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The Experience-Centric Organization

This introductory chapter shows that the customer experience is now the key driver in the market, and will be the main competition arena for the next decade. It describes what it means to compete through customer experience in a market where meaning is the new currency, and explains why the trajectory toward the experience-centric organization is one that you cannot avoid.

What Is an Experience-Centric Organization and Why Is It Important?

There’s a transformation under way in organizations, one that puts the customer experience at the heart of the enterprise. Its endpoint is the experience-centric organization—an organization where there is total alignment around experiential delivery. All organizations are on a trajectory toward experience centricity, and it will become the defining characteristic of organizations during the next decade. This book introduces the characteristics of the experience-centric organization, explains its core behaviors, and outlines the steps you need to take to elevate your organization to the final, ultimate level of customer experience.

The market is driven by the customer experience. The first trillion-dollar company in the world has embraced it, experts describe it as the number-one business priority, research in cognitive neuroscience is explaining its importance, and your competitors are putting effort into it. The customer experience has now become the major source of competitive advantage, and one that you cannot ignore.

You’re not going to stand out at customer experience if you don’t prioritize it, and with the bar being continually raised, this means making it your central company mission. It’s time to bring the customer experience into the core of your organization and place yourself on the path to becoming an experience-centric organization. Becoming experience-centric does not mean dropping everything you have done, but rather placing it in perspective, behind what matters most: how customers experience using your products or services.

This book will help you understand why you should embrace the customer experience, what it means to become experience-centric, and how to get there. If you are reading it, then you already have an interest in making this happen. This book describes how to distinguish your organization from your competitors through an experiential offering, and gives you a roadmap to optimize your organization for the future. Together this knowledge will give you a unique advantage that your competitors will be unable to match.

The experience-centric organization builds on a current trend: the customer experience is the key driving force in consumer choice and the key competitive arena in business. Every offering, whether it be a discount airline ticket or a luxury holiday, is judged experientially by customers. Everything is experience, and where there is competition, it is the experientially better service, as perceived by the customer, that wins. As a business, you need to respond to this trend by making the customer experience your number-one priority, and embark on the journey toward experience centricity.

This message is not totally new and you, like me, might ask, “Why have we not fixed the customer experience and moved on?” The reason is as simple to explain as it is complex to implement: experiences have been considered a feature of a product or service instead of an organizational imperative. We have not taken the customer experience seriously enough, assuming that we can just bolt it on at the end of a project, instead of using it as a starting point. Now is the time to move from considering experience simply as a feature to making it your core organizational mission.

Why Customer Experience Is King

In a world where there is competition, customers choose services based on their experience using them.

Recent statistics show that:

• Fifty-three percent of consumers have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service.1
• Seventy-four percent are likely to switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult.2
• Forty-nine percent say that companies are providing a good customer experience today.3
• Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience.4
• A total of $62 billion is lost by US businesses each year following bad customer experiences.5

These statistics have drawn the attention of CEOs, who have started to consider the lifetime value of the customer experience. David Reibstein, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, has translated customer experience into hard cash value. The lifetime difference between satisfied and dissatisfied customers at Starbucks is estimated at $2,800 per customer. The lifetime value of a satisfied BMW customer is estimated to be $143,500.6

It seems like we have had a kind of collective amnesia during the past 20 years, as a result of which we’ve ignored the customer in the design of products and services. The commoditization and technologification of services has been the priority, and the customer experience has lost out. The focus has been on digitalization, technology platforms, value chains, and call-center costs, and organizations took their eye off their customers as a result. Demos (a UK government think tank) describes the consequence as “a fundamental disconnect between services and people” and says that society has changed faster than service organizations. When they say this, they mean that customers have embraced brands, luxury, symbolic value, and design when it comes to products, but with services, the offerings simply haven’t been available. More recently the customer experience has been on the agenda in many organizations, but as I’ve mentioned, it has been considered a feature of a product or service—something to be added to the design process, rather than something that drives it. It’s time, therefore, to catch up and focus the organization on the customer and the customer experience.

According to a RightNow Technologies survey, 85% of respondents revealed that they’ve had customer experiences so dreadful that they’ve yelled, cursed, hit and broken things, suffered headaches, felt their chests tighten, and even cried. Only 3% of respondents reported that they have never had a negative experience with a company.7

So why are customer experiences so poor? Because organizations are not oriented toward the customer experience, responsibility for it is fragmented, it is cross-silo, and there are few key performance indicators (KPIs) that target experience explicitly. Jot down who has responsibility in your organization for the customer experience. You will probably find that responsibility is fragmented and lies with a multitude of people, spread across the many silos of your organization. Is there a culture of discussing the customer experience at management meetings or around the coffee machine? Do you listen to what your customers have to say about their experiences? The answer is most likely that it is on the agenda, but it is not the central theme for discussion. A new paradigm for service has arrived, one in which the customer experience is a primary driver of innovation in service organizations. According to a study, 95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is customer experience,8 and in 2018 the Wall Street Journal pronounced, “Customer Experience Is the Key Competitive Differentiator in the Digital Age.”9

We will soon see the emergence of experience-centric organizations across all areas of business. These are organizations in which digitalization, technology platforms, value ecologies, and business models will all become means to achieve the unique experiences that customers value. Organizations will become experts at orchestrating their offerings in order to co-create memorable experiences with customers. Now’s the time to get a jump on your competitors by embracing the customer experience and making it your main company mission.

Why This Is a Trajectory You Cannot Ignore

This book is the outcome of many years of working in the field of customer experience, through which a logical trajectory, discussed next, emerged. When the main market differentiator is the customer experience, delivering a superior experience becomes increasingly prioritized within the organization. Over time, as competition increases around the customer experience, and organizations focus more on it, it will inevitably become the company’s main mission. The organizational imperative will then be to refocus and align the company around the customer experience. When this occurs, the organization can be termed experience-centric.

Embracing experience centricity allows for an immense clarity of purpose for an organization, and for disparate parts of the organization to understand both this trajectory and their role in making it happen. It simplifies and mobilizes the organization around a simple concept—simple to understand, but requiring ambition and a deft touch to implement.

The Inevitable Endpoint of a Long Journey

We are on multiple converging paths toward the experience-centric organization. On the one hand, hypercompetition means that customers have their choice of providers and thus can choose the experience they prefer. Differentiation in the market comes, therefore, from a superior customer experience. On the other hand, companies are investing in improving their customer experience, and there is now a race to differentiate experiences.

A second, parallel development relates to branding. Corporate branding has been emphasized for many years in many organizations, and companies are working hard to combine internal and external branding to create a consistent solution. Branding is moving from promising a customer experience to delivering a customer experience. This shifts the focus of the brand toward customer interactions with your service or product and how to deliver on the experiential promise you make. This new focus requires understanding the interactions that the customer has each and every time they use your service, as well as a different organizational structure. That is, it demands an alignment within the organization around the experience you want the customer to have.

A third experience trajectory is the experience economy itself. This is deepening every day. We have entered a period in which the experiential is central to our lives. We are not rational economic beings; we value experiences, and we seek them out. As Soren Kierkegaard clearly stated, life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. It seems that we, as a society, are in a stage where we have embraced this and are now willing and able to see the experiential in everything.

There are also economic and market explanations as to why the experience economy is expanding and deepening. We have more disposable income than past generations. Earlier, it was a big deal in a household to get a functional product, such as a washing machine or a dishwasher. These appliances are taken for granted now, and we expect more. We have opened our eyes to experiences, and at the same time, better experiences are available. Competition is now evaluated through customer experience.

When a Washing Machine Provided Family Entertainment

This story not only shows the range of entertainment available in the English countryside in the ‘70s, but also what captivated us at that time. When I was a kid, our family couldn’t afford an automatic washing machine, and my mother, a working mother, still used an old, secondhand manual washing machine with rollers to squeeze the water out of clothes. She would use a whole day to wash clothes, on top of her demanding job.

In 1970 we bought an automatic washing machine. A Hotpoint automatic! We were amazed by the technological marvel that promised to dose powder, wash, rinse, and spin clothes, without us even having to be anywhere near it. It was so exciting that we all placed chairs in front of the machine and watched a full cycle—90 minutes! We were in awe the whole time at how it could do all of this.

OK, we only had two black-and-white TV channels at that time, and it was winter in the country, but looking back, it still seems crazy. There are several things to learn from this story, though. The experience of the machine was new and amazing, and entertaining. It came from new technology for the time; and for many years after, technological advancement was the reason for buying products. Now we just assume the technology works, and we look for experiences from the use of a product, not from its technology. In contrast to my childhood experience, we now have experiential overload: Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, hundreds of TV channels, YouTube, films, cafés, and more. Most families now have a higher standard of living and expect to have a washing machine (and a dishwasher), so the novelty effect is not there. Our economy today stretches to other experiential things such as holidays, services, socializing, and the like. Technology has delivered and moved on, and it frees us up to look for other things in our lives: valuable experiences.

Finally, technological advances mean that today almost all products and services function adequately. This was not the case 30 years ago, when we often made choices based on technical performance and reliability. We no longer need to expend the effort to do this; we understand when buying a dishwasher that it will wash our dishes, or when buying a toothbrush that it will clean our teeth. This frees us up to focus on how it makes us feel, rather than what it does.

Together these developments have created a new paradigm in society, one in which the customer experience is the main motivator of our choices and therefore the key differentiator in the market. This applies not only to luxury consumption, but to each and every consumer decision we make. We make experiential evaluations of our purchases, and we judge them based on the experiential outcome. As we will see in Chapter 2, our brains are wired to continually estimate and evaluate our experiences—a fact we are only now realizing. Buying a budget airline ticket is a trade-off between experience and cost, and we make a decision based on our perception of the total experience, which includes all aspects of our customer journey: ordering tickets, checking in, traveling, and ending our journey. This doesn’t mean that cost is unimportant, but rather that cost is weighed in terms of experience and we experientially evaluate both the offering and its delivery. The choice, even for low-price solutions, is based on an experiential cost-benefit judgment. This judgment helps us make decisions: we consider how differing competitive offerings rate according to our expected experiences, our earlier experiences, and the opinions of others in relation to price.

Why Has It Taken So Long?

Society is well into the experience economy, as described by Pine and Gilmore in their book from 1999. This is an economy in which desirable customer experiences are key to value. The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press) was a groundbreaking book for me. It identified one of the central truths of the economy—that we are driven by experiences, not functions. It used Starbucks as an example, showing how it is possible for people to functionally make good coffee themselves for a few cents, but they instead prefer to spend several dollars going to a coffee chain. Why would economically rational people choose to spend over 10 times as much on something like this? Now, we are all familiar with the coffee experience, we understand that Starbucks is not in the business of selling coffee; it is in the business of providing experiences.

It has been 20 years since The Experience Economy was published. The rational economic human being has now been put to rest (see more about this in Chapter 6), and even economists now understand that human behavior, emotions, and feelings are central to how we function as people. This all seems obvious; however, the journey, which in many ways was signified 20 years ago, has not reached its end.

The Experience Economy Is Central to Our Lives

In 2018, a newspaper journalist called Elle Hunt decided to find out if ditching avocado toast lunches and café lattes would allow her to save enough to buy a flat. This was based on criticism from real estate agents berating millennials for spending money on fancy sandwiches rather than buying apartments. Hunt went to a financial advisor, who told her it might just be possible to save up a deposit if she changed her lifestyle and became frugal for a period. After trying for several weeks, Hunt found she was saving a lot of money, but concluded that the experiences she gained from her social activities, coffees, and avocado toasts were more valuable to her than saving toward an apartment. That is, the experience economy, the economy of here and now, was more important for her than delaying gratification for later home ownership. Experiences have become a central part of our lives.10

The Power of Desirable Experiences

If I asked you when Apple last launched a new iPhone, the majority of you would be able to give me a fairly precise date, and even probably tell me something about the expectations for the one coming up next. If I asked you about when Hewlett Packard last launched a printer, few of you would know. Why? One is desirable, the other not. Desirability is currency, and distorts the normal rules of marketing.

Instead of having to subsidize to get customers over to your service, if you offer a desirable experience, customers will seek you out. They will switch because they want to. You will not have to bribe them, and you will not have to incite them to come over to you. People will gravitate toward your service, because it is something that they want, rather than the solution that may be different, but is no better than a competitor’s. The ability to deliver a consistent and memorable user experience is the most important strategic asset a business can have.

Customers are looking for emotional connections through experiences, but ones that they might not always be able to explain, even though they understand and identify with these experiences when they have them. This is a key part of experience-centric solutions: delivering something that “hearts and souls identify with,” and that resonate with something in the consumer’s being. To quote Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, “We are not in the business of filling bellies, we are in the business of filling souls.”11

If such experiences are now a key driver in the market, then delivering them should become the focus of organizations acting in this market. Putting this in the context of the CNET quote, organizations should focus on developing and delivering services that inspire feelings that customers might not be able to define, but that they identify with on some deeper level and that they want to be a part of—desirable experiences. Doesn’t that sound like something your company needs to deliver?

Even Low-Cost Solutions Can Be Experiential

In the experience economy everything is judged experientially, even low-cost solutions. Returning to an earlier example, when you evaluate a low-cost airline, you make experiential judgments based on cost related to the expected experience: Can I live with the discomfort and hassle of the low-cost airline? Would I prefer less transfer time? How difficult is it to change a ticket? All of these are experiential decisions that you consider as a whole based on previous experience and expectations. As stated previously, where there is competition, it is the experientially better alternative that wins. However, some believe that the customer experience is evaluated on the degree of entertainment included. This comes from viewing Disney as a leading provider of experiences and wanting to copy their model. This is wrong and has led a lot of organizations in the wrong direction. There are many situations in which the customer is looking for a functional solution, and focusing on functional experiences can create great value. As we will see later in the book, the “extraordinary ordinary experience” can be low-cost and still offer high experiential value.

Airbnb Focused on the Experience from the Start

From the first minute, Airbnb as an organization was focused on the guest experience, and that turned out to be their route to success. At the time, there were many other rental sites offering accommodations, yet the competitors focused on the functional aspect of listing rentals as objects, and not on the experiential aspect of what it felt like to be a guest. Both Airbnb and its competitors listed apartments, but only Airbnb focused on delivering the experience of staying in one.

The experiential focus was there from the start, and is part of Airbnb’s DNA. During the company’s founding period, when the founders rented out beds in their own apartment, guests each found a small pile of coins by their beds so that they could buy subway tickets. This was because the founders, as hosts, knew how difficult it could be to arrive in a country with large notes and be stuck at a subway machine that needs small coins for travel. This was a small but practical gift that had little impact on the profit margin, but an immense impact on the guest experience. It was a clear benevolent act, and communicated that Airbnb had your best interests at heart. Perceived benevolence, as we will see later, has a massive effect on our experience, and let’s face it, how many companies can you think of that are benevolent toward customers?

Shortly thereafter, the founders focused on the photography of Airbnb apartments because they wanted guests to “experience the experience” before arriving, and good photographs offer that opportunity. They understood that the first part of the experiential journey for a tourist was not the stay itself. People want to stimulate that buzz you get before you travel, the expectation of something great, and Airbnb tapped in to that.

This was the company’s experiential value proposition—“to experience the experience”—and at the time, it jumped out and caught your attention. Compared to other sites offering apartments, holiday stays, and couch surfing, what set Airbnb apart was the experience that it offered. At the same time, this was supported by touchpoints and platforms that made it easy to sign up and book.

It has taken a lot of deep thought and great design work to get Airbnb to where it is now. The company’s recent focus on linking apartments to experiences and developing experiential guides shows that its trajectory is becoming even more experiential. Airbnb is stealing a lead by bringing the experience into everything it does. It is experience-centric.

The extraordinary ordinary experience (more on this in Chapter 6) is a way of providing exceptional yet functional experiences without adding entertainment. It focuses on getting the job done, and shows that even highly functional solutions can be designed to be memorable. It’s all about knowing the experience you should give, rather than adding entertainment. As we will see later, memorable experiences and entertainment are not always the same thing. For example, I hate having to pick up packages at my (not so local anymore) post office, and if the post office clerk tried to entertain me, I think I would hit them. The experience of picking up a package does not need to be entertaining, but it can be enjoyable and memorable: that is, it can be an extraordinary ordinary experience.

Aarstiderne’s Experience-Centric Approach

Aarstiderne (pronounced “Orrstiderna”) is an award-winning Danish thought leader in the area of ecological food delivery and ecological transformation. They have an experiential vision, an idealistic mission, and a drive for change that translates into a successful experiential offering and permeates everything they do. This has made them the first profitable ecological food delivery service, and in the past five years they’ve seen a whopping 600% increase in profits. However, not everything in their development has been easy: they have learned the hard way about getting the organization to fit around the experience they want to provide.

Aarstiderne has always had a mission to change what we eat, and to move people toward ecologically sourced and local produce. What is interesting is that they have created an experiential offering that is not only successful, but also has an interesting service ecology. The offering is built up from several smaller offerings, each operating synergistically with the others to center the experience around the family: there’s a focus on parent-initiated family meals, another around children as future meal makers, and a third emphasizing children’s closeness to nature. The main offering rotates around delivering ecological food boxes to customers’ homes. This was Aarstiderne’s first offering and is their most successful today, although it has evolved from selling a set of in-season vegetables to also offering ingredients for a set of meals that a family can make together. This changes the company’s role from one of sourcing and distributing high-quality produce to one of curating home experiences. The key is in the combination of high-quality produce and family collaboration, with the idea being that everyone in the house can take part in preparing the food that is delivered.

When it comes to children, way back in 2003 Aarstiderne split up part of their original farm near Elsinore in Denmark into small plots of land where school classes prepared the soil, sowed seeds, nurtured the land, and picked their vegetables each year. Aarstiderne developed a clear, dramatic curve for farming activity, culminating in a harvest festival. The children fired up outdoor pizza ovens, rolled out outdoor kitchen units, and prepared vegetable pizza (among other things) to bake and eat—all based on what they had grown themselves. Not only did this give them an understanding of where food comes from, but it also highlighted the quality of homegrown food, demonstrated the ups and downs of a season, and gave them the fantastic experience of preparing, cooking, and eating their own vegetables in a festival atmosphere. What could be a better experiential closure than that?

Then, as there should be, the Aarstiderne experience had a neat little trick in the tail. The kids each received a cookbook, with the recipes for the food they had made. Each cookbook contained a preformatted letter for the child to sign and give to their parents, saying that they would like to take part in making food more regularly at home.

Together, this created an experiential world of interlocked offerings, all aimed at heightening the experience of the participants, and with a mission of changing food consumption for the better. The school gardens were so successful that they became a separate entity in 2006 and were scaled up from 2014. Have til Mave (“From Garden to Stomach”), as they are now called, has 40 school gardens in Denmark and has started a national initiative to develop culinary school gardens.

The success of Aarstiderne and Have til Mave is a great example of an experiential focus that works at multiple levels. At the functional level it teaches about the life cycle of plants and about food production, and it delivers high-quality produce to people’s homes. At the emotional level, through its dramatic curve, it produces mastery and pride in children, delivers aesthetic and olfactory experiences, supports family integration, and fosters children’s independence, confidence, and respect for the outdoors. At the self-expressive level, it allows families to express their family values to others (e.g., through the highly visible packing boxes outside their homes), and at the idealistic level, it allows people to be a part of a movement. All of this should identify these two companies as experience-centric, and I would agree. However, they have done this the hard way and probably would not identify themselves as being experience-centric. They would more likely describe themselves as idealists with a successful commercial solution, and this has led them to struggle through some of the structural and organizational challenges identified later in the book. They have a desirable offering, but they have struggled with experience fulfillment, enabling, and structure. Yet, despite all of these struggles, their experiential focus has driven them forward and made them stand out, making them a household name in Denmark.

Source: Aarstiderne and Have til Mave.

Experience-Centric Goes Far Beyond Customer-Centric

Many organizations confuse customer-centric and experience-centric, and their first instinct when deciding to focus on customer experiences is to look at how they can add something to their existing customer-centric initiatives. This is a tempting thought, but it’s wrong. There is a very different attitude and approach in the experience-centric organization than there is in the customer-centric organization. The following table shows how the experience-centric organization is a step change away from customer-centric:

Criteria	Customer-centric	Experience-centric
Value goal	Customer satisfaction	Experiential desirability
Basic philosophy	What do our customers want	What do we want our customers to feel
Basic approach	Reactive	Proactive
Organizational structure	Siloed according to business processes	Experientially aligned
Key terms	Value proposition, segments, brand promise	Experiential value proposition, individuals, brand experience
Orientation	Services as products	Experiences delivered through services
Brand orientation	Broadcasting a brand promise	Delivering a brand experience

As you can see, there are very different approaches taken by the experience-centric organization, right down to the value goal of the organization itself. Moving the goal from customer satisfaction to experiential desirability requires a very different approach within the organization—one that has structural implications. The experience-centric organization impacts the ways of both thinking and doing within the organization.

Experience Centricity Challenges Institutional Logics

All organizations have internal logics that describe their shared values, beliefs, and practices. These are hard to identify and difficult to describe when viewed from the inside, but often are obvious from the outside. They are a core part of the organization’s DNA, and can be difficult to change. Certain logics can persist in an organization a long time after concerted organizational change efforts.

When working with organizations, I have experienced product-centric logics in a global footwear manufacturer, technology-centric logics in a global telco, and process-centric logics in a major Nordic logistics organization. The experience-centric organization challenges these institutional logics and often requires transforming embedded values, beliefs, and practices. This might seem daunting, but in my experience there is a clarity of purpose that comes with the experience-centric approach. Experience centricity is something that everyone in the organization can identify with, and it encourages organizational alignment.

Common to all of the organizations I have worked with is a recognition that a transformation toward experience centricity is necessary and that the organization needs assistance to achieve it. The book shows different strategies, based on my research and collaboration with many different organizations, that can be applied to change institutional logics.

Wait—Haven’t I Heard This Before?What’s New? Why Should I Read This Book?

The theme of customer experience is not new, and you have probably heard about it through several converging areas—corporate branding, cultural branding, the experience economy, design thinking. All of these areas are complementary to the message in this book.

The value of this book is threefold. First, it identifies and gives a name to the phenomenon that we are experiencing in the market and in business. Just giving it a name has great value, and I have seen several light-bulb moments where people have immediately grasped the term and adopted it as a North Star. Second, the book brings different areas together into a unified focus that gives organizations clarity of purpose. Finally, it offers advice on how to transform your organization to become experience-centric. There are clear stages and levels to this process.

Put another way, the book describes the bigger picture, puts it into perspective, and helps you make the transformation that is necessary to embark on an experience-centric trajectory.

Hopefully this book can contribute to important conversations and will help people realize, “Yes, that is what we need to do, and we need to do it together.” Further, I hope it will give you an internal terminology to facilitate those discussions. Finally, I hope the book gives you an approach to and an understanding of how to implement experience centricity throughout your organization.

Where Do I Look for Best Practices?

When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to.

—Jeff Bezos, Amazon ceo12

At this stage, you will have to look carefully for best practices, as there are perhaps only a handful of truly experience-centric organizations. Few organizations could claim to have had an experience-centric approach from the start, but several have arrived there through sheer doggedness. They are the companies that have had a visionary leader who has imposed that vision on the organization. However, many more are on their way and getting close, without necessarily using the term or having the overarching model for how to do it. They all share a clarity of purpose—that the customer experience is the driver of their organization—but they differ in their ways of approaching experience centricity and making the organization work. Some have become experience-centric through strategic and tactical thinking, but most have approached it the hard way. They have developed highly experiential offerings as a start-up, had success, and afterward had to painfully forge an organization that can scale the offering or support it.

I present examples of organizations that I consider to be experience-centric, or at least experience-focused. Some are high-end, such as Aesop, while others are more everyday. Common to all is an attention to detail, and the ability to align around the customer experience. This is the key success factor, and one that is not easily achieved. Apple, unsurprisingly, is the star performer, and although it’s overused as an example, there is an important message here: the first trillion-dollar company in the world has had an experience-centric strategy for about 20 years, and has achieved great success during this period. Apple’s success has not come through luck, but by having a crystal-clear vision of starting with the experience and working backward throughout the organization. This is something Steve Jobs explained in 1997.13

Amazon is another example, and at the time of writing, it is tipped to become the second trillion-dollar company in the world. Jeff Bezos is perhaps the one person who, from the start, has been totally fixated on the customer experience. The largest innovations in online shopping came from Amazon, and now, the greatest recent innovation in brick-and-mortar stores is coming from Amazon too, with the walk-in, walk-out supermarket project. It is no surprise that Amazon is held up as a model, then, because it has done the work to continually improve the experience of its customers. A recent article by CB Insights shows that for Amazon, building a high lifetime value among its customer base through proactive delight has been a powerful differentiator, and it has paid off. The average lifetime value of a Prime customer was estimated at $2,500 in 2017.14

Keywords for Experiential Transformation

Naming things is really important, and having a good descriptive name for something, when it fits the context, can actually contribute to organizational change. I found this when introducing the basics of service design to one of Scandinavia’s largest insurance companies. Terms such as touchpoints and customer journeys were new, but they rapidly became integrated into everyday conversations in the company and thereby rapidly became a part of people’s way of work. So, terms do matter, and I hope that the following terms help initiate change in your organization by giving different perspectives on some familiar concepts. I introduce them up front so that when you meet them later, you will have some idea of what I mean.

The experiential value proposition (EVP) is the perceived value of your service offering when viewed through an experiential lens by the customer. Since it is a proposition, it has not yet been experienced, and therefore represents expected experiential value. The EVP comprises a mix of functional, emotional, self-expressive, and idealistic factors, which both include benefits but also costs, and risk.

The EVP can be broken down into two main parts: what you want to offer and what your customers perceive as being offered. The first should be your design target, an essential part of every project. The second is what customers think you offer them from an experiential point of view and is the more important of the two. This includes individual, social and cultural factors and can only be understood through dialog with customers.

In this book, I use the term offering rather than value proposition, because it is more down-to-earth and customer-focused. While value proposition might be the academically correct term, it reflects a company-out direction, and encourages you to focus on what you are proposing to the customer. The term offering, on the other hand, is viewed from the customer’s side: “What are you offering me?” When you find people in your organization using the term offering from a customer’s point of view, particularly in terms of experience, then you know your organization has shifted its weight and begun to view itself through the customer’s eyes.

Your experiential DNA is the core building block that your organization uses for working with the customer experience. Similar to human DNA, it defines you and what you can and cannot offer as a customer experience. Your experiential DNA is a mix of who you are, who you have been, and who you want to be. It is balanced between the customer’s perspective and the organizational perspective. In other words, internal culture plays an important part in your DNA, but it is balanced by the external customer view, which is based on earlier experiences and expectations. Experiential DNA is a mix of your mission, vision, and values, your brand strategy and history, how you view yourself, how you are viewed by your customers, and your heritage.

Experiential DNA includes a large degree of storytelling, in which heroes, myths, and key historical events are woven together. But it is not a fiction; it is something everyone within the organization can identify with, because it is authentic, shared, and felt. The term experiential DNA should be well understood and cherished in the organization because it defines what you can and cannot offer. Understanding your experiential DNA is not always easy, and can require considerable soul-searching. However, it is crucial to delivering the right experience, and identifying it is one of the important steps in translation (see Chapter 7).

A question that should regularly be asked within the organization is whether a project, an investment, an offering, or even an employee is a good fit with the DNA of the organization. This can even be turned into a regular organizational mantra: “Does it fit our DNA?” Everything the organization does should fit its experiential DNA.

The experiential journey is the journey that a customer takes in relation to their use of your product or service. It can often be divided into prepurchase, purchase, and post-purchase phases, and further divided up into use phases with discrete experiential moments. The experiential journey can be fine-tuned to incorporate expected touchpoints along the way—the tangible and intangible points of contact between the customer and the service/product. Touchpoints can be direct (e.g., a letter, a welcome package, signage inside a building, a logo, an SMS, a company employee) or indirect (e.g., word of mouth). Understanding the touchpoints along the experiential journey, and the experience customers have when interacting with them, is one of the first stages of becoming experience-centric.

Experience orchestration is pretty self-explanatory. You can imagine an orchestra either playing together or playing discordantly and transfer that thought to your customer experience. There is a need for orchestration within the organization, to get people to work together to deliver the experiential value proposition. A shared company vision, shared direction, and shared humility are required to develop an organizational culture. The company’s leadership is key to developing, sharing, and living this culture. In addition, the term orchestration should be used regularly within the organization—for example, “How do we orchestrate this service experience, and who is responsible for orchestration in this project?”

The company needs to have an orchestrator, a person responsible for the customer experience. That person should be part of the leadership and may be given the title of chief orchestrator, chief experience director, or similar. In addition, each and every project needs to have an orchestrator who is responsible for the experience of that service, and this person should report to the chief orchestrator. Finally, the experience itself requires orchestration during delivery to tailor the experience to the customer and ensure that the experiential journey functions as required.

Infusion refers to spreading a certain way of thinking and doing throughout the organization. Imagine placing a tea bag in a cup of hot water and watching the color and flavor spread in the water. That is what infusion is about in experiential terms—spreading the experiential focus everywhere in the organization. Infusion doesn’t happen on its own and requires constant effort to maintain its momentum. Infusion is a positive process and requires optimism in the organization. Without this optimism, infusion is blocked, so before making the change (i.e., placing the tea bag in the water), you need to make sure the organization is ready for it. This preparedness might come from identifying your place on the path toward experience centricity (see Chapter 2), and moving at the right speed through those steps.

The fastest and shortest way from A to B is a straight line. In an organization, this means getting everyone aligned with and contributing toward experience centricity. This creates a readiness throughout the organization for the experience you want to deliver. Alignment means getting the whole organization behind the experience you want your customers to have. It means everyone giving 100% toward supporting the experience that you want to deliver, and not least, understanding their role in this. Alignment, infusion, and ownership all interrelate. Whereas infusion is about the shared understanding of the experience, alignment is about applying the capabilities to make it happen.

Ownership is an individual and collective feeling of participation in and influence on the experience to be delivered, and is vital to its success. Ownership brings pride, and these two aspects go hand in hand. Ownership and pride motivate people, encourage collaboration, and make people go the extra mile when needed. Ownership has a strong intrinsic element, meaning that people self-motivate toward the common good. However, ownership also requires that the individual is recognized in the organization, that they become visible and are openly rewarded. Ownership can be seen as the result of infusion and alignment working together. When you know and are confident in your role in the organization, then infusion has been successful and you can align your contribution to the whole.

One of the challenges to ownership is that peripheral parts of the organization, those furthest from the experience delivery, might not see their role. This is not because they are not important, but mainly because they themselves cannot see their contribution. Internal symbolic gestures, specific activities, and internal storytelling all help to bring peripheral roles into the organization and encourage ownership.

Behavioral authenticity describes how well the behaviors of your touch-points fit with your experiential DNA. We all know that people have a tone of voice and behaviors, but so do apps, web pages, and almost all other touchpoints. Identifying the correct behaviors for your DNA, and ensuring behavioral authenticity, is a key part of developing and maintaining experience centricity.