One of the ways that I describe experience design, and more specifically for the purposes of this episode customer experience, is by asking people to imagine the worst customer experience that they have had. And unfortunately for all of us, there are a lot of them.

It is probably easy to remember the bad experiences. But what about our best experiences. The times that we felt cared for, appreciated, thought of, where someone did something that made us feel valued.

The job of the experience design and CX profession is, in part, to make the positive experiences common and make the negative experiences exceedingly rare.

There is a lesson in Buddhism "that life is inherently full of suffering and that it's impossible to live without it.” But even though life is full of suffering, that doesn’t mean that our customer experiences have to be.

To talk us through these points, we welcome Valerie Peck to the Experience by Design studios. For those in customer experience, Valerie Peck is a well known thought leader. And for sure Valerie has some thoughts about the state of CX and whether companies really care about customers despite their vocal assurances.

We talk about creating experiences versus pushing products, and how being solely about profit can lead to cutting experiential corners. We discuss whether companies really want to have a relationship with their customers, or just perhaps a passing acquaintance. When companies give customers surveys, do they really want to know what customers think? Or is a survey the best way of doing nothing?

Valerie has thoughts on CX consulting and the challenge of working with clients that don’t get it, and frankly don’t want to. We explore companies like Southwest and Boeing who “got it”, only to lose it in the pursuit of profit at the expense of experience rather than because of it.

Finally, Valerie describes applied customer intelligence, the upcoming CX reckoning, why companies should be more like minor league baseball, and how she helps companies stop abusing their customers so that they come back

Valerie Peck LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/valerie-peck-4b143/