Customer Experience Interview with Fergal McHugh, Arekibo

With the upcoming joint event with our partner Sitefinity, we have interviewed our speakers to understand what customer experience means to them, the challenges companies are facing, strategies to address these issues, and the future of CX. First up, we have Fergal McHugh.

Who are you and what do you do?

I am Head of Strategy at Arekibo. My role is primarily focused on helping organisations figure out how to use digital to improve what they do.

What does Customer Experience mean to you?

Customer Experience is about the customer’s whole interaction with a business, every touchpoint, every conversation, every encounter. I mainly look at things from a digital perspective, but what is important about the idea of Customer Experience is the way it forces you to look beyond your discipline and to think about what you are doing in digital in the context of that wider engagement. And that is healthy because it is easy to get locked into the perspective, and the prejudices of your own discipline.

What challenges do you think people (or companies) are facing in CX?

One of the key CX challenges organisations face relates to consistency. For example, say I, as a customer, have a series of interactions with your business: phone, in person, your social media, maybe an online self-service helpdesk. These interactions are scattered, in terms of context, channel and time. Some of them might be on the high street, others at home, days, weeks, months apart. So, here is a problem. If each time I have to tell my story again, provide the same information, I am going to get frustrated.

My view of your business might have started out with the idea that it is a single unified entity. But after a while, I begin to feel that I am dealing with a loose collection of functions that are not communicating with each other and are not really part of one team. That might not be true; it might just be that you have overly cumbersome processes or haven’t thought enough about the impact of asking me for the same information. But in many ways it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not — I think it — and that starts to erode my idea of your business as reliable, as an organisation I can trust. And this problem started with this lack of consistency from a CX perspective.

What kind of strategies should businesses use to solve these?

Well, it is necessary to plug the leaks and manage the gaps. Some of these are organisational challenges — getting processes to align and getting offline and online to play by the same rules. Others are technical challenges, such as ensuring systems can communicate with each other. And others again are design challenges — for example, my online presence may have evolved into a whole mess of websites and other online assets that I have created over the last few years, with varying interpretations of my brand. Or I don’t use the same core design principles across my regular and social media.

There are solutions. Selecting good foundational products, — like a solid Digital Experience Platform (DXP) which can enable you to gain control your wider digital surface — can make all the difference. And AI has a really important role to play here; for example, today’s automated chat interfaces can give our customers the flexibility of interaction that is lacking in other traditional web-based applications, so long as we don’t have to repeat ourselves later.

The solutions to the kinds of problems I have discussed can vary, and some don’t have global solutions; we need to address them head-on. But they all fall under the general idea of paying attention to the customer experience as a unifying principle. And I am suggesting that failing to address these kinds of challenges leads to the same outcome: it erodes trust and, in the long run, we lose customers.

What is the future of CX?

What we are working toward is precisely to look for ways to bring that customer experience together, make it seamless, and ensure that we are ready and responsive, with the data to hand at every interaction. But I think in the past we have been thinking a little too narrowly about this in terms of targeting and personalisation and closing the loop etc. The idea of consistency and joining the dots is bigger than that; it is also about improving things. This is essential both for the consistency of experience and for how I bring a customer’s data together.

But equally, we have to be careful about models that look like they are hoovering up and connecting every last bit of customer data to try and control their behaviour. We need to use what we know about the user and their “type” without getting “creepy” and without putting them at a disadvantage. It can’t just be about getting customers to do what we (as marketers, salespeople, customer service agents etc.) want them to do without letting them know how and what we are doing.

In my view, the future of CX is about building trust. In the digital space, this is going to involve combining classic UX principles about consistency, accessibility, user control, etc., with a transparent and “non-creepy” use of data that reinforces these principles. And we also need to pay more attention to data security and system reliability, and ensure these values are communicated to the customer in all interactions with our services.

Our event has been postponed due to the Covid-19 virus but keep updated on our Twitter and register your interest.