We are all CX Workers

Chaos Theory and Customer Experience.

Whatever your title is, whatever you do, your decisions and actions impact the customer experience. If they don’t, then chances are you are redundant. And in a world with complicated supply chains and nonlinear, multiparty delivery of service, you might not have to be directly employed by a brand to have an effect on its value. 

It’s easy to focus on ‘customer facing’ people in the team. A holiday can be ruined by someone on the check-in desk having a bad day or someone calling in sick so a store is unable to keep the shelves stocked. 

But it’s also not too hard for us to understand how someone working in finance, who makes decisions about payment terms or pricing could change the customer’s experience. We’ve all spoken to a customer service agent, and heard the frustration in their voice when they know we are right and they would love to help, but can’t because some faceless policy maker has made a decision and ‘that’s the way it is, they are the rules…’

Without getting too far into the weeds of deterministic nonlinearity, some of the new business models utilised by brands such as Uber, AirBnB and Amazon are chaotic systems that follow precise laws or rules. However small changes in initial conditions can lead to disproportionate and unpredictable results.

Put more simply for any person who is a cog in the machine, everything you do has an impact on the customer experience in a kind of butterfly effect. 

The "butterfly effect" is a metaphorical illustration of how small changes in the initial conditions of a chaotic system can lead to vastly different outcomes. The idea is famously captured in the phrase: "A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas." This suggests that the minuscule disturbance caused by a butterfly's wings can, through a complex chain of events, influence the weather patterns in a distant location.

Think about your role in the organisation. Think about the decisions you made today or the actions you took, or didn’t take. Now think about those choices and how the customer experience might have been changed or will change because of what you did. 

Maybe you redesign the back of your printed, paper invoices and remove your opening hours, because ‘people can Google it’. 

• Old customer journey - customer turns over the bill and sees the opening hours. 

• New customer journey -  Customer turns on the phone, (we are talking about an elderly customer base here, oh did I not mention that?) Tries to Google, but typing is difficult because the keyboard is set to maximum size for vision and coordination. Gets intercepted by a paid ad for a competitor at the top of the search results. Gives up, calls the call center, waits for 25 minutes to ask ‘What are the opening hours’. Gets told ‘It’s on the website.’ 

Small event, big impact. Not only does the customer journey become more complicated, it is subject to being impacted by third parties - the UX teams of phone operating systems and their compliance with accessibility best practices, your website and SEO team, Google and other search engines, competitors…  

The new customer journey could have been predicted. If the person making the decision to remove opening hours from the back of the bill identified as a CX worker and thought about what the butterfly effect of that decision would mean in the context of the overall customer journey. 

This example highlights some deep structural problems in an organisation. It suggests that there is a lack of understanding of who the customers actually are. There is no design thinking evident, no empathy with the customer at this part of the journey. It seems that the new journey was not mapped, and the edge cases not considered. This is not a customer-centric organisation. 

We are all CX workers. I’d love to hear from you if you think you are not.