Member Article

Six Innovations That Changed The Customer Experience

Customer experience has never been more important, thanks to the advent of the internet age. While many companies realise how important it now is, with Forrester’s research finding that 72% of firms have made it their number one business priority, it is no easy task, as companies are estimated to lose £45bn a year due to poor customer experiences.

Yet, customer experience has a long and storied history and its evolution can be traced to six key innovations:

1. Catalogues: In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward was one of the first people to create what came to be known as a catalogue (of just one page). This innovation was copied by Richard Warren Sears, and the world-famous Sears Catalogue was born. This innovation meant that no matter where a consumer in the U.S. was based, they could order products from the Sears Catalogue and get them delivered to their front doors. This catalogues would be updated on a regular basis, as a way to create an engaged customer, thanks to new product ranges being added constantly.

2. Product Offers: In 1868, homemade medical product company, Watkins Liniment became the first company to offer a money-back guarantee, just under 20 years later, Coca-Cola issued the world’s first discount coupons. Both these innovations are still used to this date to help the customer experience.

3. Call Centre: While telephone switchboards were ubiquitous in the late 1880s and early 1900s as a customer engagement tool, it was the creation of Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) technology in the 1970s, which enabled companies to deal with large volumes of calls, this gave rise to the first ‘call centres’. In 1972, British Gas used ACD to handle up to 20,000 calls per week. By 1983, the term call centre was first coined as dedicated teams of expert customer agents were created to assist customers.

4. Customer Loyalty Programmes: Customer loyalty schemes are nothing new, dating back to the early 1900s, where retailer Green Shield awarded stamps for customers purchasing products. However, one of the first mass market loyalty schemes was created by American Airlines who launched their ‘Frequent Flyer’ programme in 1981. The programme has been so successful that even today it has over 50 million members. Meanwhile, Tesco introduced its ‘Clubcard’ in 1995, in which loyal customers were offering exclusive money-off deals and a host of partner products and it has attracted over 17 million members to date.

5. Email: By the 1990s, many companies had begun building websites and as internet usage grew year-on-year, this became a natural place to further customer engagement. Email catered to roughly 16 million users in 1995 and was seen as a more time efficient and cost effective manner in which to assist consumers, especially as customer relationship management (CRM) technology came to the fore, as pioneered by Gartner.

6. Social Media: With the launch of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, customer engagement was changed forever. However, it wasn’t an immediate revolution, but it was helped by the explosion in popularity of the smartphone. By 2011 alone, as mobile devices became more and more part of everyday life, 65 million tweets were sent each day. Meanwhile, in 2015 Facebook launched its Messenger for Business platform. Social media made customer engagement must more instantaneous than had previously been possible.

As shown by these six examples, customer engagement has never stood still. As newer innovations continue to grow, such as on-demand pools of brand experts, the pace of change will become even quicker in the future.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Marie Sagarzazu .