Make Some New Friends: Jimi Hendrix and Customer Experience Part 2

Do the names Linda Keith and Chas Chandler ring a bell? Well, without their influence, we may have never heard of Jim Hendrix.

In May 1966, Keith ran into the then-obscure Hendrix playing at the Cheetah club in New York. “He was astonishing – the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence,” she recalls. “Yet nobody was leaping about with excitement. I couldn’t believe it.”

Keith convinced Chas Chandler to come see Hendrix on August 2, 1966 in Manhattan. Chandler was the bass player for the hit group “The Animals” at that time. “He was the best guitar player I had ever heard.,” Chandler would later comment of the performance. Chandler became intent on making Hendrix a star – but to do that, Hendrix had to go to a new place to start fresh – the U.K.

Successful customer experience for contact center directors also means going to new places – organizationally. The contact center is a critical cog in the “Big 3” of customer engagement, where the propensity of customer interactions (vs. transactions) occurs between the web, the mobile device, and the contact center. In contrast, many businesses are not organized holistically across these three critical elements. And on occasion, each domain architects conflicting business outcomes.

Leading companies view the customer journey as a singularity from a mobile, web, and contact center perspective. Managers of these domains are beginning to exist under common organizational designs. Many are beginning to report into chief experience of digital officers.

Much like Jimi Hendrix needed to make some new friends to achieve success, so it is in business. If you’re operating in isolation, expand your organizational boundaries if you haven’t yet. Make some new friends in your mobile and web application teams. Customer experience stardom may be right around the corner for you also!

Discover more about how Cisco’s customer experience offerings can help make music for your customers here: http://www.cisco.com/assets/sol/coll/use_case_tool/outcome.htm#~customersatisfaction