Standardizing Customer Experience

A common fallacy and much-favored fantasy of customer experience design is the notion that there is “one best way” to go about performing a task – buying a car, managing an investment portfolio, communicating with friends – toward which all people would gravitate if only it were put before them.   This never ends well, and often ends tragically.  The fatal flaw is not in the execution, but in the very belief that customer experience can be standardized.

Scientists readily admit that their study of the human mind is very primitive.  Even studies of the brain as an organ are confounded by its unfathomable complexity: 100 billion neurons, each of which may have up to 100,000 dendrites and axons, each of which communicates with others through a complex and scalar combination of electricity and chemical signals.   At one time, it was theorized that a single brain could have more than 300 trillion constantly changing connections, and this number has since been increased significantly as understanding of even the basic mechanics has expanded.

In simpler terms, the variations in brain activity are for all concerns infinite.  There is no standard brain, no standard mind, no standard behavior, and no standard customer.   The various ways that people think and act are grouped into hundreds of cultures, and each culture is merely a sloppy amalgam of what is presumed to be commonalities.   And even people of largely identical culture can have radically different perspectives.   And with all of this in mind, the attempt to discover the “one best way” for all people, for all minds, for all brains, is a fruitless enterprise.

From a practical perspective, we can easily define the most efficient way of accomplishing a task – the fewest and most simple steps to effect an outcome – and declare it to be “the best way” to accomplish a goal.  But customers will reject it in favor of less efficient but more psychologically comfortable ways, and sometimes may reject the goal itself.

Standardization is an imperative of the Industrial Era – it’s far more efficient (hence cost effective) to make millions of products that are identical clones of one another than to customize products to suit the needs of each customer.   And this mentality has carried over into the service industry: if we can force customers to yield to our preferred processes, we can serve them more efficiently.   But “efficient for us” does not guarantee “desirable to them,” as many have discovered through ghastly and expensive failures.

In the present day, the imperative is for personalization and flexibility, making products and the processes to obtain and use them as flexible as possible to accommodate the myriad of ways in which a customer might approach any given task.  While it is sometimes claimed that it is impossible to know, this excuse no longer holds water – we are now connected enough to the customer to observe their behavior in granular detail, but few bother to do so, and many fail to take what they observe into account.

Flexibility also does not necessarily mean chaos, if a solution is elegantly designed.   Consider the most popular word-processing program: there are over 30 ways to make a word or phrase appear in boldface.  The existence of so many options does not render the program a chaos, as each user is able to find his preferred method, and may even use different methods in different instances to accomplish the very same goal.   They are not compelled to learn “the one best way” to set text in boldface, and are not restricted to it when some other method would be more suitable.   The myriad of options are simply and obsequiously available for them to choose at their leisure.

And this is the gold standard of customer experience – the service each customer wants, the way that he wants it.   While customers may satisfice in the meantime, the market and the future belongs to the firm that will undertake the effort to provide it.   It may take rather a long process of evolution toward this end, but given the competitiveness of present-day markets, it is inevitable.