I am a business / technology strategy consultant who helps customers with improving the user / customer experience.
I am also a passionate baseball fan—especially the Chicago Cubs.
An important customer experience lesson from baseball is that, in baseball, the best teams focus on the end results—scoring runs.
If, for example, it is late in a game, the score is tied, and a team has a runner in scoring position, the batter is not going to try for a high-risk home run. Instead, they might try a sacrifice bunt or fly—a play with a higher chance of scoring the runner. Sure, a home run will make his statistics looks better, but his first priority is for the team to win.
The equivalent in the customer experience world is that, when the best companies present an online interface for customers, they focus on the end result of keeping it easy to use and reliable. One client of mine had the problem where the development team focused instead on learning new, cutting-edge technology. They might have built out their individual resumes, but they created unreliable software that proved to be a customer support nightmare.
