Simon David Clatworthy - The Experience-Centric Organization: How to Win Through Customer Experience

This book is for anyone who understands the importance of the customer experience and is looking to take the next steps toward delivering truly great experiences. It offers a framework for how to get your organization structured to be able to deliver upon the experiences you want to provide. The book allows you to find your position on the stepwise transition toward experience centricity, and guides you in what you can do as an organization to make the next step up.

I have been fixated upon delivering memorable customer experiences for 30 years and have come to understand that this is an organizational imperative, rather than something that can be fixed through a single project mandate. As a voracious reader, I found myself increasingly frustrated that many books talked about the importance of the customer experience, but few actually helped you design these experiences. Not only this, but they neglected to describe how you should transform your organization to deliver the great experiences you want to deliver. I kept finding myself working with leadership teams who were saying, We know this is important, but how can we do this? How can we design the company to be able to comfortably deliver great experiences? There, the literature comes up short, and that is the reason why this book was written.

I am a join-the-dots kind of person, seeing connections, patterns, and trajectories all around me. I have seen several waves of technology and organizational paradigms come and go, and this got me asking a fundamental question:

The customer experience has been important for many years, but what comes after the customer experience?

This question bugged me for a long time because the answer was always more and better experiences! However, I recognized that providing more,better experiences requires organizational capabilities. Finally, I realized that the customer experience is not a wave that we will pass through, but instead a trajectory with an endpoint. Organizations compete on customer experience, and the endpoint of this trajectory is when an organization makes the customer experience their reason to exist. That is, they become an experience-centric organization. Suddenly a lot of dots came into focus as I realized that we are on the edge of a step change in terms of how the customer experience is viewed. This has enormous consequences for business in the next decade and I hope that as a reader, you will see its relevance for your organization. I strongly believe that it is relevant and important for the future of service. I sincerely hope you find it useful, and that it arms you to engage in the competitive landscape of customer experience today.

This book is divided into three parts about the why and how of the experience-centric organization.

Part I focuses on leadership and presents the case for the experience-centric organization, the stepwise transformation toward it, and organizational characteristics needed to become experience-centric.

Part II is about the how of the experience-centric organization. It goes into detail about the customer experience itself and how to design for it.

Part III presents two guest chapters that describe new, evolving areas of competition and competencies that you should aspire to develop,once you have become experience-centric.

Each part gives you the knowledge to understand your position on the experience-centricity maturity scale, and provides valuable information about what you can do to transform as an organization toward experience centricity.