It was about six months ago, and I was finishing up a news story about a martech company that was introducing an application that was designed to help companies better understand whether a customer was interested in making a purchase.
I’m not going to name the company. I don’t have to — it could be almost any martech company. That was the problem.
Although I was fascinated to see how technologies like artificial intelligence were beginning to change the way organizations could collect and use intent data, I also knew it wasn’t enough.
In other areas of my work, I was writing about companies’ branding strategies, and their efforts to infuse a greater sense of creativity into how they talked about their purpose or values.
Then, in the background, were the customers — the people who were often fed up with the companies they dealt with and would have laughed at some of the news I was reporting.
These customers often didn’t want to have their intent data tracked, because they felt preyed upon. Worse, once they actually made a purchase, they struggled to get the help they needed to actually do what they had wanted to do.
Long wait times on the phone. E-mail messages that went nowhere. Social media posts that were ignored. We could all name examples.
This was despite the fact that there has been a steady rise in interest around customer experience (CX) management. I’ve been coming across more firms with entire CX teams and dedicated chief customer officers.
I know there have been a few other publications covering this area, but not in a way that I felt would really inspire them to fulfill the mandates they had been given.
360 Magazine aims to address that void. I want to discover and share the elements that contribute not only to better customer experiences, but the world’s best customer experiences.
I know this will be a tall order. But I’m doing it with a deep sense of meaning and value that such stories could potentially bring to the world.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope you’ll keep reading, subscribe and be a part of the history of CX as it is being written — and published — here.