Figure it out
I wrote a while back about a pet-peeve of mine when I grocery shop: Not enough small carts.
Now, that’s clearly a small thing (literally!) to get too overworked about. First World Problems, and all that. At the risk of delving further into Angry-Old-Man-Shaking-His-Fist-At-The-Clouds territory, let me gripe again about shopping carts.
As I’d mentioned, ours is a somewhat urban neighborhood. Now, we’re not “downtown” or in any sort of high-rise area…It’s one of those in-between sort of place where there are a mix of houses and businesses; sidewalks and alleys. But it’s definitely in the city, and naturally we have our share of vagrancy issues.
So, our local grocers have cart issues of their own: Homeless folks will often wander off with them. Now, there’s a mechanism they’ve installed that locks a wheel if the cart is taken beyond the parking lot. It’s a somewhat expensive solution the problem, and seemingly not totally effective, given the number of carts one can see abandoned within a few blocks of the store when the absconder finally gets frustrated with the impediment.
But not only is it not all that effective (although I’m sure there’s a study on it…perhaps it’s effective enough to justify its cost), it’s also a frustration for their Customers. I can’t tell you how often I get one of these carts with that one wheel locked inside the store because that mechanism is malfunctioning. Sometimes it’s clear right away and you can abandon it right there at the front of the store. In fact, usually if there’s a cart or two not stacked in with the rest of them, but rather just out in the middle of that space, often that’s why: Someone else abandoned it right away. But sometimes it doesn’t go haywire until you’re already on your way and you either have to get another cart from the front of the store and swap all your so-far picked items into the new one, or somehow try to drag ¼ of the cart the rest of the way through your visit.
My previous article, linked above, simply asks why certain brands haven’t figured out some of the inconveniences their Customers have. Now, here’s an admonition: They should figure it out. […]
On the other hand, maybe AI will NOT kill CX
I wrote the other day about what I thought was a conclusion drawn about the impact of automation and AI and all that stuff on CX, from a conversation I’d had with a colleague. Briefly, I noticed that, absent the incentive of increased costs (tied to increased Customer interactions, which, with automation would now not need costly humans to handle), the new technology would actually decrease CX in the long run because brands would be less driven to address the root causes of issues. Why spend the time, money, and resources, after all, if we’ve got robots to take care of all those messy cleanups, right?
Then I slept on it.
The next day I wrote back to my colleague and said, Wait a second… Not so fast. […]
AI will kill CX!
One Big Question I hear a lot these days is about AI and automation. “How will AI impact CX?” How the heck should I know? It’s clear I’m the one writing all these articles, isn’t it? I wonder if we’ll reach the singularity and the world will implode if someone uses AI to write an article about AI and the impact it has. Surely it’ll be a glowing review.
But discussions about AI are becoming boring to me frankly, simply due to their ubiquity: How will AI affect education? How will AI affect marketing? How will AI affect sales? How will AI affect dessert toppings? How will AI affect floor wax? (Hat tip to anybody who got that last reference.)
If nothing else, AI has brought back to the surface at least one of my longest-standing writing struggles.
Nevertheless, recently I had a very cool discussion with a friend of mine in the CX/UX space, and I posited the following theory, almost right off the top of my head as I was thinking it while I spoke:
AI may actually make CX worse in the long run, or at least impede better Customer Experiences. […]
What is your word worth?
I recently had a particularly silly experience with the US Postal Service.*
I mailed an envelope (containing nothing more than a copy of my very thin, light book) from Denver across the country to a client. The estimated arrival time on the east coast was to be two days. In fact, I sent two identical packages from the same place at the same time to two equidistant (from me) places on the east coast. One arrived exactly as promised. The other? A week and a half later (I spent that time bemusedly watching via the tracking on the USPS website as it made its way up and down the coast), it finally arrived.
So I called the Customer Service number and asked for what any other Customer in his or her right mind would request: A refund for their complete failure to do what they’d promised.
Their response?
“Sorry, sir, it’s just an estimate.”
Well, yes, I know it’s an estimate. You never know what may happen, after all. For what it’s worth, there was no force majeure during this time, but from time to time things will happen that are simply accidents or other issues. Packages slip between cracks, trucks break down, someone—I dunno—actually goes postal? Anyway… […]
I’m a greedy networker
I’m a selfish networker. But hear me out; I don’t mean it the way you probably think I do.
When you read that first sentence, you probably conjured in your mind a picture of that guy who shows up to the networking events with a bunch of his business cards, introducing himself around telling people what he does and asking, “Do you know anybody who needs that?” Or even, “Do you need that?” This guy’s out there, basically soliciting. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that.
That said, a professional networker (or one of those consultants to consultants) would likely say, along the lines of good vibes and karma, that it’s better to go into situations like that more with a sense of giving than receiving.
Well okay, but I’m still selfish. And here’s how I mean that: […]
Operationalize
I used to say that I don’t know anything about Marketing.
Then I started spending a lot of time with marketers. They’re an interesting bunch, and considering that, as I like to say, Marketing and CX share two sides of the same coin—that being the Brand Promise—I’ve had many conversations as our work compliments each other.
But what of that interaction; the interaction between Marketing and Customer Experience (functionally, I mean)?
The way I see it (and here’s your chance to validate that, perhaps, I still don’t know anything about it!), Marketing is all about building a Brand; at least in theory. I don’t mean that’s my theory. I mean that the brand that Marketing builds is, well, still on paper, so to speak. […]
