Three key takeaways from #CXNYC 2016

A number of years ago, I worked with a fellow who used to munge two common business phrases. When he was faced with something that was pretty easy to do, rather than saying "It's not rocket science" or "It's not brain surgery", he'd say: "It's not rocket surgery".

After all this time, I still hang onto this phrase, partly because it's somewhat humorous in its muddling of the two common refrains and partly because Customer Experience (CX) really is like rocket surgery in many ways. CX pros have to have incredible attention to detail and design, and success is often mission-critical for their organizations. Attending Forrester's CXNYC 2016 this week, as well as the CX Council meeting that preceded it, I can see all these current and future rocket surgeons working incredibly hard to get their metaphorical rockets off the ground.

There were so many great talks this week, and I can boil the ones I saw down to a set of three key themes:

• CX and the "business" need to support each other
• CX cannot succeed without considering User Experience (UX)
• CX must focus efforts where they're needed the most

Let's start with the first theme: CX and business supporting each other. One great example of this came in a presentation from Oak Labs Founder and CEO, Healey Cypher. Oak Labs has developed technology to make the clothing shopping experience come to life in an all new way. This new tech can sense what items were brought into a fitting room, and a touchscreen embedded in the room's mirror allows the shopper to request different sizes or colors be brought directly to them, and a real-time search of the store's inventory enables that remote thumbing-through of the racks. Even check-out is simplified via the touchscreen, helping the shopper skip the line at cash wrap. Where's the "business" side, you might wonder? Firstly, the store can now get a much better handle on what's in the fitting room at any point in time (reducing shrinkage). Secondly, the back-end analytics break down what sold--or didn't sell, empowering the store's buyer to have far more useful data in hand when negotiating with designers and other suppliers. It looks deceptively simple to the customer, yet it makes the experience easier for the customer and the store alike.

Now, let's talk about CX and UX. It's awfully easy to pigeonhole UX folks as people who geek out at the notion of a biometric scanner or a 3-D printer in the focus testing room--but there's just so much more to it. According to Staff UX Researcher Jill Fruchter, Etsy includes UX in every cross-functional project team, and that is a contributing factor to experiences that get them rated in the top 5% of Forrester's CX Index. Architects like NBBJ's Director of Digital Practice, Paul Audsley, consider lines of sight in stadiums for optimal event views, traffic flows and office space designs that maximize interactivity with co-workers, and other ways to build beautifully elegant and highly functional buildings. By considering the customer's needs and testing rigorously--even to the point of developing custom software to do intensive scenario modeling for honing their designs--NBBJ is applying rigorous user experience design to render a customer-centered outcome positioned for the greatest possible success.

Finally, there's the criticality of focusing your attention on whatever will bring you the biggest results. During one of the keynote sessions, Michael Moore, Vice President & General Manager of Call Center Operations at SiriusXM talked openly about the satellite radio provider's various channels (no pun intended): including in the car and on the desktop. Although digital experiences are still very important, particularly when it comes to providing good customer experiences, SiriusXM analyzed their customer service activity and found that roughly 60% of it was generated by customers calling from their mobile devices while in their car. This key data point made Moore's spending decision a lot easier: added investments needed to be focused first on the call center, to improve the experience of those customers calling from their cell phones.

For seasoned CX professionals, none of this should really come as a surprise. And truly, having been a CX practitioner for a number of years, the statements above aren't revelatory for me, either. That said, the value in attending events like CXNYC is to be reminded how we need to keep our eyes on the CX ball. With its usual mix of specific examples of successes and teachable moments, CXNYC continues to inspire me, and I'll be putting more of what I learned over the last few days into my own personal CX practice.

Remember:

Building and sustaining a CX practice requires that you can draw the connection between CX and the "business" side of the house.

While you can do CX without UX, embedding user experience into your customer experience practice enriches and fortifies your work. 

Finally, using data to help target your efforts where they will have the greatest impact supports the business AND supports your practice by helping you establish the wins needed to garner more promoters within your organization and ultimately prove the return on investment of CX.

It's been a great few days, and now it's time to head home and put this all to work. Rocket surgeons of the world, unite!