The global boss of IBM Interactive Experience has told B&T he’s bemused by organisations that focus on customer experience, but still treat it as silo.

Paul Papas, global leader of Big Blue’s customer experience practice IBMiX said that there was now a trend among companies to treat customer experience as some sort of North Star guiding light.

“It guides everything that a company is doing, in terms of how it’s going to transform, how it’s going to make itself better. But you can’t think of customer experience in a silo unto itself,” Papas.

“If you’re just going to try to improve customer experience, without tying that into how the company operates, what their processes are, how are they going to enable that, how are they going to do it?”

Papas said user experience could no longer be divided between the digital and physical worlds. He said that user experience had to inform decisions within an organisation down to the complex back office integration that will help deliver that customer experience in the physical world.

“When you describe an airline losing luggage, they can have done everything on the customer facing side of it – ‘Hey, I was able to check-in online, it was seamless, it was beautiful, they sent me text messages on my mobile device – but they didn’t reverse engineer that into managing the operations to make sure that they wouldn’t lose my luggage’.

“So they may have gotten one segment of the experience right, and failed on the critical segment of executing. Executing what your core needs are, as a customer are. Get me there safe. Get my luggage there with me,” he said.