Last week the Century City Conference Centre in Cape Town played host to CEM Africa 2022, where industry leaders unpacked their respective thoughts, plans and approaches to customer experience (CX).

On day two while delivering his opening keynote, Dennis Wakabayashi, chief collaborator at Team Wakabayashi, focused on his approach to the CX journey, emphasising in particular whether or not businesses actually know their customers.

Here, Wakabayashi is not talking about insights from data, but rather the human element.

While some companies choose to look at their customers as data points, Wakabayashi is of the opinion that trying to understand the CX journey from the customer perspective, and in particular that these customers are humans, is of critical importance.

This especially for any organisation wanting to not only solve a problem for their customers via the CX journey, but also create an increased degree of loyalty.

Speaking about the CX landscape in South Africa and Africa in comparison to that in the US, Wakabayashi could not hold back his enthusiasm. This as CX is very much a clandestine activity in the States, but locally there is a greater desire to collaborate and share information in order to deliver better experiences for customers.

All about perspective

To illustrate his point regarding a distinct lack of knowledge of the human behind the customer, Wakabayashi played a video chronicling a series of interviews with customers he interacts with regularly.

Instead of asking what they are looking for in a customer journey, he asked more intriguing questions, like what they would do if given $100? Answers ranged from immediate wish fulfilment by buying some sort of electronics, to thinking about loved ones where a young man said he would take his girlfriend out on a date.

Wakabayashi also asked about instances where they experienced great and poor customer service. Regarding the former, all great experiences usually involved customers being treated above and beyond what is expected. The latter usually involved the opposite, with a distinct lack of understanding about the issue they were experiencing being the sticking point.

The video montage served as a simple example about how brands can greatly increase customer loyalty by subverting the CX journey. This as the ability to over-deliver can greatly affect whether a customer chooses to engage with your company again. They will also be more willing to share those experiences, for that very fact.

Next Wakabayashi shared some of his own insights, with zeroing in on the human element of the customer being vital. He also emphasised the need to make CX a priority throughout the entire organisation. This as solving customer problems and retaining loyalty should not be a concern for one department of the business alone.

The last pointer that Wakabayashi shared was the need to focus on the points of the CX journey when the customer chooses us (the business). If greater consideration is paid here, and more conversations are had around it, the CX journey only stands to benefit.

[Image – Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash]