I am reading “Ulysses” by James Joyce, regarded as one of the great works.
What does James Joyce say about customer experience?
Well, honestly, he doesn’t address customer experience directly, but offers a powerful lesson nonetheless. In “Ulysses”, Joyce makes repeated use of a writing technique called internal narrative, i.e., writing what the character hears inside his head, his ‘inner voice’. Much of the internal narrative is nearly gibberish to the reader. Yet does Joyce mean to say that internal narrative is gibberish? I don’t think so …
To that person, their internal narrative is very sensible, rational, and linear … A leads to B, connections are immediately obvious, and the interplay of past events, the present, and possible futures all fit like puzzle pieces. However, if I try to read another person’s internal narrative in print, it may seem like … gibberish. And that, I think, might be what Joyce had in mind. Each mind has its own inner grammar, vocabulary, and context, and it doesn’t ‘travel well’ outside of our thoughts, so much so that humankind developed written and spoken languages that follow ground rules so we can translate our inner speech into something that another person has a fighting chance of understanding.
The connection to customer experience is clear. For all the well-intentioned efforts to ‘get in the head’ of a customer, it’s not so simple. Even simple subjects are in reality complex assemblies of thoughts, some on point but other contradictory and even random, or at least seemingly so to another person. Yet out of this we expect a rational single-threaded insight or answer from our research.
To some extent this may seem counter to much of the innovation currently unfolding in customer experience, yet not really. Joyce isn’t telling us to do stop doing whatever we can to gather facts about customers. But he may be saying that if someone claims to be able to ‘know’ a person’s internal narrative, watch out. Better to engage, observe, and ask questions rather than believe we can make sense of another person’s inner narrative by analyzing data about them. Data bases may be useful guideposts, but they are not going to tell you what a specific person needs of you in a specific situation; for that insight, a human connection is required. And we need to be open to situations where aggregated data actually infers the opposite of what deep connections tell us and be ready to revisit our expectations accordingly. Come to think of it, this is good advice in life, and it may even help us to get along with holiday houseguests.
What great works have given you insights and inspiration in your customer experience journey?
