are ruining our customer experiences. Destroying customer value. And driving a collapse in customer trust.

The biggest challenge of all is that each company alone can’t solve it. When they try to, they just make things worse.

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A blind spot

Why can’t businesses see this fundamental customer relationship issue? Because it’s a blind spot.

Companies of every size are already being swirled around in a ‘perfect storm’ of digital disruption: the unrelenting technology shifts; the changing business models and constant new competition; the ever-new channels and digital expectations; and shifting regulatory pressures and tensions around privacy and customer innovation.

Simply put, businesses are having a hard time knowing which way is up, let alone seeing the systemic issues with their customer relationships.

If you zoom out from this digital disruption and noise you’ll see that all this mess comes from solving things from only the business side, rather than the customer’s.

Companies have talked for years about being customer-centric. But in truth, we always just end up with solutions that are product centric. Platform centric. Business centric.

A new perspective

To solve this we need a completely new perspective. We can’t use the same thinking that got us here.

The good news is that the solution is already staring us in the face: we need new tools for customers.

Solutions that work from the individual’s side, not the business’s. 

Right now, all the smarts, all the technology, all the clever automation, is designed and built out from the business side. Not the customer’s. 

As a result, companies spend billions each year optimising for their own needs, not the individual’s. It’s why we have hundreds of different accounts to manage, and digital identity is fundamentally broken.

It’s time for a new category of customer technology: products that do things with and for customers, rather than doing things to them.

It’s time for the Great Customer Reset.

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