BrianSolis

Originally published on the Salesforce “360 blog“

Customers care about end-to-end experiences, not how your company is organized. Business leaders are quick to say that a connected customer experience is a major business priority. But the truth is that they are struggling to do it well. New data captures the gap between business and digital transformation and the integrated experiences customers desire.

Countless growing departments, new services abound, and the truth remains: Customers have to see you as one company. This is why a connected, personalized, and seamless customer experience (CX)can make or break your brand. But telling this to executives is preaching to the choir. Eighty-eight percent believe a complete and consistent view of their customers is crucial to the future of their business. But fewer than one-third say they currently have that unified view. And for those 31% executives who have a single 360-degree view of customer data? Half say they lack the organizational structure to actually make use of those customer insights.

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Lee Odden and I have been friends for over a decade. He’s super smart, a pioneer in digital discovery and influencer, and a wonderful human being.

We recently worked together on the 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report. And, to celebrate its launch, we shared a moment together diving into the world of B2B influence.

I wanted to share it with you here…transcript and video below.

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Digital transformation is the new black. It is one of those catch-all terms that seems to describe any investment in trending digital technologies and modern processes and philosophies. Depending on the role, department and mindset, digital transformation means many things to many different people But, digital transformation is much more than just “digital.” It is also the construct for the future of business.

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Before social media, before modern digital marketing and before DCX and digital transformation, I spent much of the late 90s and early 2000s studying and experimenting with online influence. In February of 1999, I opened a lab to test and learn and in the process, was one of the many contributors to shape the future of digital marketing and customer engagement. Shortly after joining Altimeter Group in 2012, I shared all of the research I had collected and more and published the findings in a comprehensive report, “The Rise of Digital Influence.” In fact, that report is still considered the standard in understanding how people influence the impressions and actions of others online.

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Customer experience aka CX is one of the most important trends changing business today. And, experts believe that it represents the next big competitive advantage for companies that invest in it. But what is customer experience exactly? It’s one of those terms (and movements) that is defined and interpreted differently depending on who’s talking about it within the organization. But without a common appreciation for customer experience and what it represents to customers, not just our view of them, our CX efforts may not be as effective as we think.

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I study disruptive technology, specifically innovative technology that gains so much momentum that it disrupts markets and ultimately businesses. In the past several years, disruptive technology has become so pervasive that I’ve had to further focus my work on studying only disruptive technologies that are impacting customer and employee behavior, expectations and values and affecting customer and employee experiences. I can hardly keep up with today let alone consider the potential disruption that looms ahead in every sector imaginable including new areas that will emerge and displace laggard perspectives, models and processes.

The image above represents the focal point of my work in 2009 – 2012. I called it the “Wheel of Disruption” (WoD) and it was meant to document and convey that the “Golden Triangle” of real-time, mobile and social, surrounded by the cloud, was inspiring incredible innovation and thus producing new and disruptive new apps, tools and services.

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It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since the launch of X. In the last two weeks, I’ve hosted conversations about the promise of experience design in London, Düsseldorf, Oslo, Sydney and Geelong.

Somewhere along the Atlantic, I was asked to answer a few questions ahead of my arrival in Geelong for the Pivot Summit by Courtney Crane of the Geelong Advertiser. Thanks to the magic (or curse) of inflight wifi, I was able to make her deadline. But it was more than a Q&A, it was the purpose of the conversation that stopped time to reflect on how this once bustling city is proactively investigating how to build upon its history to adapt for the future.

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All customers are not created equal. This is also true for relationships. No business has the same relationship with their customers as you intend to have with yours. The thing is though, you must first define what a relationship with your customer looks and feels like and in turn, how they would describe it to their friends and colleagues. This is where the future of customer experience begins.

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