the irony of great customer experience

The great irony of exceptional customer experience is this:

The less "experience" you have with a company, the better your perception often is.

Think about it. The best experiences are often invisible.

The bill that pays itself automatically.

The package that has just arrived on time.

The refund appears in your account without a single phone call.

The ideal experience is often no experience at all.

But when direct engagement is unavoidable, the standard shifts. It must be personal, fast, and efficient. No repeating information, no confusing phone trees, no waiting on hold for a simple answer.

The goal for every department — Product, Marketing (looking at you, lead capture forms), Sales, Service — should bend toward reducing customer effort.

So why do so many companies still get this wrong?

They fall into a classic trap: designing from the inside out.

Most companies design a service blueprint. This is the company's internal view, a process map focused on efficiency, metrics, and "how we want the customers to interact with us" for our own efficiency and measurability.

What they should be designing for is the customer journey. This is the customer's reality — the natural, sometimes messy, path they are on to learn, solve a problem, or achieve a goal. It prioritizes their needs and perspective above all else.

Exceptional experiences are, and always will be, designed from the outside in.

This is where AI can become more than a buzzword. It's the technology that finally allows us to bridge this gap at scale and take a giant step forward in reducing effort for the customer. For the first time, we can use AI to truly design from the outside in — anticipating where a customer is on their journey, understanding their intent, and personalizing a path forward for them in real-time.

It's about building for their path, not ours.

Are you building service blueprints for your own efficiency, or are you designing for your customer's journey?

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