There’s a big difference between having a creative idea and actually bringing that idea to life. Marketing, sales, commerce, and service delivery systems must be built with careful, deliberate attention to every step in the process of designing and implementing the idea. Miss a key step or ignore a key process, data, or technology component in the architecture, and the entire experience might fail.

Enter the need for ‘experience architecture’ — a new frontier that blends the capabilities and competencies of ‘enterprise architecture’ and ‘experience design’ to enable next-level customer experience to come to life. Whereas enterprise architecture has historically focused on building the technology infrastructures needed to deliver products and services, experience architecture expands from this narrow focus to something much more valuable.

With companies now — hopefully — recognizing that customer experience is a primary strategic business driver, we’ve seen more of them expand their approach to experience architecture to encompass every point and moment at which the customer might interact with the brand.

Every moment of interaction is dependent on a complex combination of design, people, processes, business rules, security, data, integration, and infrastructure technology.

Today, experience architecture is more interconnected and holistic than ever before — and as a result, we’ve listed several interesting new trends that you should be aware of in order to build next-level customer experiences.

Where experience architecture and customer experience meet

Experience architecture has typically incorporated four main components:

Business Processes — the processes a company operates to provide products or services

Applications — the software and systems that run those processes

Data — the data, data storage, and data processing that power the applications

Infrastructure — all other information technology assets that the company uses

Notably, the customer experience is missing from this list — an oversight that companies are working double-time to correct.

However, there are many layers to the customer experience, and each layer introduces a new set of complexities that must be mapped out during the experience architecture process:

Marketing wants to engage customers through different channels — increasingly with personalized messaging and offers.

Sales needs to turn leads into customers with fast, frictionless experiences.

Commerce needs to make it as easy as possible for customers to find and buy products. In a post-COVID-19 world, contactless commerce is critical and digital capabilities are the great enablers.

Service wants to help customers solve their problems in a timely and efficient fashion, often via self-service channels and proactively.

To architect exceptional experiences at each of these opportunity areas and touchpoints, there must be strong integration and support from each individual business team.

If you truly want to achieve this, the entire organization must be on board — ensuring the tools, processes, policies, and people are in place to facilitate this level of experience delivery. Nothing should detract from the positive, frictionless customer experience at any point.

Done well, experience architecture can successfully tie together all these different strands of communication and the governance model that collectively shape customers’ perceptions about the brand, weaving those threads into a cohesive mantle that guides everything the company does.

In short, experience architecture gets the entire organization rowing in one direction: toward delighting the customer. It provides the pathway that leads customers to unabashed brand loyalty — those coveted customers who swear by one airline, who always buy Ford but never Chevrolet, or choose an iPhone over an Android smartphone every time and vice versa.

How experience architecture is evolving

As companies rise to meet this challenge and adapt their approach to experience architecture, many new trends are shaping the customer experience.

1. Employees matter

By now, most firms have realized the importance of putting the customer at the center of their business. Many have spent time creating and understanding customer journey maps and personas. Some have re-invigorated customer research initiatives through surveys and quantitative measures such as Net Promote Score (NPS®).

However, most have yet to rethink their employee’s experience. If a technology, process or system is not intuitive for employees to use and maintain, the customer experience falls apart before the customer has even entered the scenario.

Companies are increasingly recognizing that highly engaged and informed employees can provide a higher level of customer experience — and as a result, companies are investing more in the digital experiences for all employees, but especially these front-line workers who directly engage with customers. Employees are the critical bridge between customers and technology enablement of brand experiences.

2. Simplified technology

In a related vein, companies are increasingly seeking to simplify the technology they use to reach and engage with their customers. Since complicated tech stacks that involve multiple single-point solutions are more difficult to implement, operate, maintain, and scale, there’s a greater risk that the customer experience may be damaged over time.

In response, many companies are migrating to cloud-based solutions and all-in-one digital experience or engagement mega-platforms, such as Salesforce, Adobe, Pega, and SAP. Ultimately, simpler is better and more cost-effective and scalable in the long run.

3. AI insights

While companies today collect massive amounts of data, they often don’t know what to make of it or how to put it into action. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool to detect and highlight patterns within these reams of data.

When AI is applied to the customer journey, companies can derive insights needed to scale their delivery of service, predict new behaviors and better meet the needs of their customers.

For example, a company might normally run customer service hours from 8:00 a to 5:00 But if the company’s AI tool detects a pattern of customers attempting to reach the service department at 7:00 a the company can make an informed decision about how to adjust their hours and deliver a better customer experience.

4. Omnichannel experiences

The better companies get at experience architecture, the more each customer channel can be optimized and synchronized for more seamless customer experiences that span time, channels, screens, and moments.

Rather than focusing on creating a better online shopping experience or a mobile app experience, this more expansive view seamlessly incorporates new channels such as wearables, connected cars and other Internet of Things-connected devices with existing channels for more holistic experiences. The result is a smarter, more cohesive experience that aligns with customer expectations.

5. Better automation at scale

Interactive technologies — such as chatbots, virtual reality and voice commerce — received much hype and fanfare when they first emerged. Now, as these technologies are maturing, companies are revisiting how they can use these tools more effectively throughout the customer journey. Consumers too are becoming more comfortable with these technologies and are expecting these types of interactions.

Notably, automation tools can drive more rapid response times and increase customer satisfaction by quickly fielding the most common questions and problems customers have allowing for higher degrees of self-service. Connecting these tools to customer data platforms and other data sources allows for ultra-personalized customer interactions while also freeing up company employees to be able to focus on more complex, strategic issues.

6. Cybersecurity and data privacy

As more companies accelerate their digital transformation and more customers look to engage digitally in new and expansive ways, customers are demanding that brands be committed to transparency, honesty and data privacy. Companies must step up and honor those expectations.

In this increasingly digital environment, strong cybersecurity measures to protect both sensitive customer data and the organizational infrastructure — such as biometrics and multi-factor authentication — become table stakes rather than differentiators.

Consumers grow weary of data breaches and hacks that expose their personal information (financial, health, personal, etc.) to malevolent actors on the dark web. They will happily leave a brand that compromises their personal security without looking back.

Governments and regulators are holding companies to higher standards and making them accountable for data breaches as well. Experience architecture plays a crucial role in protecting everyone.

7. Customer lifetime value

Although customer lifetime value is certainly not a new concept, it’s playing an increasingly visible role in experience architecture. Budget realities mean that many companies must prioritize when and where they invest in customer experience.

From this perspective, it makes sense to prioritize investments that will either focus on those customers with the highest lifetime value, or that will serve to reduce churn and increase the lifetime value of a specific customer segment. Sophisticated analytics and mathematical models can help pinpoint these business-critical numbers.

Experience architecture can then enable targeting these segments with the right offers, experiences, personalization, etc. to keep them engaged over time.

Going forward

In the months and years to come, experience architecture will continue to become more sophisticated and successful at delivering amazing experiences.

Ultimately, though, it all starts with a simple premise: as organizations adapt to deliver continually better customer experiences, they must leave no stone unturned. They must coordinate and synchronize their enterprise architecture and technologies with the experiences they enable. This is a cohesive approach that is built for the future.

With the right approach to experience architecture, companies can gain a 360-degree view of the customer journey and can align their entire operational structure to optimize every step of the way.

Narcissistic CEOs weaken collaboration and integrity

There are a number of well-known CEOs, such as Uber’s Travis Kalanik and the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who have historically been described as narcissistic. Much of these leaders’ success has been attributed to personal qualities — including clear, bold vision, a huge amount of self-confidence, and an innate determination to win at all costs — that, though they can obviously be interpreted positively, are typically embodied by narcissists.

This personality type also includes less palatable traits such as entitlement, hostility when challenged, and a willingness to manipulate (all of which you could argue are also present in both Kalanik and Jobs — and others like them). Despite this, the uncompromising vision these individuals have for businesses can establish them as market leaders, and the success of the companies run by these individuals testifies to that.

While it’s easy to correlate success with personality type, let’s say we only see the 10% of narcissists that succeeded — then we call them visionaries. What we are not looking at is the 90% who failed and caused lasting damage to their businesses and the people who work for them. By talking about narcissism as though it might be positive and using the aforementioned examples as proof of this, we are paying an unfairly small amount of attention to how dangerous narcissists can be to the success of a business.

Understanding the narcissist

There are a number of traits that are associated with the narcissistic personality type, including arrogance, self-centeredness, and a lack of empathy. My team and I carried out research to examine the kind of company culture that narcissists inspire by conducting a series of field tests and surveys, one of which was completed by 900 business school alumni from Stanford, Santa Clara University, and UC Berkeley who worked at 56 large, publicly-traded high-tech firms based in the United States.

The research, carried out at Stanford Graduate School of Business, revealed that narcissistic managers tend to prefer and create organizational cultures with less collaboration and lower integrity. For example, they were less prone to agree with statements such as, “I treat people with care and respect,” “I practice what I preach,” and “It is important to maintain harmony in the team.”

We also found that narcissistic leaders were more likely to ignore violations of company policy, and to promote people who were less ethical and willing to do what it takes to succeed. This filtered down into the workforce so that, following the example from the top, those leaders’ subordinates were more likely to exhibit similar behaviors.

Impact of a narcissistic CEO

We all know the benefits of a narcissistic leader. They often build successful global brands which dominate their sectors. They are single-minded, supremely self-confident, and driven to fulfill their dream. Provided that employees buy into their vision, they have the ability to inspire everyone and drive the business forward.

However, researchers generally agree that companies with cultures that are less collaborative and have less integrity – often reflecting their leaders – are more likely to get in trouble and break laws. Other studies have shown that, due to the nature of the culture of the business and the tendencies of the CEO, these companies are more likely to get bogged down in lengthy litigation and manipulate earnings.

This is exemplified in the case of Theranos, where founder Elizabeth Holmes is now facing federal charges of ‘massive fraud’ for exaggerating and misreporting the company’s financial performance and the efficacy of their blood-testing technology.

Boards have to distinguish carefully between true visionaries and harmful personality types when hiring executives. Due to the fact that the prototypical visionary leader profile is so similar to that of a narcissist, boards must be very careful, or risk making the wrong choice when selecting a new CEO.

So how do we avoid hiring the wrong type of person? The good news is that having each candidate undertake a personality test is likely not to be the case. Rather, boards should look at speaking to subordinates about how they were treated by the individual when working for them.

Collecting this sort of data means boards can get a first-hand account of the candidate. Should the person be seen as having plagiarized people’s ideas, abused other members of the team, or acted impulsively in business-critical situations, boards should be wary of this individual displaying a lot of narcissistic traits.

Working from home is great — until your co-workers show up

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

Many people are now struggling with adjusting to working from home, but I’ve always been a big fan of WFH. Way back in the day, I even started my second company in my spare bedroom — with employees and everything!

The company was a wireless hotspot operator and we didn’t end up moving from my spare bedroom until we grew to 12 people or so. Even when the spare bedroom became the baby room when my first daughter was born, it was still ‘the office‘ during the day, just with a baby in it.

I liked it a lot, and it was mostly pretty easy to maintain a good work-life balance. Whenever there was an important call, or I had to attend an important meeting in the conference room (my living room), I would hand my daughter to one of the engineers — or to whoever looked most uncomfortable at that moment. It was a nice mixture of family life and startup life in a tiny space.

But this WFH setup also had its downsides…

One day I came ‘home’ after a long day talking to potential customers, and crashed on the couch. Before I could even take off my jacket, I heard the door open, and one of the project managers walked in. He asked me whether an important package with a missing adapter had arrived. It hadn’t but I remembered seeing a similar one in my basement.

A few minutes later I was kneeling on the floor, in my dusty basement, going through boxes looking for an adapter, when all I really wanted was to come home to a hot shower and my bed.

I was starting to get why you might not want to have the office in your home 24/7, but the next and more pivotal moment happened a few weeks later.

My daughter was old enough to walk around and demand my attention — also when I couldn’t give it. This particular evening, I happened to be on the toilet, cherishing this brief moment for myself in my home, when she knocked on the door.

I tried persuading her to go and talk to her mother, but she insisted I opened the door. I obviously lost that battle, so I found myself sitting on the toilet, door wide open, chatting with my daughter.

That’s when a key slid into the front door lock, which was directly opposite my toilet door. Before I could do anything, the door swung open, and two of my employees stepped in.

I’m sure you can visualize the situation, and also appreciate that this isn’t a situation you would want to find yourself, your boss, or your employees in. Like ever. Some experiences should not be shared within companies, and this one is high on the list.

So while working from home can be challenging, remember that at least you have your privacy.

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