Every busi­ness can be sit­u­at­ed on a cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence de­ploy­ment con­tin­u­um. The busi­ness is ei­ther new to the game of cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence, find­ing its foot­ing with cus­tomers, far along in its jour­ney, or hit­ting the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence high notes con­sis­tent­ly. Each of these ref­er­ence points rep­re­sents a spe­cif­ic land­mark along the con­tin­u­um, in­di­cat­ing how well the busi­ness is do­ing in im­prov­ing its cus­tomers’ lives and keep­ing them hap­py.

The first land­mark that needs to be recog­nised is the “new to the game” land­mark. This is where a busi­ness be­gins its nav­i­ga­tion jour­ney and the cur­tain ris­es on the the­atre of cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence, al­low­ing the au­di­ence to get a first glimpse of what to ex­pect, in how they will be served and treat­ed.

A key theme at this land­mark will be high­light­ing what prob­lem the busi­ness will be solv­ing for its cus­tomers and in how po­tent a man­ner. This prob­lem may be com­mon to the in­dus­try and so, the busi­ness has to be clear and clever in com­mu­ni­cat­ing how it will stand out from the com­pe­ti­tion in the race to so­lu­tion man­age­ment and cus­tomer hap­pi­ness.

The thing about this land­mark is that it’s a first im­pres­sion land­mark and car­ries the bur­den of set­ting the bar on the ser­vice de­liv­ery machi­na­tions the busi­ness will need to mas­ter in or­der to as­ton­ish its cus­tomers. Whilst some busi­ness­es un­der­stand the pow­er of this first im­pres­sion and start out with a well-in­ten­tioned “wow” fac­tor, an equal num­ber fail to keep up the mo­men­tum. I’ve dis­cov­ered that this sce­nario re­lates to some busi­ness­es be­gin­ning their cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence trans­for­ma­tion jour­neys as well.

The sec­ond land­mark is “find­ing one’s foot­ing with the cus­tomer.” This is the point on the con­tin­u­um where cus­tomers have be­come fa­mil­iar with the busi­ness brand and its grow­ing con­sis­ten­cy in meet­ing ser­vice promis­es. There’s grow­ing cus­tomer en­gage­ment and the busi­ness is demon­strat­ing that its glow­ing first im­pres­sion was not sim­ply for van­i­ty likes and click­bait. When a busi­ness be­gins to find its foot­ing with its cus­tomers, a lot of work be­gins to hap­pen un­der the hood. The busi­ness be­gins to aim for con­gru­ence be­tween its peo­ple, its process­es and the tech­nol­o­gy that sup­ports ef­fi­cient ser­vice de­liv­ery, so that cus­tomers’ ex­pec­ta­tions can be met (and ex­ceed­ed).

The third land­mark is where the mag­ic be­gins to hap­pen. It’s where the busi­ness is “far along in its cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence jour­ney.” There’s a cer­tain sweet spot in the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence jour­ney, when a busi­ness finds the right com­bi­na­tion of how, what, when, where and how much, in de­liv­er­ing its ser­vice pack­ag­ing.

When a busi­ness finds this sweet spot, in­vari­ably through mar­ket­ing strate­gies, re­search, cus­tomer feed­back, so­cial lis­ten­ing, sur­veys and the use of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence tools to track cus­tomer habits and pur­chas­ing be­hav­iours, it be­comes easy to cre­ate a cy­cle of cus­tomer suc­cess. When this cy­cle is ex­e­cut­ed ef­fi­cient­ly, cus­tomers re­ward the busi­ness by in­ten­tion­al re­peat pur­chas­ing.

Let me re­mind every­one that the best gauge of cus­tomer loy­al­ty is their pur­chas­ing be­hav­iour, not their pos­i­tive re­spons­es on a sur­vey.

Fi­nal­ly, the fourth land­mark oc­curs when a busi­ness is “hit­ting the high notes” with cus­tomers. We need more busi­ness­es to get to this land­mark, which now turns in­to an im­por­tant mile­stone on the jour­ney to cus­tomer as­ton­ish­ment.

The prob­lem is that the ex­tra­or­di­nary ef­fort lev­el re­quired for suc­cess at this land­mark over­whelms busi­ness­es that are not se­ri­ous about mas­ter­ing cus­tomer suc­cess.

Last week, I shared that we are in the age of cus­tomer as­ton­ish­ment. It is sim­ply not suf­fi­cient to just keep cus­tomers hap­py, they need to be as­ton­ished. The co­nun­drum fac­ing some busi­ness­es that may not have even got­ten out of the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence start­ing block is re­al.

The busi­ness­es at this fourth land­mark in the cus­tomer as­ton­ish­ment jour­ney, are those that are the most out­stand­ing in their busi­ness sec­tors and have be­come the ref­er­ence points for the gold stan­dard in de­liv­er­ing an ex­pe­ri­ence that leaves every cus­tomer as­ton­ished.

These are the busi­ness­es that have dis­cov­ered that through su­perla­tive cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence-as-a-ser­vice, re­peat busi­ness be­comes pre­dictable, caus­ing rev­enue to be­come pre­dictable. This is not rock­et sci­ence, it’s cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence sci­ence, based on the sim­ple tenet of com­pound­ing cus­tomer val­ue and we do know how pow­er­ful­ly the law of com­pound­ing works.

Com­pound­ing cus­tomer val­ue is de­rived from the stack­ing of these four key land­marks. A word of cau­tion. This chain of ef­fort is not for the busi­ness that wants a quick fix, but the busi­ness that wants to cre­ate a sus­tain­able cus­tomer pipeline based on cus­tomer as­ton­ish­ment and its sup­port­ing ac­tors of sus­tain­able in­fra­struc­ture, tal­ent­ed peo­ple, friend­ly process­es and mod­ern-day tech­nol­o­gy.

But, most of all, com­pound­ing cus­tomer val­ue is best suit­ed to busi­ness­es that wish to be­come forces of na­ture in keep­ing their cus­tomers in a nev­er-end­ing state of as­ton­ish­ment.

The high-val­ue ques­tion is, “Where is your busi­ness on this land­mark con­tin­u­um?”