What you need to know

• Glacier Consulting CEO and Qualtrics X4 keynote speaker, Ken Hughes urged brands to embrace the “Blue Dot” mindset – where consumers and employees see themselves as the immovable centre of the universe, and expect everything to orbit around them.
• In today’s CX and EX landscape, people expect services, products and experiences to adapt to their needs in real-time – not the other way around. Think Uber, not yellow cabs.
• Hughes cited Dutch supermarket Jumbo’s 'Chat Checkout' – designed for elderly customers craving social interaction – as proof that connection, not just convenience, drives loyalty. It was so successful the retailer rolled it out across 280 stores.
• Connection, continued Hughes, is the new currency. Drawing on Harvard’s long-term study of happiness, he argued the quality of relationships – not money or even health – is what makes people happy. That applies equally to brands and employees.
• His takeaway: Stop viewing customers as waypoints on a journey. They are the fulcrum. To win the race for relevance, brands must build personalised, human-centred experiences that make people feel seen, heard and valued.

We are all Zaphod Beeblebrox. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Beeblebrox is placed into the Total Perspective Vortex for what is meant to be a ruthless punishment. That's because the machine is designed to show you how infinitesimally tiny you are in the greater context of a Vast Universe.

But rather than being contextually crushed, Beeblebrox emerges unscathed after the Total Perspective Vortex simply confirms what he has always known: He really is the centre of the universe.  

Beeblebrox would be right at home in the kind of “blue dot” society described by Ken Hughes, CEO of Glacier Consulting, the self-proclaimed King of Customer Experience, and a keynote speaker at Last week’s Qualtrics X4 event in Salt Lake City.

Hughes told delegates that previous generations grew up in a world knowing they were a small part of a big world. “And you had to learn to navigate your way through the world.”

It was like reading one of the old-fashioned fold-out maps, he suggested. “That was the old way. And there are still some businesses probably in this room that are still operating this way," Hughes continued.

“You think the consumer is just a point on the customer journey, and that your employee is a ‘human resource,’ a term I hate. But let me introduce you to the 'blue dot' consumer: The blue dot consumer is the world. They stand perfectly still at the centre of it all. If they take a step to the left, they expect your brand, your business, to take a step left with them. This changes everything.”

According to Hughes, some products are natural blue dot products, such as Uber. “You stay where you are; we bring the taxi to you. You don’t have to wave like a madman trying to get a yellow cab on the street.”

Another example is streaming. “My kids think it’s hilarious every time I tell them the story of how we used to rent movies. ‘Tell me the story again,’ they say. You’d drive into town, go to the video store, look on the shelves—and the movie you wanted was never there. You’d go to the counter, and ask the guy, ‘Do you have Die Hard 2?’ ‘No, sorry, that’s out.’ And you just accepted it. You picked some crappy movie instead.

“Now imagine going on Netflix or Disney+ tonight to watch something, pressing play and getting a message: 'Sorry, someone in New Orleans is watching that. You might get it tomorrow'.

It would also be wrong to assume the blue dot is a digital-only confection. Hughes offered up the experience of Dutch retailer, Jumbo.

“Jumbo looked at some data and realised for some of its elderly customers—especially those living alone—the only social interaction they might have in a day is at the checkout."

As a result of this insight, the retailer introduced what it called 'Chat Checkout' in five test stores. “They trained the cashier to scan items slowly. Over the four or five minutes the transaction took, there was time for a real conversation, a genuine connection," Hughes explained.

The test was such a success that lines for the chat checkout were longer than for any other checkout in the store. “So Jumbo rolled it out to all 280 of its stores, because they believe in the power of customer connection.”

Connection

Connection was the key theme of Hughes' presentation. “We are in a race for relevance in terms of connection with our customers, and our employees," he told attendees.

“It’s about connection—and connection is actually all that matters. Robert Waldinger wrote a very good book called The Good Life. You should all read it, or at least watch the TED Talk if you don't have time to read.”

Based out of Harvard, Waldinger’s work includes the longest-running longitudinal study of human happiness ever conducted. “He and his team have been researching what makes people happy over the course of their entire lives.”

The answer? "It’s surprisingly simple. It’s not money. It’s not even your health. What makes people happiest in life is connection—the relationships you have," said Hughes. "The quality of your relationships with friends, family, and colleagues is the defining variable of human happiness.

“It’s no different when it comes to brand connection or employee connection.”

Fulcrum

In an accompanying report, Hughes wrote: “The implications for brands are significant. Your customer is not an endpoint on a customer journey, they are its fulcrum.

“From direct-to-consumer culture [‘I want it now so bring it to me’] to personalisation [‘I want it my way’], blue dot thinking is fundamental to winning the race for relevance in CX and EX."

It has been said many times, but Hughes reiterated it: It's not about a brand's product or service, its distribution channel, or its ways of working – it is about the customer.

“It is about people first, not product. It is about connecting with your customer and employee personally and making them feel special," he added.