After almost 20 years on the cutting edge of Customer and Employee Experience trends, we are thrilled to announce the first-ever Experience Strategy Trend Report coming your way in January 2023!

In 2002, when many companies started realizing the power of ‘experiences’ to create value, Joe Pine used Peter Drucker’s famous line to describe the aim of Experience Strategy. First, here’s Peter Drucker’s declaration:

But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself." (Management 1973)

At the time many of the ‘chief marketing officers’ were in fact salespeople who had been promoted. Drucker was frustrated with companies who thought they were doing marketing but had only retitled their sales function and he wanted to describe the distinction.

The Southern Company Gas Customer Experience Team partnered across their organization to undertake experience research that would help them understand exactly what it would take to lift overall customer satisfaction as well as help the organization hear directly from their customers.

We started studying meaningful experiences in the summer of 2018 in a world that looked and felt much different from today. We decided to study meaningful experiences because customer expectations were evolving rapidly. Spurred by new, smart experiences embedded into every aspect of their lives, people were no longer satisfied with experiences that lacked intelligence, meaning, or both. Companies were (and still are) getting better and better at creating content, products, and experiences. This abundance of experiences overwhelms people leading to a reduction in the net value of any one experience and the value of experiences generally.

O’Charley’s, a 50-year-old casual-dining chain, offers comfort food with a Southern accent in a homey, welcoming atmosphere. However, as the casual dining category became more competitive and their guest’s expectations evolved, O’Charley’s lost market share and sales. They needed to outline a path to restore market share and increase sales by identifying the most important current and future customer jobs-to-be-done that would revitalize the brand and create new value.

Customers have strong, if often unconscious, expectations of solutions they hire to help them. Experience strategists who understand the archetypes of jobs-based experiences are more likely to create value for the customer and the company.  

What is “Jobs-to-be-Done?” 

Jobs to be done is a strategic discipline that focuses on creating value for customers by understanding what customers want to in a given situation. The term was popularized by Clayton Christensen, the top innovation professor at Harvard in the 2000s and 2010s. His definition of what a ‘job to be done’ is: 

“Job” is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance. But this goal usually involves more than just a straightforward task; consider the experience a person is trying to create. The circumstances are more important than customer characteristics, product attributes, new technologies, or trends.

Customer experience metrics are incredibly important to companies today. They are the first indicators of whether or not customers actually value what you are offering. The category giant, Net Promoter Score, has come under scrutiny by companies, academics, and especially customers. TWS metric is a new approach to CX metrics that can give you better indicators for how to improve your experience.  

Companies evaluate customers' experiences in ways that are very different from how people do.

I’m going to say something about the experiences customers have with your company that, at first glance, is going to be so obvious to you that you may decide not to finish this article. But I’m then going to show you the implications of that observation and if you are honest with yourself you will realize that your company has not focused on the most obvious attribute of meaningful experience creation.

We live in a world of abundance. People have so many options before them, almost all instantaneously accessible. But, what no one has more of is time. Time is the limiting factor in what we can consume, enjoy, build, and even become.

People have always valued meaningful experiences. And with limited time and an abundance of experiences to choose from, the time we spend with experiences becomes even more valuable.

In today’s world, providing a streamlined and positive experience is not only preferred by patients, but expected. When someone checks into a hospital or physician office, seeking help for a chronic or acute condition, there are feelings of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. These feelings are not only felt by the patient but also by friends and family and others in their circle of care. Many companies are working to use experience design methodologies to alleviate these feelings and improve overall patient outcomes. One company in particular, Flagler Health+, which includes an award winning 335- bed hospital that has a 130-year legacy of caring for the St. Augustine community, joined the Digital Healthcare Collaborative to do just that— take friction out of the patient experience through ideation and co-creation research.

“Consumer.” We see it all the time in business strategy, but the truth is, “consumer” only applies to commodities. The word misses the point for most companies in two major ways. First, it’s company-centric. It implies that consumers will consume what the company creates; people will use up an offering and, ideally, consume it again. Here’s an example of how limiting the term is: In the greeting card industry, people don’t consume greeting cards, they give them. They are givers. If strategists at a card company talked about their customers as “givers,” a rich array of givers’ attributes would come to mind; they’d explore what it means to give and how the company can support the experience of giving. By contrast, sticking with the word “consumer” keeps the focus narrowly on the attributes of the cards to be consumed.

What questions do you have about the Collaboratives?

All too often fitness centers, medical providers, colleges, and organizations in many other industries seek to distinguish themselves only on the quality, convenience, and experience of what they sell. It’s not that those things aren’t important. But they matter only as means to the ends that people seek.

Today we are joined by Matt Maher, a Futurist specializing in augmented and virtual realities, web3, the metaverse, artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), and voice technology.

I’ve been working to create a new measurement, one that definitively identifies customer and business impact. If you were creating a new measure of success, what customer metrics would you be most interested in looking at?

You can now watch us as we nerd out about Experience Strategy because… We are on YouTube!!!

We are excited to share news of our recently formed partnership with the Transformational Travel Council (TTC) who will participate in the inaugural Transformation Economy Collaborative, designed and guided by Joe Pine (author of The Experience Economy), leading Transformation Coach and Experience Strategist, Aransas Savas and me (co-author with Joe on “The New You Business”, Harvard Business Review 2022).

Any company worth its’ salt is going to ask customers what they think. Most of the time, however, companies are asking the wrong questions.

So much is changing in your company’s business model. New competitors, rapidly changing technologies, and new ways of thinking about the populations you serve. Consumerization is here. Healthcare companies must have a strategic point of view on the types of experiences they create for their customers.

At Stone Mantel, JTBD is at the heart of all we do, and we are leading experts on the subject.

Along with powerful and action-focused research and a guided innovation journey, did you know that members of The Collaboratives gain a robust and well-rounded education in the art and science of Experience Strategy?