The MarTech Conference day two keynote

“It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a cup of coffee at Starbucks, an iPad at Apple, or an electric supercar at Lucid Motors, there’s a common ingredient for success and growth that spans products, that spans industries — and that’s customer experience.”

That’s the most important lesson Len Devanna, VP strategy at Cortico-X, has taken from more than two decades of experience digital strategy, CX and transformative leadership, and it’s the message he delivered on the second morning of The MarTech Conference.

Defining experience

“Everything starts with the human,” said Devanna. “The importance of this cannot be overstated. We’re not selling to robots. Yet. We are selling to each other and sometimes that gets lost in the fray.”

Through the lens of the human, it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying a phone or a car; there’s a journey to be undertaken. At a very high level, the journey ideally moves through stages of discovery, consideration, transaction or conversion and advocacy.

That journey can involve hundreds or even thousands of touchpoints, and the sum of those touchpoints is, for Devanna, the experience. The better the experience, the better the business outcome.

It’s time to reflect, he said, on whether your business is providing customers an optimized, seamless experience or a series of disjointed experiences, placing the onus for navigating the journey on the customer.

Having an exceptional product is no longer enough

Customer expectations of interactions with brands have steadily grown, so that it is no longer enough to offer an exceptional product; exceptional experiences are required too. Eighty-four percent of customers say the experience is as important as the product or service itself.

That means brands need to be on a journey, from wherever they find themselves today to a plateau of what Devanna calls “CX mastery.”

The first step on the journey is breaking down silos. Customers don’t care whether they’re dealing with marketing, sales or service; they’re experience is with the brand. Progress here mandates reaching out across departmental boundaries and having transparent conversations about positives and negatives in the experience itself, not just about the performance of specific teams.

“We are smarter together,” Devanna insists, “and fostering this conversation, bringing people together from across the organization, is a solid step in breaking down these silos and igniting new levels of collaboration.”

Car-buying nirvana

Devanna’s prime example of positive CX comes from the car-buying experience (he served as head of customer experience at Lucid Motors).

The traditional model

• Discovery. Bombardment with marketing materials from a range of sources.
• Consideration. Consultations with, on average, 2.8 dealers (looking for the best price).
• Transact. Dealing with various possible sources of finance.
• Advocacy. Nobody really owns the experience, so where’s the loyalty?

The D2C model

Brands like Lucid Motors, Rivian and Tesla are able to dominate from a CX perspective. No more inter-dealer haggling; the brand owns the end-to-end experience and that, said Devanna, is a game changer.

The auto industry, Devanna says, is in urgent need of an experience overhaul.

Be an experience activist

“I am here to selfishly recruit you,” said Devanna. As experience activists, the task is to convince the world just how important experience really is. “Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to become an experience activist alongside us.”

Go here to see the entire presentation. Registration is free.