Of all the creative industries’ many disciplines, customer experience is arguably viewed as one of the less ‘sexy’ ones – but could this perception finally be shifting? On the client side, an increasing number of chief customer officer positions are cropping up among the more traditional CMO job roles, while agency-side there seems to be a change in focus among business and creative leaders. In a recent piece CR spoke to the new customer experience practice that’s just been integrated into Uncommon London about why CX is the next creative frontier.

Launched during the height of the pandemic last year, creative agency New Commercial Arts was founded on the basis of ‘uniting brand and customer experience creativity’. The new endeavour from adam&eve founders James Murphy and David Golding sees the duo team up with BBH’s former chief creative officer, Ian Heartfield, and Rob Curran, previously chief experience officer at Wunderman Thompson.

“I think all four of us had that same feeling, even before having met each other, which is that clients are essentially surrounded by different agencies all doing a different job. And usually, if truth be told, most people in those agencies go, well this doesn’t work for retail, it doesn’t work for CRM, it doesn’t work for the website, so how the hell are we meant to execute against this, because it hasn’t been thought through in that way,” Curran tells CR.

Part of the problem with CX in the past has been the challenge of succinctly defining what it is exactly, which, according to Curran, inevitably leads to confusing jargon. “I’ve always liked the really simple way of looking at it: Steve Jobs called it ‘The whole fucking thing’,” he says. “If you take a car company making beautiful ads, and then you log onto the website and it’s full of annoyances, it’s kind of pointless doing the advertising because the customer is immediately frustrated. Essentially, you’re making promises and then not keeping them, and we thought that the industry desperately needs an agency that unifies the process of making promises and keeping them.”

While some clients still come to NCA just for the communications or CX part of a broader campaign, the purest form of the agency’s business model is built around looking at the customer journey from start to finish. “What that looks like day-to-day is if we’re coming up with a brand platform or a brand idea for a client, we then ask the CX team, do you know how to execute that in every touchpoint? And if they say no, then we strike it off the list, because it won’t work,” says Curran.

Executing this end-to-end approach is made easier by the fact that NCA is only 40 people in total. While there are different teams for creative and CX, for example, the entire agency is able to have a half an hour call every morning, where everyone can hear about the progress of every project currently going on. Working in a cross-disciplinary way is also an important part of the way it functions; if there is a piece of copywriting needed in a call centre script, for instance, then the CX team will normally bring in one of the copywriters from the brand side.

One of the challenges in CX is that you have to convince companies to spend money on making something feel great to a customer and there isn’t a direct return on investment

This approach has translated into a number of successful client projects so far, including Halifax’s It’s a People Thing positioning, MoneySuperMarket’s MoneySuperSeven squad campaign and Vodafone’s Together We Can brand platform. “I think what we’re doing is making the promise effectively and then we’re engaged in a real, in-the-trenches slog to keep that promise everyday,” says Curran. “You can film an ad, and you can put it on TV and make that promise relatively quickly. To keep the promise is a multi-year endeavour, especially for a big customer experience like Halifax. We’re making improvements to the branches every day, right and up and down the country, trying to tweak and make that experience better, and the same for the app and the call centres.”

Keeping CX top of mind does present the agency with a number of challenges, particularly when it comes to the creative side of a campaign. “What we’re choosing to do from a creative point of view is to make life harder for ourselves, because we have to find an idea that genuinely works for everybody across all of those touchpoints,” explains Heartfield. “In previous siloed roles you didn’t actually have to care, you might have pretended you did but if your job was the communications all you really cared about was it working great for communications. What it means from our point of view is that it’s harder, because we’ll come up with stuff that will make for amazing advertising but if Rob’s team can’t do anything with it then it goes in the bin, and vice versa.”

The added impact an agency can bring to a business that invests in CX is undeniable though, particularly given that it can help move the conversation from the marketing department to the C-suite. “Rob gets access to the CEOs, the actual boss of the entire organisation, and when you sit down and speak to the people who own the company about how broken this journey is, it’s such a come-to-Jesus moment that they then just go ‘sort this out’ to the marketing team,” Heartfield adds.

While working with siloed agencies has been adland’s default for decades, heightened by the birth of the internet and the rise of the ‘digital agency’, the industry is slowly but surely cottoning on to the value of a more joined-up approach. This is evident from the amount of large-scale mergers that have happened in the last decade, of which adam&eveDDB and Wunderman Thompson are just two examples. The team behind NCA are sceptical of the merger approach, however. “I think the industry thought the best way to do this was to slam two enormous agencies together. Having been through one of those mergers, we all thought this needs to be born in a particular shape, rather than slammed together like that,” says Curran.

Many big brands have some soul-searching of their own to do when it comes to prioritising the needs of their customers first and foremost as well. “One of the challenges in customer experience is that sometimes you’ll have to convince companies to spend money on making something feel great to a customer and there isn’t a direct return on the investment,” says Curran.

“I worked with Dyson a few years ago and they are just like, if it makes it better we will do it. Whereas there’ll be some businesses that won’t spend a penny unless [there is ROI]. To me one of the big differences is a belief in if it feels good to customers, they will come back. Those companies who get customer experience – Apple, Amazon, Uber, Google – funnily enough, they’re the most valuable companies in the world.”

newcommercialarts.com