Customer experience or CX (pr. see-ex) has like most things evolved over the years. From the initial understanding of CX being that it was predominantly a way in which to measure marketing and advertising effectiveness. In the early beginnings, the understanding of the potential for businesses learning about CX was like anything, a process. With each incremental change, tweak and shift came either a newfound success or a newfound failure, always a newfound lesson.
With the emergence of CX, we started to learn that there were absolute pre-cursors to business success such as you couldn’t change a customer touchpoint without first successfully shifting the employee touchpoint. Therefore, becoming born, the employee experience (EX). The employee experience, much like the customer experience began to shift away from the models of the past. The carrots and sticks started to be pushed aside for engagement and autonomy. The concept of management changed to a concept of leadership. In business we started to see the empirical changes between businesses fashioning themselves to the new way of working versus those still stuck in the industrial revolution attempting to sustain business on a 9-5 clock.
Then bring along the introduction of technology on a scale never seen in the history of man and there becomes a thirst for immediacy. A thirst for information, for transparency, connectedness and by no means least, personalisation. Why? Because this is the human experience (HX). As humans, as much as we are identified as a species, we identify as individuals. Even as I write this not getting off the telephone 5 minutes ago to my twin sister I realise that despite sharing more DNA than most others, we too are nothing alike.
So, for those in business whether your DNA is an entrepreneur, a leader, or the owner of an organisation, what these pillars are evolving into is the clear and transparent understanding that to be successful, sustainable, and trusted, your CEHX needs to be just that. The new spin on this concept is now being touted at Business eXperience or BX for short. In a recent article by Accenture (Australian Consulting Agency). They state that organisations that place a priority on BX are shown to be more than 6 x more successful in revenue than those that just work towards CX. However, the reality is, this new acronym is just another way of spinning what is, a necessary shift in business. Just as we talk about the customer experience, we need to also be strategic towards the employee experience and with those two components in mind, then you overlay the human experience. Bringing to your customers that for which they want and need and not the other way around as it used to be back in the day.
Whatever the acronym is that you need to use to create absolute clarity on the centricity of your business, everyone is a customer of someone, and your BX will only ever be worthy of your customer’s loyalty whether that is an internal or external customer with the strategy and delivery of great CEHX in that business.
Aileen Day
CEHX Creator and Advocate
