Transforming the Customer Experience: An Interview with Jon Picoult, Founder and Principal, Watermark Consulting Stephen Shaw 4 months ago <span hidden data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig<P><STRONG>HT:</STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span style=" class="amp-wp-a0319c3"><strong>HT:</strong> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig<P><STRONG>HT:</STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span></iframe></p> <h3><span style=" class="amp-wp-d496082"><strong> Jon Picoult is a leading expert on customer experience and the author of “From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans”.</strong></span> <p>You would think by now that just about every company would have accepted the necessity to deliver an exceptional customer experience.</p> <p>Apparently not, according to Forrester Research. </p> <p>Forrester’s latest Customer Experience Survey found that CX quality has fallen for an “unprecedented” third year in a row. In fact, average CX quality has dropped to its lowest point since 2016. “US consumers are having, on average, the worst experiences in a decade,” explained Rick Parrish, VP and research director at Forrester. “Brands want to create better experiences”, he said, “and they realize that putting the customer at the center of their business is the way to do it. However, organizations struggle with the scale of change that this requires.”</p> <p>Forrester also conducts Net Promoter Score rankings for 100 brands in Canada and the most recently published report mirrored the CX findings: the NPS score dropped or remained the same for all industries last year. In commenting on the NPS results, Parrish stated what every consumer already knows: “In Canada, brands are struggling to provide effective, easy, and emotionally positive experiences for customers”. He went on to say: “When brands put customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations, they enable stronger customer loyalty – which in turn drives revenue, profitability, and business resilience, even in uncertain times.” </p> <p>All too true. Strangely, that linkage between loyalty and profitability seems to have escaped the notice of most CEOs.</p> <p>Treating people with respect – showing appreciation for their business – making their lives easier, more productive, more rewarding – minimizing their level of effort – being a company that cares as much about customers after the sale as before – all of that goes a long way to securing greater brand loyalty. Yet most companies get a failing grade when evaluated against those basic principles. It seems companies are headed in the opposite direction, prioritizing profits over people. Customer service is seen as a cost – which explains the rush to adopt AI-powered chatbots meant to take over from live agents. It also explains why it can be so hard to find a phone number to call if you have a question or complaint. </p> <p>Today more than ever customers are feeling shafted, exploited, taken for granted. And their simmering resentment over complaint handling is spilling over into angry confrontations with front line workers, according to the 2023 U.S. National Customer Rage Survey. The report observes: “The incidence and public displays of customer rage are commonplace, on the increase and can be scary.”</p> <p>Corporate mistreatment of customers is baffling when you consider that repeat buyers almost always account for a disproportionate share of total sales and are the only sustainable source of recurring revenue. As long as the experience a brand offers is indistinguishable from competitors, it is substitutable, and doomed to compete on price.</p> <p>Marketing has to shoulder some of the blame for this corporate apathy toward CX, too busy chasing market share to give much thought to expanding “share of heart”. Certainly most CMOs appreciate the importance of delivering something other than a “me-too” experience even if company leadership does not. It’s just that most marketers struggle to be seen as “serious people” capable of serving as change agents, even though their job is to make an emotional connection with people. And according to renowned CX expert Jon Picoult, the transformation of customer experience starts with understanding how people feel. </p> <p>To create genuinely loyal customers – emotionally committed customers who love the brand, who will go out of their way to buy it, who are true fans, who are quick to forgive and to recommend – Picoult believes it is essential to deliver a more “memorable experience”. In his book “From Impressed to Obsessed” he offers 12 principles for turning customers into “lifelong fans”, derived in part from insights into how the mind works from the field of cognitive science where he gained his university degree.</p> <p>I started by asking Jon what drew him to the field of cognitive science.</p> <p><strong> Jon Picoult:</strong>: I started off in college as a computer science major, and I was always into computers when I was young and middle school and high school, and that was just kind of the natural path for me. Then I hit discrete mathematics. That was the first required mathematics course that I had to take in college, required for the comp sci major. And I was just like, this is not working for me. I like to program, but the discrete mathematics, I said to myself, I can’t do this. </p> <p>And so, the thing that I had actually always been interested in when I was working with computers early on was getting computers to mimic human thought and this is going to sound like, I mean, these days with AI washing and what not, everybody would be like, well, duh, we’ve done that. But this was 25 or 30 years ago, and AI had been, people have been promising AI for years, decades.</p> <p>And what I ended up doing was actually constructing what was called an independent major because there wasn’t a major for this area of study where I went to school. And so the major that I assembled basically took pieces of comp sci, linguistics and psychology. And so my focus was actually on understanding how the human mind interprets language and then getting computers to replicate that. And you know, it sounds kind of has been now, right, in today’s day and age. But it was really interesting at the time. And I do have to admit to you, I never expected that I would use my cognitive science degree and that schooling in the way that I have. Because as you know, it’s sort of central to my philosophy, the notion of how you sculpt memories and customer experiences. So, yeah, that was a surprise to me. And I guess a lesson for all, you never know where stuff is going to lead you.</p> <p><strong> Stephen Shaw:</strong>: Exactly. Well, and there’s plenty of examples in the book. We’re going to get to some of that a little later on. So the other thing I want to ask you is you went to work in financial services for what, 15 years or so?</p>
