"The Red Queen Effect"
'It’s difficult enough just to keep up with what’s going on in the fastchanging CX world. But read this book and you might be able to get a little bit ahead of your own competitors, at least for the time being …'
Transform Customer Experience is your ultimate guide for putting your customers first. Don Peppers, founder of CX Speakers and the Peppers and Rogers group, writes an insightful foreword in Isabella's book about "The Red Queen Effect", which describes the rapidly changing CX landscape.
'There’s an evolutionary feature known to biologists as ‘the Red Queen effect’ based on a tale in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice meets a chess piece — the Red Queen — who explains that in Looking-Glass Land, everyone has to keep running ever faster, but they never seem to get very far because the landscape is moving with them: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’ In the natural world, biologists have found that species must continually adapt and evolve just to keep in the same place, both with respect to other species competing with them for food and to avoid predators. Every time squirrels get quicker, foxes need to develop faster refl exes, because only the fastest foxes will catch enough prey, which means the squirrels have to become a little bit quicker still, because only the quickest squirrels will live long enough to pass on their own genes. The Red Queen effect also applies to the business world, and to the customer experience space. Companies work hard to deliver a better experience so they can prosper by winning more customers, keeping them longer, and growing them bigger than their competitors. But their competitors are also innovating and evolving, so every successful CX initiative is soon replicated by other companies, which means that to be competitively successful, a company has to differentiate its own CX even more effectively. We can call it ‘creative destruction’ or ‘survival of the fittest’, but innovation is a constant business process, and it is especially pronounced in areas characterised by technological disruption or rapid change, such as the customer experience space. Three fundamental technological developments explain why ‘customer experience’ continues to be such a topic of discussion in business strategy sessions, leadership meetings and corporate boardrooms around the world:
Cost-efficient interactivity. Companies can now interact with individual customers, one at a time, and they can scale these personalised interactions across millions of customers costefficiently.
Customer demand. Today’s customers can easily fi nd detailed information online, check social connections for reviews or references, and use self-service apps to complete transactions, with the result that they have not only taken charge of the buying process, but have developed ever higher expectations with respect to what an acceptable customer experience consists of.
Commoditisation of products. Automation and globalisation have undermined nearly all proprietary product features, dramatically increasing the competitive importance of strong customer relationships and trust.
Today, of course, we would take each of these three technological developments for granted; they’re obvious, and each points to a greater need for a business to be capable of delivering a competitively successful customer experience. But as focused as business leaders have now become on the customer experience, many senior executives still don’t fully understand the magnitude of the task in front of them. Nor do they appreciate the rate at which this task is evolving, as ever more companies embrace the idea themselves and work hard to win the competitive battle. And who is their adversary? Who are businesses trying to triumph over in this competitive struggle? You, that’s who. Your business and every other business in the world. That’s why you should read Isabella Villani’s book, Transform Customer Experience. It is absolutely jam-packed with the latest thinking, the most competitively successful ideas and practical case studies from around the world. You’ll find checklists of everything from channels and metrics to dealing with customer expectations and preparing for emerging technologies. Isabella Villani’s many insights are smart, well informed, up to date and helpful. She draws freely from a wealth of personal experience in the discipline, as well as from a voluminous assortment of expert opinions and judgements offered by other authorities on the subject. It’s difficult enough just to keep up with what’s going on in the fastchanging CX world. But read this book and you might be able to get a little bit ahead of your own competitors, at least for the time being'
From services to products, online to in-person, small-scale to multinational, your customers’ loyalty depends on how you interact with them. Transform Customer Experience is your ultimate guide to putting your customer first. Author and CX expert Isabella Villani shows how you can implement a customer strategy from planning to execution.
We are always keen to engage in a further conversation on all things CX! If you would like to learn more, please reach out to me or any of the team. Warm regards, Isabella and the team at Exceed Global Isabella Villani Company Director and Chief Customer Officer Exceed Global 0407 889 987 Isabella.villani@exceedglobal.com
