In this piece we want to take you a little way back along the Customer Experience journey you work on every day, every hour, on a short trip through what our recent history has seen.
Today, companies develop countless strategies to gain a competitive edge and win customer loyalty in fast-changing markets. Personalised services, AI-powered systems and a seamless digital journey sit at the heart of modern marketing.
So what realities was customer experience built on in other periods of history? The answer sheds light on the roots of consumer psychology and of people-centred service.
Take the Soviet Union, for example, where a centrally planned system, far removed from the dynamics of a market economy, held sway.
In an order where competition and alternative choices were extremely limited, the very idea of customer service took shape in a reality very different from today’s. To get hold of basic everyday food and household goods, consumers often had to wait in queues that lasted for hours.
One of the most striking features of the period was that paying money alone was not enough to complete a purchase: social networks and personal relationships played a critical role as well. In the 1950s and 1960s especially, in big cities such as Stalingrad (today’s Volgograd), some shoppers built private relationships with shop staff to have scarce, sought-after goods set aside for them in advance. This informal network of relationships, known as “blat”, was the main lever for getting access to goods and services. Ordinary citizens without a wide circle of acquaintances had no choice but to go round several shops and put up with long queues to find the food they needed.
In the same region, various practices also existed for measuring customer experience.
As we all know, customer satisfaction is not a problem of modern marketing but a chronic issue present in every period of history.
In Soviet retail, official complaint books were kept in shops so that buyers could make their voices heard. These books were consumers’ most basic channel for objecting to sellers’ rudeness and indifference, and to cheating on the scales.
Historical archive records clearly reveal the scale of dissatisfaction in this area. In 1953, for instance, of the 3,602 complaints officially recorded in Leningrad’s public catering and retail outlets, no fewer than 1,809 related directly to poor and indifferent service. This confirms both how hard it was to supervise the quality of service and how fragile consumer rights were at the time.
In Türkiye, meanwhile, the same years were a period of great social and economic transformation, when migration from village to city sped up and the foundations of modern retail were laid. Customer experience in those years was far from today’s ideas of “customer-centricity” or “unconditional satisfaction”; it was shaped around the realities of scarcity, import restrictions and an economy in transition.
With no big supermarket chains or shopping centres, the heart of shopping lay with the small shopkeepers of the bazaars. Customer experience was entirely face to face, built on warm, personal relationships. The shopkeeper knew his customers; purchases were usually written down in the “veresiye defteri”, the credit ledger, and paid at the end of the month or on payday. Trust and loyalty were the cornerstone of the commercial relationship.
Foreign trade deficits in the 1950s and the shortage of foreign currency that came with the planned-economy period of the 1960s severely limited access to imported goods. Domestically produced goods dominated the market. With far fewer brands and models to choose from than today, making do with whatever was available was a basic necessity.
The economic hardships of the late 1950s in particular led to queues for basic necessities such as sugar, cooking oil, bottled gas, coffee and fuel. People could not get the products they wanted straight away, and securing some scarce goods could mean building close relationships with grocers or cooperative staff (having goods set aside through acquaintances, much like the “blat” logic in the Soviet lands of the time).
Although the first examples of modern retailing and department stores began to open from the 1950s onwards, especially in big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, the seller’s upper hand was still felt in Anatolian trade. Service quality had not yet been standardised; dissatisfaction was dealt with not through official complaint channels but by talking directly to the shopkeeper, or by choosing to go to another shop.
In short, customer experience in the Türkiye of that era was lived less through corporate strategy than through a dynamic that swung between warmth, neighbourhood culture and trust between shopkeeper and customer on one side, and the shortages of a scarcity economy on the other.
In today’s digital world, by contrast, consumers are one click away from an unlimited pool of products and services. When they meet a service they dislike or find lacking, the walls of loyalty come down and buyers can switch to rival brands within seconds. This intensely competitive environment pushes companies to go beyond simply selling a physical product. Organisations now have to offer genuine attention, trust and a truly personalised, one-to-one approach.
Looking back over this short history, we can see that technologies have been renewed, that economic systems differed sharply and that the market has gone through major changes.
The truth that has not changed, however, is that what customers want, even in times of scarcity, remains the same:
“I matter.”
CXUnique Research Team, Uzbekistan