From the course: Design Thinking: Customer Experience

The age of the customer

From the course: Design Thinking: Customer Experience

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The age of the customer

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- Before we can understand customer experience, we have to understand the context of our world that has made it so important. Over the last several decades, technology has democratized information and shifted power from the hands of businesses to the hands of customers. Open access to information on price, product, and quality of experience has empowered customers to demand more from organizations. Where before we drove to the story, perused their selection and assumed that the price and quality of our purchase would meet expectations, we now rely on Amazon as our shopping advisor, checking its prices and reviews before plotting a purchase and trusting the immediate gratification of next-day delivery to our doorstep. As new products, services, and companies like Amazon have emerged in response to this demand, our expectations continue to heighten. We go so far as to use our experience with Amazon as a benchmark for evaluation, asking ourselves why can't everything be delivered in a day without impacting price. As customers have become empowered, companies have had to shift their focus to properly respond to those new and rising expectations, forcing many organizations to move from being company-centric, oriented around the needs of the organization, to being customer-centric, taking an outside-in approach to designing experiences that meet customer needs. Customer experience is a practice born out of this change in the market as being customer-centric has become critical to remaining relevant.

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