You can’t get through the 21st century as a business manager without fighting the battles of customer experience. How your customers spend their attention is precious information; it dictates how services and products will behave in the coming years. And what we have been seeing in today’s experiences is a collision of technology as convenience, free media, experimentation, and relentless distraction. In a hypercompetitive experience economy, where customers are digitally empowered yet still feel perpetually short of time, there is a fundamental choice to make in your customer experience strategy. At some point, you must decide whether your brand’s offering is a step along the way to experiences or whether you are providing the experience itself. In every interaction or encounter, you must ask: is your brand saving the customer’s attention or grabbing it? The answer to that question may change throughout the customer journey, but the challenge remains constant. Fail to save or grab attention and you will end up wasting it. And wasted attention is unforgivable.
Customer experience Paying for something with time and attention costs more than money, especially if that payment ends in an experience that doesn’t work, isn’t useful, and isn’t very pleasant. The challenge for customer experience in the future is dealing with the enormous competition to offer moments of pleasure built into services or products. Today, you need to pursue things like:
- Highly digitized business models to win the battle for maximum efficiency;
- Connected devices, such as image and voice recognition, machine learning, and big data to make better decisions for the consumer’s benefit;
- The shift from fleeting sharing on social media to real audience engagement;
- A chorus of purpose-driven brands, large and small, promising a path to self-actualization.
You need to enter this new market knowing exactly where your brand stands: saving or grabbing attention. Brands that save attention What do I mean by saving attention? In 2017, the moments when our attention was saved, that is, when we ended up spending less time on a task because it became more efficient, became invisible to us. We will probably only appreciate these moments the first time we use the service, and we will notice the change when the services aren’t working properly. The market is competing for improvements that create radical shortcuts in the experience, and if you don’t keep pace with these expectations, you cause disappointment, frustration, and even anger among users. Brands that position themselves as attention savers are cultivating a scenario of high demand, smart devices, and a customer journey that saves time through convenience. One example is the Burger King campaign that lets PlayStation players order food by voice command without having to put down the controller.
“Play with the best gamers and order your Whopper without putting down the controller.” How do you create functional experiences like this?
- Always ask yourself which parts of your customer experience could disappear, going beyond the usual journey offered by most companies in your market;
- Empower your customers with additional experiences that make multitasking easier;
- Make sure your experience has no negative consequences for the environment and that its social impact is minimized;
- Don’t let shorter experiences mean that your consumers will be pursuing behavior that is harmful to them and to society.
Brands that grab attention Are your customers masters at collecting experiences? Attracting and holding their attention gets harder every second. If your brand, product, or service doesn’t create experiences that hold attention with unique stories, constant updates, connection with others, or the wonderful feeling of being understood as an individual, it is doomed. Brands that position themselves as attention grabbers have longer journeys, breaking the rules of vertical engagement to create new settings that charm users into staying. In a market with endless choices, your brand needs to shine like a colorful billboard covered in flashing lights, drawing attention to an experience unlike any other, one that stays in people’s memory and happens again. One example was the partnership between the airline Air France and Adidas. The campaign encouraged children to come home to their parents sooner after the year-end holidays by letting parents send their children only one pair of new Adidas shoes, keeping the other with them.
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