I'll always remember the day I saw the talking car. It was 1983, and I was a fifth-grader who was always eager to try out a new digital interface. (The videogame arcade at the mall was the main venue for that, one quarter at a time.) Today, it was something especially interesting. A friend's dad had just bought a new Chrysler with the latest technology: speech.

The car was in the driveway when I got there. And while my memory is hazy on some details - who actually opened the door and started the car, and what we talked about afterward - I'll never forget what the car said.

The door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.

I also remember that, at that moment, everyone standing in the driveway thought this was one of the cooler things we had ever seen. Cars were now smart enough to talk! The 1980s had arrived! The future was now!

But that changed. A few scant weeks after the initial driveway demo, I heard from my friend that his dad no longer thought the car was so cool. In fact, the dad wanted to find the voice chip so he could rip it out of the car. "The door... is ajar. The door... is ajar" had quickly become an irritation of the first order. We used to joke about what he must have said back to the car. "I know the door is open, and by the way, it's not a jar, it's a door!"

Chrysler, by the way, stopped production of the talking car within a few years (the option was called EVA - see Wikipedia) and I'd categorize the whole misadventure alongside other automotive failures like the Edsel.

Now more than a quarter-century later, I still reflect on this as a great case study in marketing and customer experience, since the customer experience revealed the actual value of the feature. Sure, the TV commercials, if there were any, promised something amazing. And the test drive on the lot was exciting. And even the first few days of ownership must have been satisfying, with the neighbors crowding around the driveway and cooing over the talking car.

But none of those initial experiences were what I'd call the customer experience - those were something superficial, a glossy illusion constructed to sell units and stave off initial buyer remorse. In other words, a certain kind of marketing.

The customer experience started when the customer - no longer a starry-eyed buyer but an actual user of the car, attempting to derive some actual value out of the product - began driving the car around day-to-day. And hearing, every time they got in, the door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.

Marketing, for all its ability to spread the word and drive sales, is different from the customer experience. While marketing can help shape the customer's perspective about a product - see the tuna story - only the customer experience reveals the actual and true value of the product.

And that's exactly how customer experience killed the talking car. Once the initial owners had lived with their talking cars for a few weeks, they spread the word to their friends: whatever you do, don't buy one. All you'll hear, all you'll want to get away from, is the door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.

Just remember - whatever product or service or other experience you create: the user, the customer, the recipient will know sooner or later exactly how much value you've delivered to them. So create something good.

(And contact me at Creative Good if I can help.)

Thought for the day, lifted from my Twitter feed:

Talking a whole bunch about innovation is no substitute for doing the grunt work to improve the customer experience.

This recently arrived in the mail - an envelope from Citibank marked "Important account information":

The envelope contained a solicitation for a new credit card. And I don't own a credit card with Citibank, so this wasn't about an existing account.

Citibank fooled me. This wasn't important account information, it was spam that I never asked for and felt irritated about when I opened it.

The outcome is that I trust Citibank less. And if I ever get another envelope from Citibank - even if it's marked "please don't shred, we're serious, it's really important this time," you can bet it's going straight into the shredder.

Citibank is creating a bad customer experience by fooling its prospective customers - the very people it needs to revitalize the business. How do you think this plays out as a customer experience strategy, long-term?

The success of Facebook - and, by extension, the entire social media landscape - is often measured by the rate of new accounts being created. Facebook is reportedly adding 10 million or more new accounts per month (though the rate may be dropping) and announced that it just passed the 500 million user mark. Those are some big numbers. However, I wonder if a better metric would be the ongoing engagement of members of these various services. For example, if a typical Facebook user shows an initial spike of usage - searching for friends, posting on walls, etc. - and then trails off to "rare or never," can we call that a successful customer experience?

Not too far from the five stages of Facebook grief, here's the story I've heard from a number of Facebook users: they log on for the first time and try it out... then they're excited to look up all their old high school friends to see how everyone looks now, and who's married, and send notes to a couple of them... then they experiment with posting some pictures and links... then they, well, just sort of lose interest and figure that they have more important things to spend time on.

Facebook has a number of customer experience challenges - their groups functionality is hard to use and poorly documented (brings back memories of AOL's Rain Man system in the mid-90s, anyone remember that?) ... the email client, a supremely important feature, has the features of an email program circa 1992 ... fundamental items like the News Feed and privacy settings and incoming bitstream filters have confused users for years. To date Facebook hasn't seemed to plant a stake in the ground to say "we will obsess over the customer experience" like, say, Amazon or Apple... and the results are telling.

More generally to the entire social media landscape, what does it say about the future of services like Facebook if the customer experience isn't a ramp (of increasing engagement) but an arc (showing initial interest and then trailing off)?

From the Financial Times profile of the new CEO of Caterpillar, Doug Oberhelman:

Mr Oberhelman, who officially took over at the start of July, believes seeing Caterpillar's products being put to use is more instructive than sitting in boardrooms. It reminds people that customers come first, he says.

With that in mind, he recently brought the company's entire senior leadership team - some 35 people - on a surprise trip to the Clinton landfill. "We told them to meet in a hotel in Peoria and said: 'Be in your chair at 8am,'" he recalls. "When they got there, there were no chairs. They were told: 'Get on the buses, we're going.'"

At the site, the executives were split into teams and spent time with customers who had gathered there. "We listened to some good things and some bad things," Mr Oberhelman says. "The whole point was: whatever the customer has to say, you'd better be listening."

Emphasis mine. Any company that stresses listening to customers over meetings, and is lucky enough to have a CEO preaching the message, has a killer advantage over its competitors.

(Thanks to Phil for the pointer.)

Years ago we surveyed our employees at Creative Good and found that the single most popular undergraduate major was, of all things, art history. Since then we've always given extra points to any job applicant with that major, since art history teaches people how to see. And knowing how to see is essential in customer experience work.

In a recent interview about his new novel The Same River Twice, author Ted Mooney described learning "how to look, and how to teach people to look":

If you stand in front of an artwork of even medium value, you really have to spend some time cleaning your mind of words utterly, and just begin to look, and keep yourself as blank as possible, for as long as possible, and you'll begin to see the relations of things, how they fit or don't, and eventually you'll be able to see the object whole, and then you can start letting words come in again, and they will be the right words. If you do the same thing on a street corner it works too, by the way.

One book related to this topic is Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. While I don't agree with all the ideas or politics in the book, it provides some good examples of seeing things in different ways. We've assigned the book to new employees over the years, with good results. Learning how to see is more important than learning a tactical method. One might even argue that customer experience work is mainly the exercise of seeing in a different way - that is, seeing from the customer's perspective - or, as a customer experience consultant, both the customer's and business's perspectives.

Notice also that Ted Mooney, above, encourages people to set aside language and judgment and preconceived frameworks and just experience what's around them. The language will return; analysis will come later. But during the moment itself, the important activity is just listening, watching, experiencing. This is a major goal of my Gel conference, incidentally - creating an environment where people can just experience for two days - then analyze later.

This can all be scary. Opening up to an experience means relinquishing control. I've often seen in listening labs (note the name!) the discomfort it causes for stakeholders to encounter the truth about the customer experience they create. But in the end, it's the only way to create change. A good first step to making something better is seeing it, now, exactly as it actually is.

See also:

• Ted Mooney's quote above is from the June 4, 2010 New York Times Book Review podcast (here's the mp3 download) - you can listen to the excerpt here.

• As I've written before, the Book Review podcast is a mainstay in my media diet. Find more Book Review podcasts in the archive.

• If you want to follow Mooney's suggestion and stand in front of good artwork to uncover the meaning and relations, look into Slow Art Day, run by my business partner Phil Terry. Groups in dozens of cities go to local museums to do just that.

American readers of a certain age will remember the late Tip O'Neill - the white-haired, bulbous-nosed Speaker of the House throughout most of the 1980s. For many people he's best known for his dictum that "all politics is local." Elections are won and lost - legislation is passed or defeated - through person-to-person relationships, not grand announcements or abstract frameworks.

I'd argue that the same holds for customer experience. Anything the customer sees or uses - be it on a website, iPhone app, social media project, or in some offline context - is conceived, designed, negotiated, and launched on the basis of person-to-person relationships. These relationships include stakeholders cooperating with each other, communicating with developers, and listening - one-on-one - to customers.

To put it another way: All customer experience is local.

In contrast, a good customer experience is not built via grand pronouncements, or strategies from on high (from the consultant who plops the fat printed report on the desk and leaves), or echoing the headlines, or chasing the latest fad. None of those are built from a relationship.

If you want to build a good customer experience, go local. Sit down with the person you need to work with. Listen to them. Come up with common goals. And always remember to include the customer. (For help on that, of course, you might contact Creative Good.)

Yours locally, -mark