Opinion: The Transference of Expectation meets The Great Resignation

Customer experience is one of the most important focus points for business today.

You can't trust anything you read, ad fraud is rife, attracting attention is hard. Investing in CX comes down to optimising the most valuable channel anyone can tap into — word of mouth.

A great dining experience you'll tell your friends about comes when the server isn't stressed to their eyeballs. An outstanding tax return you'll share with colleagues comes from an accountant managing a reasonable client list.

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Getting customer experience right isn't easy, but it has been simple. Perhaps not so straightforward any more though..

The Transferring Of The What Now?

The Transference of Expectation is a really fancy term that consultants use to make themselves sound smart.

It also refers to a trend we’re seeing in modern day consumption, once brought to life by IBM’s Bridget van Kralingen who once said, “the last best experience that anyone has anywhere, becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.”

While i'm reluctant to refer to the ‘Uber’ of anything, it has also been referred to as The Uber Effect.

So what does that mean in real terms?

It means booking in an event should be as intuitive as Airbnb. The checkout process should be as seamless as Amazon. As simple as *shudder*

And when those plucky group of upstarts known as Millennials have the lowest opinion of most industries’ digital services, we can be assured this is a known and real thing.

Get your act together, people.

Calling It Quits

Then there’s that other phenomenon we’re hearing rumblings about, where everyone is fed up of the job and ready to chuck it in the second things show signs of stabilising.

The Great Resignation

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021.

Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record-breaking 10.9 million open jobs at the end of July.

No, we’re not the US... We usually lag by about 6 months to a year (ok fine, that's being generous). So while the University of Melbourne are saying we’re not seeing it just yet, expect it in our futures.

So if this phenomenon is indeed headed our way as the burnout and rethinking of work-life balance inevitably follows the anxious tensions of COVID, how are we supposed to meet these heightened expectations of delivering the best experience everywhere?

The hospitality industry is already experiencing it first hand. They are struggling to attract and retain everything from servers to waiters to chefs to baristas. That delicious morning brew is going to become harder to find — and far more expensive.

How will this affect professional services though? Will junior lawyers want to put in the hard yards required to learn the game and move up the ranks?

“[Employees] don’t want to return to backbreaking or boring, low wage, sh-t jobs,” Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, told TIME magazine. “Workers are burned out. They’re fed up. They’re fried. In the wake of so much hardship, and illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.”

Delivering the best customer experience is not always within the most glamorous of responsibilities and, perhaps, has been criminally undervalued by a lot of businesses to date.

If your front line workers, your customer service people or other customer facing staff feel they’re in a ‘sh*t’ job, what’s the incentive to get them to superserve and overdeliver?

Investing in technology will only take you so far, there will be an incubation period of behaviour change and uptake and at the end of the day, its never seamless. So you will need bodies in the short term.

Where will they come from?

Customer experience is the battlefield and this feels like its going to become even more important as The Great Resignation starts to bite.

Will customer behaviour change in line with lowered expectations? A downward decline of expectations as the ‘best’ no longer becomes available?

We’ve come to accept people are ‘doing their best’ during the pandemic and understand deliveries will be missed, home internet drops out, stuff gets missed.

Could this be the heralding of The Great Reversal?

How will the landscape shift with expectations around customer experience?

This article was republished with permission from Beau Ushay on Linkedin