Not every piece of customer experience wisdom stands the test of time. Experts highlight six mantras and pieces of advice that can go by the wayside.
Not every piece of customer experience wisdom stands the test of time.
Most of the mantras practitioners repeat originate from a well-meaning place. But taken to their extreme, these mantras can harm experiences, erode staff efficacy and trust, and even hurt the bottom line.
“CX absolutisms are appealing because they’re simple,” Menon Billingsley, head of solution strategy for technology, media and telecom at Qualtrics, said in an email. “But customers aren’t simple. Their needs evolve — their expectations shift and their relationship with any brand is layered and contextual.”
To Billingsley, the very habit of turning CX principles into absolutisms is a problem practitioners need to address.
“We see companies with beautiful CX principles posted on their walls that haven’t connected those principles to actual operational decisions,” she said. “The mantra becomes a substitute for accountability rather than a driver of it.”
“The companies winning on customer experience are the ones with the intellectual honesty to keep questioning their assumptions, and the operational rigor to act on what they learn,” Billingsley said.
CX Dive spoke to experts about six pieces of CX wisdom that need to be reconsidered, retired or simply thrown out. Here’s what they had to say:
‘The customer is always right.’
The mantra “the customer is always right” is seen as a tenet of good business.
But the customer is not always right. Waiters get yelled at for unreasonable service demands, retail associates are faced with irrational refund requests they can’t fulfill, and representatives frequently deal with customers who take out their frustration on them.
The absolutism fails to consider staff, Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting, says.
“When business leaders invoke that mantra in any situation, they are implicitly suggesting that the involved employees are wrong — which can be very disheartening and demotivating for the staff,” Picoult said in an email.
A better replacement for this mantra, he says, would be: “The customer isn’t always right, but they must be wrong with dignity.”
“That’s a more accurate and balanced view of the world — and one that doesn’t throw employees under the bus,” Picoult said. “Instead, it gives staff a more realistic and appropriate outcome to strive for when dealing with difficult customers who, let’s face it, can sometimes be wrong and irrational.”
‘Every interaction should delight customers.’
Leaders often say that they need to delight customers, but what do we mean by that?
“They don’t define that any further,” Eric Keller, senior director analyst in Gartner’s customer service practice, told CX Dive. “Does that mean you should bake them cookies, or does that mean you just really put in the extra effort? They use that term, but it’s not really that helpful.”
Delight also doesn’t make sense in many instances principal analyst at Forrester
“People don’t call the contact center to be delighted; they want an answer to their question or a solution to their problem as quickly and effectively as possible,” Ball said in an email. “That doesn’t mean the customer’s emotional response to an interaction isn’t important, but we all want fast and easy far more than we want delightful.”
Gartner’s research also shows that a delight strategy doesn’t impact customer retention effectively.
“You can kind of do all these things and provide a really empathetic and wonderful experience and memorable experience, but at the end of the day, a customer wants to have their issue resolved, and you have to do that effectively,” Keller said. “That has a really big impact on customer retention, and then sometimes those additive touches-they feel nice.”
“Delight can be overrated,” Keller said.
‘Reduce friction at all costs.’
Reducing friction is generally a good thing. Customers don’t want to wait in a long check-out line, ask for an associate to unlock the deodorant they’re trying to buy, or wait for a page to load to browse products.
But not all friction is created equally. “Reducing friction at all costs” is “too simplistic,” Billingsley said. “Some friction builds trust.”
Two factor authentication, encouraging a thoughtful purchase decision, or an onboarding process for a product that ensures the customer gets the best use out of it are all examples of friction that builds trust.
“The real goal is eliminating bad friction while preserving meaningful moments,” Billingsley said. “Companies that have stripped out all friction in pursuit of this mantra have sometimes stripped out the moments that make experiences feel human and trustworthy.”
‘Meet customers where they are.’
Meeting customers where they are can be a useful customer service strategy, but if a business stretches itself thin and offers more choices than it can handle, such efforts can quickly turn south.
“Some people want text, and some people want WhatsApp, and some people want live chat or chatbot, and organizations built up all these different contact options,” Keller said. “But there’s a paradox of choice thing that happens where, ‘Wow, there are seven different ways I could get in touch with you, but for my issue, a lot of those ways actually don’t work.”
Chat or text may not be the right channel for a bank resolving a charge dispute. But a customer may try that and fail before getting redirected to a live representative.
“So you’ve got all these options, and really only one or two of them work,” Keller said. “It creates a pretty kind of crappy experience.”
Leaders need to ask themselves if they need all those options.
“And if you have all those options, you have to be really intentional about guiding people to the right option rather than just letting them choose,” Keller said.
‘NPS is the North Star.’
The net promoter score is often viewed as the Holy Grail of customer experience. But it’s come under scrutiny in recent years.
“One of the CX mantras that I have firmly believed needs to be reconsidered over the past few years is that NPS is the North Star metric that indicates that a brand is doing CX well,” Halle Stern, director analyst in Gartner’s <a href="https://bitcomme.com/3-ways-marketing-automation-platforms-are-being-reinvented/” title=”3 ways marketing automation platforms are being reinvented”>marketing practice, said in an email. “While NPS is a metric that most organizations measure throughout the customer journey, NPS alone does not tell us whether we are exceeding customer expectations.”
Brands have a plethora of indicators to assess their customer experience.
“I believe that looking at NPS to assess CX performance by itself is like looking at one indicator to measure the health of a person,” Stern said. “You wouldn’t say that because you weigh a certain amount or because you follow a certain diet means that you are a healthy person.”
Stern encourages leadership to move away from simply trying to increase NPS scores to outperform competitors.
“This mindset needs to shift to look at NPS at specific journey touchpoints and collect qualitative data alongside the numerical score to understand what is working well, what needs to be improved and what needs to be completely left out of a CX strategy.”
‘More personalization is always better.’
Brands often tout enhanced personalization, with the assumption that more personalization is always better.
But personalization has become more of a reflex than a strategy
“Customers want to feel understood, but there’s a meaningful difference between helpful personalization and personalization that feels invasive or presumptuous,” she said. “The mantra has outrun the judgment required to apply it well.”
More data, more signals and more tailoring doesn’t automatically equal a better experience.
“That equation has a variable most companies aren’t measuring: whether the customer actually wanted to be personalized in that moment, in that way, for that purpose,” Billingsley said. “It becomes an issue when companies treat personalization as something you do to customers rather than something you do for them.”
Customers know when personalization is an effort to upsell or make a sale or when it’s done to optimize company outcomes at the customer’s expense. Personalization should remove genuine friction, anticipate needs or make customers feel understood.
“The mantra assumes personalization is the destination,” Billingsley said. “It isn’t. Trust is the destination.”
And personalization that can feel creepy or akin to surveillance erodes trust.
Instead of “how do we personalize this more?” Billingsley encourages companies to ask: “Have we earned the right to personalize this?”
