Scalability, Repeatability, Sustainability, and Consistency.

These aren’t the sexiest part of a CX program, but they are four of the key components that drive measurable success when used in conjunction with a modern experience playbook. When you design meaningful experiences, they must be able to be scalable, sustainable, and consistent as well as magical, unique, story-driven, and feel highly personalized.

A lot of people talk about creating experiences for customers, and I listen carefully for evidence of all these critical features. I rarely find them.

Most companies can deliver one or two, but never the full complement. That means their overall success and ROI will be limited. Lots of CX programs get a black eye - simply because they failed to deliver the whole strategy.

A good example of this is residential construction: every residential builder loves to take pictures of homebuyers with some version of their corporate logo on the day they close on their home, break ground, or sign their contract. They treat this like it’s a magical moment. In reality, it is a bland, homogenous, commonplace tactic used by every builder, everywhere. The blatant use of the builder’s logo and builder’s messaging in these pictures is gratuitous marketing - not homebuyer storytelling.

Does this scale and is it consistent? Yes. Mind numbingly so. Are these moments unexpected, special, personalized storytelling? Absolutely not. Do these moments differentiate that builder or their clients from others? Absolutely not. Are they repeatable and sustainable? Yes.

And cheap and easy. Which is why companies do them.

This is a great example of delivering the operationalized side of CX without the magic, unique, highly differentiated side of the equation. Experiences like these still take resources, but without delivering the ROI, referral, or retention metrics worthy of any investment.

Industries everywhere are littered with these types of experiences. And there are just as many on the other side of the equation: highly personal, unexpected but without any ability to be delivered consistently at scale or sustained over time. I hear just as many over the top, one-off stories. Lovely, but not sustainable, repeatable, consistent, or scalable. They aren’t designed for efficiency, cost, or ease of execution.

To succeed at CX, you must have a playbook, operational model, and infrastructure that delivers the whole program. All three of these are essential. That’s why great CX is so truly rare, because good enough is not good enough.