Before we exit 2011, let’s not forget to celebrate. By most measures, this year marks the 10 year anniversary of the Customer Experience industry.
Back in 2000, the usability industry was starting to realise that their core techniques could easily be extended to measure not just whether people could use something, but their total experience of it. This was a natural extension – the three component measures of usability are “effectiveness”, “efficiency” and “satisfaction”. All it needed was a fourth measure – “engagement” – and a measure of the whole experience could be established.
Over the course of 2000 and 2001, this understanding started to solidify into a new discipline, and discussions at places like the Usability Professionals Association and the Information Design Association started to include the words “Customer Experience” and “User Experience”. These rapidly gained momentum, and by 2001 the industry was forming, with companies starting to advertise “Customer Experience” solutions, and the first job adverts emerging asking for “Customer Experience” experts.
As the terms “User Experience” and “Customer Experience” started to gain a foothold, in February 2001, I started a company called ‘UXP’, standing for “User Experience”. This trend for shortening ‘experience’ to ‘XP’ was common at the time, and was solidified in October of that year when Microsoft released Windows XP (where the “XP” stands for “Experience”). As it turns out, they hadn’t really solved very much of the User Experience of that Operating system, although it was still a lot better than Windows 2000. The power of this shift is clear – ten years later, 60% of Corporate Desktops still run Windows XP, while only 0.1% run Windows 2000.
Whilst “XP” is no longer used, the use of the ‘X’ is still maintained today in the common practise of shortening “User Experience” to UX and “Customer Experience” to CX.
2001 was also the year when Foviance, the company I now work for, was born, as “the Usability Company”. Over the last 10 years, the industry has undergone a series of consolidations, and lots of other industries have pushed into the market, with several mergers and acquisitions. However, Foviance’s grounding in the basics of Customer Experience measurement has always given it a solid basis. It was always one of the bigger players, and is now in the top 5 Customer Experience specialist consultancies in the world. (I’m not including the “not-Customer-Experience-but-branded-as-it” agencies, which are essentially creative design etc – not at all what Customer Experience is about).
Being a part of an industry as it was born was very exciting. Helping to shape an industry as it has matured, and developing new methodologies has been a lot of fun, and seeing it become accepted, and increasingly adopted by major clients as a core part of their strategy and business operations has been both a relief and an affirmation of what many of us realised back in 2001 – The Customer Experience is a key differentiator in most industries.
I’m looking forward to the next 10 years, as Customer Experience becomes more integrated into strategies and business operations. As companies place more and more focus on the Customer Experience, more will realise that the core measures of that experience must be based in solid methodologies. Those who were around in 2001, when we talked about hypertext theory, library science, psychological profiling and information design will increasingly see their industry going through major transformations, yet remaining strangely familiar.
Thanks to everyone who was there when we started this wonderful thing back in 2001.
