The Center of Experience: A blueprint for creating the experience-led enterprise

By Greg Kihlström

We find ourselves at an inflection point in the relationship between brands and their audiences, where customers and employees are demanding better and more valuable experiences. Companies must keep up with this demand in order to remain competitive. This includes competition for both customers as well as employees. More importantly, while many organizations have traditionally focused on external-facing initiatives first, it is the ones which start internally that have the greatest potential to provide long-term positive benefits.

"With honest expression and stimulating, provocative thinking, Greg comes from a place of passion and understanding of what it takes to achieve value. You'll be reading words from someone who has been there and done that. Who has a vision and a plan for the "how to" rather than just theory," says Diane Magers, CEO of Experience Catalysts.

The book provides a blueprint for organizations to implement a center of excellence incorporating brand experience, or the combination of customer and employee experience. Each property of experience is articulated and explained in detail, including brand, governance, culture, platform, measurement, and environment. The book also provides recommendations on how an organization can begin to implement a Center of Experience of their own, and how success is measured. The Center of Experience features a foreword from Diane Magers, Former Interim CEO for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and Founder and CEO of Experience Catalysts, and pioneer in the discipline of experience.

The Center of Experience is Kihlström's sixth book, following his Agile series, which started with 2016's The Agile Web, followed by The Agile Brand (2018) and The Agile Consumer (2019). It is his second book on customer and employee experience, following Digital Delight, which was compiled from a series of his articles and released in 2019.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543999051

Book preview

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Part 1:

Definition

Being a great place to work is the difference between being a good company and a great company.

– Brian Kristofek, President and CEO, Upshot

In this first section, we’re going to discuss what we mean by brand experience as a combination of customer and employee experience, and the purpose of the Center of Experience. We’ll also discuss what the Center of Experience is intended to accomplish, and provide a high-level definition of the elements involved.

Let’s get started with a definition of what is meant by brand experience.

Chapter 1.1

Brand experience

Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.

Richard Branson - founder of The Virgin Group

Change is inevitable and often necessary for companies to survive. We live in a time when, if your industry has not already been disrupted by some new approach, it will be soon. This is so prevalent, in fact, that many companies aren’t waiting for external disruptions and are enacting massive changes to themselves.

So, change is coming in many forms, and under many names. There is digital transformation, sometimes shorthanded to just transformation, along with other things like a move to substantial investments in data science and exponential technologies (often using artificial intelligence and machine learning). For many of us, experience is another one of these major game changers. Except that experience has always existed; it is just getting a new focus because of factors too numerous to do justice in this book. But needless to say, just as the big data craze (and its subsequent investments) of several years ago enabled a lot of the technology and digital transformation of today, there have been many factors that have contributed to the current era of experience such as the following (and many