Archives / July 2005

Remember Einstein's famous precept? "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

That's been on my mind lately as I've described customer experience to potential consulting clients and others.

Stated as simply as possible, but not simpler, there are four steps in transforming the customer experience within a business:

1. Listen to the business.
2. Listen to the customers.
3. Synthesize the two inputs.
4. Suggest improvements.

Remove any of these steps, and the method no longer works. Add anything, and it either fits inside one of the four steps or it might be irrelevant. In other words, I think this four-step model achieves Einstein's goal.

Of course, there are lots of sub-steps...

- Listening to the business requires interviewing stakeholders, analyzing past research and documents, and reviewing competitors.

- Listening to customers means conducting open-ended listening labs, facilitating stakeholder discussions, and analyzing results.

- Synthesis is the process of creating a "customer experience strategy" that intersects business and customer goals.

- Suggesting improvements means creating mockups of the new service or product, based (importantly!) on the strategy from the previous step.

But regardless of the details, at its heart the customer experience method is best described by those four simple steps. It systematically answers the question, how can the company improve to serve customers better?

Remember: every customer-facing organization in global business will invest in answering this question in the next decade - if they're not doing so already. Whether you're in such a company, or independently helping from the outside, it's good to have a grasp of this model.

But be careful that you don't violate Einstein's rule. There are, of course, two ways to do this:

- Be too complex: Some methods promoted within the fields of usability, IA, and user experience are too complicated to explain easily... or understand at all. Overly academic, pseudo-scientific, or exceedingly nitpicky, these methods tend to be tactically focused (at best) or dangerously ineffective investments. They aren't "as simple as possible."

- Be too simple: Many companies skip the second and third steps; that is, they NEVER get face-to-face with a customer; and so they never create a strategy based on customer needs. Occasionally we get calls from companies that "already know the issues" and want us to jump immediately to drawing mockups, without interviewing a single customer (?!). Please tell me, dear reader of this newsletter, that your company does get stakeholders in front of real live customers!

Avoid those two pitfalls and you'll be more likely to create significant business results.

Finally, if you're interested to read more detail about this method, I'd point you to our whitepaper, "Joining Strategy and Usability: the Customer Experience Methodology."

Here's a summary:

The customer experience methodology (CEM) works solely in context of the client's business: its strategic goals, current resources (organizational constraints, timeframe, etc.), and competitive position. Customer experience improvement, after all, is about driving business results.

The CEM is less directed and less task-focused than traditional user experience research methods. For example, in a CEM project, usability tests are conducted in the form of non-directive "listening labs." CEM results are easy to measure, by comparing key metrics before and after a CEM project is conducted.

Download the whitepaper here:
http://www.creativegood.com/doc/creativegood-method.pdf