When is it appropriate to favour the customer experience over profits?

Harley Manning: You should never put the customer experience ahead of profits

According to Harley Manning of Forrester, the answer to the question “When should you favor customer experience over profits?” is “Never!  In his post Harley recounts the following:

After some preamble about the pressures his company was under to increase revenue and profits, he asked, “Given that, when should we put aside the need for profits and fund customer experience projects instead?”

His question surprised me. And I clearly surprised him when I responded, “Never.” I let that hang in the air for a moment so it could sink in. Then I added, “You should never put aside the need for profits when you fund customer experience projects.”

I could see that people were a little confused so I went on. “You should only fund customer experience projects that will produce profits. That’s why you do those projects in the first place. And if you have other kinds of projects that will produce better business results, do them instead. But if you take the time to create the business models for your CX projects you’ll probably find that they’ll produce better ROI than most of the initiatives they’re competing against.”

Does Jeff Bezos agree with Harley Manning’s take on customer experience and profits?

As soon as I read this post by Harley Manning the following thought came to mind: what about Jeff Bezos and Amazon?  It occurred to me that Jeff Bezos has consistently sacrificed short-term profits in order to attain the long term leadership.  And how has he gone about attaining that leadership? By focussing on creating compelling value for the customer.  And what is a key ingredient of this compelling value?  The customer experience.

If you doubt my words then read the following post: 6 Things Jeff Bezos Knew Back in 1997 That Made Amazon a Gorilla.  Here is one particularly relevant part of this post:

Bezos: It does fit into my view. Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. Ebooks had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.

When is it appropriate to favour the customer experience over profits? 

There is no simple answer to this question. Why?  First, one has to be clear that there are all kinds of profits.  There are this years profits. There are the profits that will be made in the next three years. And if you are Jeff Bezos you are thinking about the profits that will be made over the next seven years. If you are Toyota you might just be looking out 20+years.

Second, there is the matter of what falls under the umbrella term of ‘Customer Experience’.  Some, possibly like Harley Manning, see it simply as customer interaction management – how the customer is treated at various touchpoints along the customer journey.  Others, like me, include the brand (as in reputation not marketing messaging) and the core product under the Customer Experience umbrella.

Where do I stand on this?  My answer is “It depends!” What does it depend upon?  It depends on you and your circumstances. Do you have the leeway to play the long-term game?  Then I say make the short-term sacrifice and go for long-term market leadership.  If you do not have that leeway then you have to follow Harley Manning’s advice.  And in doing so you will leave open the door to the likes of Jeff Bezos – the disruptors. Which is great because progress relies on disruptors to shaky up things up and create ‘new value’ for customers.