“Loyalty died during 2020. Customers today want instant gratification. We want those just-in-time, personalized, relevant experiences. Customers today have choice, and we are gravitating toward companies that make our lives easier and better. Because we don’t have the luxury of waiting around for companies to figure out how to be more digital, how to meet our needs faster, how to get our products to us faster.

And there’s a lot of dysfunction happening today. Call centers saying, ‘Due to higher than normal call volume because of COVID, you’re going to have to wait on the phone for two hours.’ There’s a lot of that. Or, ‘Because of supply chain and logistics issues, products are not getting shipped for four months.’ I know that because I’m trying to furnish a house, and I gotta wait six months for a couch—it’s insane.

And staffing issues, I mean there are a world of problems out there for businesses. But the truth is: no excuses. We have to rise to the occasion for our customers, because this is the moment we are all being judged for how we behave in these difficult times.”

“If there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that these are not normal times. None of this is normal.

Here to explain how we’re influenced by retail marketers is customer experience expert and author of The Customer of the Future. I’ve identified there are three trends that have created this perfect storm where customer experience is all anybody wants to talk about. Those three trends are:
– The experience economy, where people value experiences over things.
– A power shift from the company to the customer.
– And technology, which increasingly plays a huge role in shaping our most beloved experiences.

Jeff Bezos once asked his head of service how long it took for a customer to reach a call center agent. The executive guessed under a minute. Jeff called, and the team waited… one minute, two minutes, three minutes—nothing. At four and a half minutes, someone finally picked up. Shortly after, the head of service resigned. The point is, why would the richest man in the world care about call wait times? Because those details define the customer experience.

Spotify understands nostalgia drives connection. They create personalized time capsule playlists based on teenage years using AI and machine learning. Every time they launch them, acquisition and retention soar. That’s customer experience, not just service.

We’ve moved from the materialism of the 1980s to today’s experience economy, where people prefer experiences over possessions. Yet too often, companies use technology to create distance instead of closeness, forgetting what it feels like to be the customer.

Elon Musk knew drivers didn’t want to feel dorky in an electric car, so he built Teslas to be as fast as a Porsche and as beautiful as a Ferrari—aligning technology with aspiration.

Netflix leverages AI and data to recommend uniquely eclectic content for each viewer, creating experiences that feel personal and engaging.

Finally, think of the blind cave fish. These fish weren’t always blind—they evolved to thrive in dark caves, becoming 15% more energy efficient than their sighted relatives. The lesson: survival requires adaptation. Companies, too, must evolve continuously to meet customer expectations.”

Hello, my name is Blake Morgan and I’m a customer experience futurist. I have my new book coming out, it’s called The Customer of the Future: Ten Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business.

I wrote this book because I felt this giant challenge facing every business today, and that challenge is this problem of commodification—that all of our products and services now are the same, that we are simply competing on price. And that’s not enough.

It turns out, with this sea of sameness, the only way to make customers remember you is customer experience. So I wrote this book based on hundreds of interviews, on researching companies all over the world, and what I found is that most companies have not even achieved the table stakes of customer experience.

And so the book The Customer of the Future is based on ten principles, and these are best practices that I believe anyone reading this book out there would benefit from understanding.

I’ve been studying this critical topic of customer experience for over 12 years. But today, the conversation has come to the forefront of business dialogue everywhere. Now companies understand that there’s actual ROI to be gained from investing in your customer relationships—from making your customers’ lives easier and better, from making your customers feel special.

And so I hope you’ll check out my new book, which you can buy on Amazon or wherever books are sold—The Customer of the Future.