Well not ghostbusters that’s for sure.

I’ve found the whole rush by marketers to become “customer experience” experts quite amusing. Why, just because people use hand-held computers, do marketers believe customer experience is a new phenomenon?

The customer experience has always been at the heart of everything marketers have done since the invention of marketing. If customers enjoyed their shopping experience (that’s marketing jargon BTW, not customer language) they returned to buy again. Simple.

If they didn’t enjoy it, they didn’t return. Simple.

Stores were designed to make it easy to find what you want, while order forms were also designed to make remote ordering as easy as possible. Staff were trained to assist customers and were known curiously as “customer service staff”. Call centres were established to provide customer service. The customer experience has always been standard marketing 101.

the customer experience wasn’t invented yesterday

So given that online sales are less than 10% of total retail sales, why are marketers faking a new essential requirement of marketing – the customer experience? Cue the acronyms – UX (User Experience) and CX (Customer Experience).

It’s damn obvious that using a website or an app, on either a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, has to be as easy as possible. It’s called “common sense”. Make life difficult for your customers and you’ll quickly lose them. Make it easy and they’ll keep buying from you.

Does it really need a whole genre of marketing for such a simple and obvious element of commerce? Me thinks we marketers do tend to navel gaze and play with ourselves too much.

But if you do need punters for your user testing, so you can fine tune your common sense service, who are ya gonna call? Well you don’t have to call, rather you visit an Australian start-up providing the goods.

It’s called askable and it is a platform where you can recruit people who fit your customer profile (sorry, persona) to attend your user testing sessions. It’s a service whose time has come. Check it out and mention my name for a special deal.

I have to go on a customer journey now. I need to convince askable to give you a special deal for your UX…