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Brian Solis is the Global Innovation Evangelist for Salesforce and a Renowned Digital Prophet and Author.
When the pandemic first struck, most businesses were stunned by the severity of the impact. Seeing people storm online for essential goods made them take stock of their digital readiness. Alarmed by how unprepared they were, they fast-tracked their digital transformation plans.
Up until that moment, those digitization efforts had plodded slowly along, mainly concerned with finding quick wins by increasing efficiency and productivity. Improving the customer experience was often a more distant goal, modest in ambition, meant to fix the broken parts. If a business was imaginative enough to dream up bolder ideas, those plans invariably got pushed into the future, since there was no pressing urgency.
Now those same businesses are scrambling madly to catch up to their customers, compressing their digital roadmaps from years into months, worried about losing ground to challenger brands or more agile competitors. Already the pandemic has mowed down a slew of bricks and mortar retailers who were slow to adapt to an omnichannel world. Other sectors too have been caught flatfooted – travel, hospitality, apparel makers, out-of-home entertainment, just to name the worst hit. The businesses that have managed to pivot quickly are the ones with the foresight to have invested intelligently in digital transformation, and were ready to absorb the sudden surge in ecommerce traffic.
Even with a vaccine in sight, businesses are likely facing a slow recovery and a populace whose habits and attitudes have been deeply affected by months of internment. Just how enduring those changes are likely to be is on every marketer’s mind right now. Early evidence from China suggests that people might revert to old shopping habits quickly, judging by the rapid return to normal in that country’s retail spending after they quelled the virus. But China’s health crisis was over too soon for new habits to take root. Whereas people still waiting for the pandemic to end may never want to return to the way things were before.
Of course, digital prophets like Brian Solis have been warning about this moment of reckoning for years. As the bestselling author of such books as “Business As Usual Is Not an Option”, still a highly relevant read eight years later, and the prescient “What’s the Future of Business”, he has been a leading voice for holistic digital transformation. He has long argued that society and technology have been evolving much faster than businesses’ ability to adapt, leading to what he calls “digital Darwinism”: the speed at which companies evolve to survive and thrive in a digital economy.
At the start of this year, even before the pandemic hit, Brian wrote that “digital transformation will start to become synonymous with business modernization and innovation”. Competing for the customer of the future, he predicted, will become “mission-critical”. Clearly, we’ve now reached that inflection point, much faster than even he might have thought possible. Facing the biggest disruption in living memory, we’re entering a “novel economy”, as he calls it, meaning the old playbooks are of no use anymore. That’s where I started the interview, wondering what marketing’s role is in the digital reengineering of the customer experience.
Brian Solis (BS): Customer experience has not really been owned by any classical group that spans the organization, right? Just that role has not really existed. And even if you have somebody like a chief customer officer, it’s still only relegated to aspects of the journey not necessarily the entire experience. So, when we talk about customer experience, we tend to think about it as a practice or a cost center in worst case, where we’re looking at it with traditional metrics, we’re looking at it as a traditional model, as we put X, Y, and Z into this, what do we get back from it and how quickly?
If you think about simple metrics like in customer service, you know, there are some metrics that we look at how quickly we can get someone off the line, not necessarily how does someone feel when they’re off the line. So, we have to rethink the entire model of what it means to invest in customer experience. And I wrote two articles, one in “Forbes” which is the one that Tom Fishburne thankfully picked up, and another one yesterday on LinkedIn, which was really focused on the concept of adding an apostrophe as to customer experience so that we could personalize the conversation – humanize the conversation is probably a better word – and see what the experience is from their eyes. And the point of it was to reset the argument or reset the conversation away from, how do we do this … to, why are we going to do this? And then how do we build from there?
Because I think what we’re trying to do today is attack it from the classical models that we have built today and that leads to the typical things like politics, and egos, and silos, and budgets, and resources, and constraints, and priorities that are focused elsewhere. When in fact, we could show that investing in the word experience, which just simply means an emotional and intellectual reaction to any moment. If we looked at it that way and measured it that way: How did someone feel? How did someone react? What did someone do? And what is the memory that someone takes away from that moment and how do those moments add up together? We can now reconstruct not only customer experience but the entire brand relationship. From there, anyone who cares about human beings could lead the charge for bringing together the organization in a much more cross-functional way, that’s productive, that’s optimized, that’s customer-centered, that’s joyful even, and then we can start fixing the broken things and start innovating in the areas that we’re not investing in today. So, it’s complex, but it’s possible, it’s just, we have to shift perspective.
Stephen Shaw (SS): So there’s this current pandemic, this global crisis we’re facing, that all businesses are wrestling with today. I think you’ve said, it’s awakened a sense of urgency amongst businesses that some level of change is required, and I think you talk about the “novel economy”. You’re suggesting, I think, that this is a matter of hitting the total reset button, this isn’t just accelerating digital transformation, this is a total reset in how businesses have traditionally operated, is that fair to say?