Brands are lasering in on consumer data to tailor experiences that keep customers loyal as German Shepherds. But as with marketing initiatives, throwing new software at the problem and expecting magic to happen yields poor returns. Companies need a culture with CX leadership and cross-department involvement to differentiate from competitors.

That is the gist of a book published last June titled “More Is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences.” Its author, Blake Morgan (pictured), customer experience futurist, writer and speaker, explained how to achieve a people/tech balance in a recent interview with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California.

“I’m not anti-technology. I’m not anti-bot,” Morgan said.

Amazon Go cashierless stores are a good example of technology in service of customer experience, Morgan pointed out. A just-opened Seattle store cuts out the most loathed part of people’s shopping experience — lines — with unmanned, high-tech checkouts. But in many, if not most, scenarios outside of shopping, cutting people out totally is not practical or desirable.

“I do think that technology can help us without totally replacing us,” Morgan said. “I think we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us, to make smart decisions. … You can’t just let the technology go.”

This week, theCUBE spotlights Blake Morgan in our Woman in Tech feature.

Companies must kick ‘retail therapy’ habit

If the 85 percent fail rate for big data initiatives looks depressing, CX’s track record is an even bigger downer. CX’s fail rate is as high as 93 percent, according to some estimates.

Both domains suffer from blind faith in technology. The 85 percent figure for big data misfires comes from Gartner Research analyst Nick Heudecker‏. Gartner had previously placed the fail rate at 60 percent. But, last November, Heudecker said that estimate was too conservative. “[T]he problem isn’t technology,” Heudecker said, as quoted by Tech Republic. Company cultures remain in a rut as big data tech keeps improving, he stated, echoing other analysts. “Organizations … need a plan to get to production. Most don’t plan and treat big data as technology retail therapy,” he added.

Customer experience initiatives may leverage consumer big data, and they often fail for the same reason big data projects do. Sixty-one percent of CX execs state that their company’s adaptive speed is a main strategic priority, according to a study from West Monroe Partners and the Customer Experience Professionals Association. Insufficient speed or agility can stymie CX efforts. Fifty-four percent of organizations said that culture, not technology, was the primary obstacle to agility.

CX culture shock

Customer experience is not the same thing as customer service, Morgan said. Customer service for most is a call or contact center, a single point in the overall experience. CX, on the other hand, spans the entirety of a customer’s relationship to a brand. Thus, it requires all employees’ performance metrics — to be tied back to customer satisfaction. That means those in human resources, finance, marketing, and customer service.

A stellar customer experience meets the customer where he or she is, which can mean social channels like Twitter or on mobile apps, for instance. “There’s so many channels; it’s really overwhelming for a lot of businesses, so I think it’s important to really cut out the noise,” Morgan said. It is worth the effort, she added.

In many cases, companies make things easy for themselves and pass the footwork onto the customers. “For example, say, you tweet a company. They might tell you, ‘Hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself, or now you need to send us an email.’ Well, that’s not easy for me as a customer,” she said. Putting extra thought into reducing steps and serving what customers want when they want it pays dividends in satisfaction and loyalty.

“I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer,” Morgan stated.

Companies underperforming on CX  aren’t necessarily lazy, according to Morgan. Businesses that want to create excellent customer experiences must live by a demanding code. “I think it’s actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice,” she said.

Staffers need to “self-manage” and prevent burnout to maintain the necessary energy to achieve CX goals, Morgan advised. Lastly, a devoted CX leader who can get in the weeds can make a difference for companies serious about customer experience.

“I think it’s important to have somebody accountable to it, whether it’s a chief customer officer or your CMO, because the CEO is ultimately responsible. However, the CEO has their hand in so many things,” she said. “It’s not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level on customer-centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE