Earth: The Customer Experience

So, folks, along the lines of empowered customer experience, I was inspired today by a blog post from The Debatable called "Folks, it's only one planet... let's take care of it." Full disclosure: the blog is written by a friend.

Here's where I got to after reading his post: The earth offers each of us one heck of an experience, but it differs profoundly from the retailers, service providers, or other experience suppliers we deal with every day. Where's the contact us link? The 800 number? The customer service agent for earth?

It's us! It's us, or nobody. And, therein lies the rub. This biggest, baddest, all-enveloping customer experience relies to a great degree on us - the users - to infer what's right and wrong with the whole offering. We have to make choices, collectively, about what to do about it, too. As if this challenge isn't significant enough, we probably won't be around to see the outcome of the initiatives we undertake, either.

So the question is, what are we going to do about it? Unlike a grocery store, we can't simply decide "this place is too hot to be comfortable, so I'll shop across the street." Where are we gonna go? Venus? I don't think so.

No, we have to solve this customer experience dilemma without a ready substitute at hand. It's a realtime monopoly, and yet there is the opportunity to influence the path forward. The opportunity is limited for most of us as individuals, but collectively we can exert remarkable influence. This is our co-op. We own the joint.

The choice, ultimately, will play out in a repeating cycle of the coalescence and dissolution of groups of various views, how they haggle with one another, and the consensus reached on a path forward "as of now." Step by step, course-correcting and modifying the path as new insights are gleaned, we will move into the future.

Without espousing a particular viewpoint here (I did that in a comment on The Debatable earlier), I am asking you to have a viewpoint, to express it, and to take what you consider the appropriate action. It may be an activist viewpoint, it may be a concessionary viewpoint, it may be one altogether different. Please have one, share it, act on it. As customer experiences go, this one is a biggy. Let's all be the engaged customers we so value hearing from in our businesses. Let's make a difference.