Mark Twain once quipped: “Everybody talks about the weather, nobody does anything about it.”     If Twain were to spend some time on corporate campuses today, I wonder if he might level the same wry observation at all the corporate talk about “customer experience.”   After years of articles, conferences, business best-sellers and corporate buzz phrases, badly designed customer experiences remain legion.  Howcome?

It’s not quite right to say nobody does anything about customer experience.  Lots of time money and effort goes into initiatives aimed at improving customer experience.  And to be fair, progress has occured - particular in web usability.  I was delighted for instance, this week, with the intuitive pop-up calendar implementation for selecting departure and return dates on Air Canada’s Aeroplan frequent flyer rewards site.  Shortly after that, the trouble began….

My goal, (probably a familiar scenario to most people reading this post) was to use frequent flyer points so my wife could join me on a business trip.  This meant I wanted to buy one ticket and use points to acquire the other.   Turns out, you just can’t do that on Aeroplan on-line.  Was this a web usability problem? No, deeper, it turned out. My operator at the Aeroplan call center was not able to arrange for the purchase of an Air Canada ticket to go along with the ticket I wished to reserve on points: “Happens all the time” he said - “very common request - we just can’t do anything about it.” Aeroplan then transferred me to an Air Canada number that rang until I hung up. Eventually an independent travel agent straightened it out.
I raise this case as a crystaline illustration of the classic problem that bedevils large organizations in delivering customer experience - “silos.” In order to organize people to get work done, an organizational chart inevitably comes into play. People soon learn the political hazards of encroaching on other people’s turf.  So, heads go down - and the customer experience problems that get solved tend to be those that can be solved within a silo - like the snappy calendar on Aeroplan’s reservation page. So it follows that the problems that linger are the ones that have to do not so much with the parts - but the relationship between the parts.  Sound familiar?
For people who would like to do something about customer experience, two takeaways seem clear:    First -  bad customer experience is a cost-driver.  Air Canada lost call-center cycles and distribution margin on my business because they failed to anticipate and respond to an easily predictable customer goal. Habitually calling out such costs may be an important discipline in building the case to make things better.  Second, the organization that seeks to  differentiate itself on customer experience will need to identify customer experience champions who are senior enough to focus attention and resources on the problems customers experience as they cross organizational silos in the pursuit of their goals. Ultimately, that will mean creating a brand-specific viewpoint on just who those customers are and just what their goals might be.