Customer Experience Was Born In 1994
December 17, 2010 3 Comments
Yesterday, Google launched a very cool tool called Google Books Ngram Viewer that provides a searchable database of millions of books published over five centuries. The tool lets people search through 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish.
As you might expect, I was intrigued by the announcement of this new analytical tool — so I decided to do a bit of my own analysis of the English corpus. Rather than do a bunch of analysis on the data, I’m just sharing the data with some basic observations. Notice the shape and peaks of the “S-curves” which highlight the evolution of terms that I examined. How would you interpret this data?
The focus on “Customer Experience” started in 1994
The focus On “Voice Of The Customer” started in 1986
“Customers” start to outpace “profits” and “employees” in 1995
CRM started in 1998 and peaked In 2003
Total Quality had an 18-year run, ending in 1996
The bottom line: Thank you Google for this new analysis toy!
About Bruce Temkin
Absolutely fascinating!
I also noticed that if you trend “customer loyalty,” the growth curve is remarkably similar, except that “experience” seems to be picking up speed again while “loyalty” looks like it has started to plunge:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=customer+loyalty&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3
One other interesting note: there was a small spike in the literary usage of “customer loyalty” in the first few years of the 20th century. Were certain writers on to something way back then?
Yes, very fascinating stuff indeed. Not sure how to interpret the graphs, but it does provide a good snapshot of popularity around certain topics. I looked at Customer Service which did a rocket launch upwards from 1980 until peaking in 2003. Based on my own knowledge of business, I can make an assumption this is also when service-based businesses grew on the back of the info age. I could also assume that companies placed more emphasis on customer service and beefed up customer service departments in an attempt to differentiate commodity products and services.
At the same time customer service peaked, we see Customer Experience starting to move in a similar upward trend-line. What does this mean? I don’t know exactly, but I know from reading various sources (including Bruce’s blog) that companies can differentiate on customer experience and they can be more profitable in delivering good customer experiences. That’s a concept that has a lot of staying power and room for growth giving that the concept of Customer Experience is in the nascent stages relative to concepts like Customer Service.
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