Why Do We Need A Customer Experience Day?

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My birthday is coming up. It’s a special day in my life. Makes me think about other special days during the year that we can all celebrate. For example, by month:

January 21st is National Hug Day
February 22nd is Thinking Day
March 21st is World Puppetry Day
April 11th is International Louie Louie Day (really)
May 4th is Star Wars Day
National Donut Day in the U.S. is the first Friday of June
System Administrator Appreciation Day is the last Friday in July
August 20th is World Mosquito Day
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day
October 23rd is Mole Day
November 19th is World Toilet Day
December 15th is International Tea Day

irtually every thing, and every cause, has its own ‘day’.Wednesday, October 5th was the Fourth Annual September Customer Experience Day. It’s presumably a 24 hour block of time in which the development, maturity, and future of customer experience can be addressed as a discipline, and as an organizational focus. As a site set up to promote CX Day, this is done through “online events, company celebrations, and local networking events across the world.”

One of the keystone events was a Twitter chat on the state and direction of customer experience, led by two professional CX colleagues. The issues they addressed included:

– Concerns regarding current perceptions of customer experience
– Recognizing customer experience as a discipline
– How to build knowledge in customer experience as a discipline
– Increasing organizational adoption of customer experience within worldwide organizations
– Future key areas of customer experience focus
– The customer experience profession ‘as it matures and develops as a discipline’.

CX Day also identified ‘CX Impact Award Winners’ which, per the site, is ”aimed at individuals from front-line employees, managers, and/or senior leaders who practice excellence in CX within their organization or the CX industry….” Recognition such as this helps bring needed attention to customer experience and customer value delivery.

Perhaps the most important thing that CX Day does is ask individuals and organizations to reflect on where they stand, and where they are going, with stakeholder experience. This includes identification and and assessment regarding the degree of sincere focus on customer experience and value delivery, and more broadly on employee experience as wel,l within the cultural DNA of the organization. The objective is to demonstrate and/or reinforce how a stakeholder-obsessed company culture helps organizations succeed through providing optimal experience.

This will continue, and it should. There’s a ‘save the date’ for next year’s CX Day. For those of us in the customer experience business, it is beneficial to have a day to a) put a spotlight on delivering stakeholder value and b) feel good about doing that.

With that said, my perspective on the subject of customer experience is simple, and it’s the same as when companies proudly announce “Today is customer appreciation day”. Why is it just today that customers are appreciated? Every day should be customer appreciation and experience day – for every enterprise, every practice, and every employee within that enterprise.

Michael Lowenstein, PhD CMC
Michael Lowenstein, PhD CMC, specializes in customer and employee experience research/strategy consulting, and brand, customer, and employee commitment and advocacy behavior research, consulting, and training. He has authored seven stakeholder-centric strategy books and 400+ articles, white papers and blogs. In 2018, he was named to CustomerThink's Hall of Fame.

1 COMMENT

  1. ‘And so say all of us’! Thanks for posting this Michael – I completely agree on all fronts. The simple fact that there is now a day to celebrate and acknowledge the development of the profession is a wonderful thing. Yet it is even more important that every day from now until the end of time is a day that we should focus on the customer….. and our own people!

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