We’ve all been there, I’m sure we have. You only have to look at Tripadviser and the reviews and you will soon work out that “experiences” trump “product”.

You can have the best hotel, restaurant or entertainment venue but if the service (experience) you offer is poor the reviews will “shout from the roof tops” and people won’t come back, won’t recommend you and your business will be going one way and one way only.

It’s all about how you, your teams, your products and your online services make people think and feel the more you strive and focus on delivering great service (experiences) that matter most to the customers you want to serve the more your business results will go in the right way.

Anyone who has received an Apple product – have you noticed how much attention is paid to the packaging. How easy it is to open the box and how good the product looks in the box. You can just tell that somewhere in Apple there is someone testing every new packaging idea and designing an “experience” to make the unpacking moments seamless and frictionless.

So here is the thing – no doubt somewhere in your organisation right now there is a team reviewing “customer journeys” – mapping out moments of truth – engaging with people from across the business and pulling in insight to validate the ideas.

Have you got members of your team volunteering to be involved in that work?

Or are you waiting for the big reveal and the whole load of actions that will come your way to improve how your team deliver products and services to improve how customers think, feel and what they will have to do?

Customer journeys cannot and should not be behind closed doors, in a back room, on a whiteboard hidden from view – they should be front and centre of every team of every department helping everyone understand what matters and encouraging insight to be gathered ahead of the tripadviser reviews!

Those business who’s DNAs ooze experience, know exactly who their target customers are, know exactly what matters to their target customers and make every interaction with the customer something to be remembered and talked about.

The world of IT has been automating “internal” businesses for decades .. the internet was the start of deploying services .. and a service is far more than an application, it is far more than the input, process and output of data. A service oozes experiences.

Have you been at the bleeding edge of the experience era ?

Are you spending every day of your life considering how the products and services you develop will help solve customers problems?

Or are you just starting to open up the customer journey powerpoint slides and think about the difference you can make with the experiences you will deliver?