“Customer experience” (abbreviated CX) is a hot topic in business. Which makes sense. Business needs customers, and should care about customers’ experiences with business. Problem is, all this concern, so far, is kinda one-sided.

According to Wikipedia (as of today), “Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.”

Note that frame of reference: a supplier.

It continues, “This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.”

Three of those are experiences customers know and care about: interaction, purchase and use. The others — awareness, discovery, attraction, cultivation and advocacy — might be things customers experience, but are mostly marketing jive.

Two paragraphs later it says “Analysts and commentators who write about customer experience and customer relationship management have increasingly recognized the importance of managing the customer’s experience.” The italics are mine.

Who wants their experience of anything managed by somebody else?

Stop here and think about how you function independently as a customer, and the tools you use to manage your own customer experiences, across every company you deal with. Chances are you use some combination of these:

  • Wallet and/or purse
  • Cash
  • Credit or debit cards
  • Car
  • Mobile phone or tablet
  • Computer
  • Apps (not just for commercial interactions, but for managing budgets and expenses, paying bills and filling out tax forms)

Your list may be different, but  what matters is that those tools are yours. Yes, your car may be a rental, and your credit cards belong to a bank; but they are your tools, and — here’s the key: you use them to deal with many different companies in identical or similar ways. They each express your agency:  the power to act with full effect in the world, as an independent human being.

Your experience with those tools is also personal, meaning yours alone.  You can tell they are yours because you speak of them, and think about them, using the first person singular possessive voice: my car, my cash, my credit card, my phone. They are first person technologies that enlarge and enhance what you can do with your body.

Here’s another way to look at them: they give you scale.

What we need from CX is scale for us, not just for companies wanting to give us a better experience of them. That scale is what VRM is about, and it can only work if it’s good for both sides.

We can’t get there if we start on the company’s side. We can only get there by starting with the individual customer, and working toward scale for him or her.

This can be scary and alien to companies used to thinking that the customer needs to be “owned,” “managed” or “locked in” somehow. What companies need to think about are the benefits both sides get from first person technologies.

I think there’s a good place to start working on new first person technologies that work better for everybody, and I’ll lay that out in the next post.