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July 14, 2006
LRA Worldwide, a customer experience firm “that gets it”
Posted by Bob Jacobson
Rob Rush is the CEO of LRA Worldwide, Inc., located in a suburb of Philadelphia, PA. Until Rob contacted me -- with nice words to say about Total Experience -- I didn't know about LRA or that it was in the “customer experience management” business, with an impressive array of clients and a long list of projects completed in their behalf. I'm glad that Rob got in touch. LRA is every experience designer's dream: a thriving company that validates the vision shared by many in the experience design community, but heretofore largely unrealized.
What's LRA about? Here's how it describes its primary activity, Customer Experience Management, or CEM:
Customer Experience Management is a relatively new term with a number with a number of different interpretations in the marketplace. Our view of Customer Experience Management, however, is quite simple. Every time a company and a customer interact, the customer learns something about the company that will either strengthen or weaken the future relationship and that customer’s desire to return, spend more and recommend. LRA's customer experience management consultants identify each of these “moments of truth,” ensuring that the company and its people, products, processes and culture are aligned across all of these “touch points” to best serve the customer... based on what is most important to that customer.
I like that. Simple, concise, and easy to understand. But then, that's what these guys are all about: understanding.
Karl Long, on his ever insightful
Experience Curve blog, seconds my impression that
LRA is an experience design firm of a type we haven't seen before. In an exchange with me on Paula Thornton's
Experience Design newsgroup, in which I compared LRA with better-known “experience design” companies like
IDEO and
BRC Imagination Arts, Karl had this to say:
What [LRA does] is engage at the right level in companies to help change happen across departments and organizations. IMHO, the IDEO's and BlastRadius-type companies can create staged experiences, but they don't have the influence at the right level across all departments.
LRA is truly in the “customer experience management” space.
To which he added,
Don't you think if they wanted to move into “experience creation,” they would need some distinct skills that they probably don't have now, a kind of imagineering division?
Well, yes, Karl, I do.
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BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
