Banks benchmark banks. Hospitals benchmark hospitals. Airlines benchmark airlines. Telcos benchmark telcos.
Customers Don't Live Inside Industries
It makes sense but it may also be limiting how differently we think about Customer Experience.
You may ask why? Because customers don't live inside industries.
The same person who checks into a hotel and is recognized before having to explain anything may walk into a hospital the next morning and repeat the same information three times.
The customer who tracks a €20 delivery in real time may have little visibility over the status of a much more important banking request.
The passenger receiving proactive updates before asking what is happening starts expecting that same level of communication everywhere else.
Customer expectations travel across industries, even when organizations don't.
So, what has another industry already learned about human experience that yours hasn't?
Learning Beyond Your Industry
Let's look at Hospitality as an example. It has spent decades understanding anticipation, recognition, personalization, service recovery and those small details that make someone feel genuinely looked after.
And those principles are increasingly relevant far beyond hotels while cross-industry learning should never mean copying.
A hospital does not need to become a five-star hotel.
A bank does not need to behave like an airline.
And putting a hospitality ritual into a different environment does not automatically create a better experience.
The value is in understanding what makes a great Customer Experience work, then adapting those lessons to your own industry and customer journey.
For example, recognition in hospitality could become better continuity of care in healthcare.
Proactive communication in aviation could change how a telecom company handles an outage.
The visibility we now take for granted in e-commerce could challenge how a bank communicates the progress of an application.
And the discipline around service recovery in hospitality could make us rethink how complaints are handled almost anywhere.
Experience Has to Be Observed, Not Just Mapped
But there is another part of this that matters. You have to get close enough to the experience to understand what actually needs fixing.
A customer journey can look perfectly logical on a PowerPoint slide and feel completely different when you live it.
At CXM, we go into the field.
We walk the customer journeys ourselves. We observe real interactions, conduct mystery shopping, listen to customers and employees, analyze feedback and operational data, and work directly with the teams delivering the experience. We look across people, processes, technology, communication and departments to uncover the gaps, friction and missed opportunities that traditional Customer Experience assessments can easily overlook.
We work across healthcare, telecom, aviation, banking, technology, hospitality and government. Our teams bring experience from both inside organizations and from the outside, across different markets and operating environments.
From Benchmarking to Differentiation
So when we look at an experience problem, our reference point isn't limited to what others in that sector are doing but we want to ask ourselves: Who, anywhere, has solved this human problem exceptionally well?
Then comes the important part: deciding what can be transferred, what needs to be adapted and what should be created specifically for that organization.
"Benchmarking your industry can help you improve, but if everyone is studying the same competitors, adopting the same best practices and solving problems in similar ways, eventually everyone starts looking remarkably similar." says Abdulaziz Ahmed, Senior Partner CXM.
The good becomes the baseline.
For us, the work doesn't end with identifying friction or delivering recommendations.
We go from finding it to fixing it to differentiating it.
Look Further
So next time you're looking for ways to differentiate your Customer Experience, don't only look at your competitors.
Look further. Your next distinctive Customer Experience idea may already exist. Just not in your industry.
Sometimes, it takes an outside-in, cross-industry perspective to see what others in your market are not looking for.
At CXM, that's exactly where we look.
We go into the field, experience your customer journeys first-hand, uncover what needs fixing and bring cross-industry thinking to what could make your experience distinctly yours.
Want to know what your industry could learn from another? Talk to us.