Today marks the end of one of the most influential TV shows of the last decade. Definitely so in the fantasy genre. The final episode will air today, and there are parallels between customer experience and the show itself. You can learn from the show writers’ mistakes and apply it for your own CX efforts.
How can a show, and a company have similarities? Well, creating loyalty to the show and scoring high in TV Show NPS (viewer ratings) is all about the experience. The great movies and the great shows have something magical to them. Just like products and services that make people crave for more. This magical substance is what we define as customer experience.
1. Emotional, irrational. GoT creates an emotional bond. Through the characters, the plot twists. All the little details. Just like your product. It’s not the core value proposition that will create the craving for more. That’s only the satisfaction part. The emotional, irrational part will come from small details. Everybody will try to understand why they feel one way or the other but rarely get it.
2. Surprising. The emotional bond gets stronger through constant surprises. Emotionally striking. It’s tough to create unexpected parts that are emotionally moving. Probably the toughest challenge in CX architecting.
3. Consistent. A good show, just like exceptional customer experience, is consistent. If anybody can die, anybody should die. If you create a family-focused experience, you should focus on families all the time and make sure you are not putting singles first when all your products, services, branding was about families. It will make people feel off.
As of now, more than 1 million have signed the change.org petition to rewrite season 8. That’s a lot, but not much compared to the number of worldwide viewers. However, critics are the same around the world. The show lost its magic. Inconsistent behavior of characters carefully crafted arcs closed with the #gotsimplicity of a Disney cartoon. The grandiose scenery, the great battles, and the world are still the same. The core and the storyline have not changed. It’s the spicing that is missing. The small details that might seem irrelevant or less important to a generalist, but essential to the expert. The small pieces that build on top of the core and create the experience.
Even if making these shortcuts in the experience is intentional, it provides a great example of how you can ruin an experience. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and resources to make customers believe that this is your authentic experience. And just because you don’t have time or the resources, you ruin nine years of investment, for the sake of the bottom line or other factors I can’t even imagine. This is what we will remember the show of and not the surprising twists and emotional ups and downs.
You are an emotional architect when working with customer experience. You plant the seeds, but you should already have the final experience expectations in mind. You can’t roam around ignoring the rules and just focusing on the tangible, core values that everybody understands.
You have to be the magician. The person that understands how the world works and creates magic for everybody sitting in the audience. That’s the job of the CX leader.
To create the wonder and to distill it to parts that makes sense to everybody in the organization but still add up to something more, something irrationaland magical.
So next time you are in the board meeting arguing about CX and the small steps, use GoT final season as an example. Pretty sure everyone will get it!
Do you see any other similarities between your customer experience work and the GoT? Add yours in the comment section below!
