Mário Conde: If Experience Is the New Product, How Do You Manage It?

For companies organized around products or functions, delivering an exceptional customer experience can be difficult. Mário Conde, a partner in Bain's Digital practice, shares how companies can compete with digital insurgents by focusing on customer episode redesign, setting clear goals and launching agile teams.

Read the Bain Brief: Experience Is the New Product; Here's How to Manage It

Read the transcript below.

MARIO CONDE: Digital native companies are really redefining what a great customer experience should look and feel like. And keeping up is a matter of survival. But traditionally, companies organize around functions and products, and it's really hard to deliver a great customer experience because functional goals don't always line up with customer goals.

And since each function owns a part of the experience, it is really hard to do this at speed or to get accountability when something goes wrong. Pioneering firms today are transforming the way they organize. They are focusing on episodes, setting clear goals for those episodes and putting together agile teams to deliver against them.

An episode is the set of activities required to fulfill a customer need, such as to buy a car. When you map out all episodes, you actually get a taxonomy of the work to be done. And you can rank the episodes by emotional impact, frequency of use or economic value.

We then set clear goals and metrics for that episode—for example, NPS and conversion, which allow you to understand what's going well and what could be better. And then we finally launch agile teams that are multifunctional and that pursue, iteratively, the goals of that episode.

When you set this up right, you get an empowered, inspired, customer-centric team that has a sense of purpose. And that actually speeds up decision making and delivery of great customer experiences. So if customer experience is the new product, shouldn't you organize your work around it?

Read the Bain Brief

Experience Is the New Product; Here's How to Manage It

Organize around customer episodes, improving them through Agile teams.