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Customer Experience in Four Steps, and a Whitepaper
Jul 27, 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
Neatly summarized!
I am simply amazed at how mostly mediocre to bad customer experience seems to be in many of my interactions with a business or service provider.
They may do the first two steps of listening to the business and the customer, and even synthesize the two, but that's where it seems to end. It seems that suggested improvements are never made or acted upon.
The other day, a friend and I were in a branch of the a major convenience store chain. The store was practically empty. When we went to pay for our items there were *three* employees at the counter and *no* customers ahead of us yet there was still a delay of about 5 or 10 minutes before we were served. Only one of the 3 employees seemed to actually be on duty! One employee who did not appear to be doing anything, actually pushed the "Next Register Please" sign when we approached the register she was stannding next to. The second employee was on the customer side of the counter doing something that occupied the other employee who would have been serving us. Eventually she came around to the other side and began helping customers.
However this is the kind of customer experience I have consistently had at this chain. At the times I've gone there, the store can never be said to be crowded, yet it can take 15 to 20 minutes or more to get checked out. They'll be only one person assigned to the cash registers, but about 6 other employees puttering around arranging merchandise on the shelves. If a customer has a problem while checking out, that can add to the delay, since the check-out person cannot process any other customers until the problem is resolved, which involves paging the manager and waiting a bit until he/she arrives at the counter to assist.
I sent an email about this to the company and they said they were going to be looking into it, but as far as I can tell nothing much has changed.
I've had similar kinds of experiences while enrolled at a major university. I have experienced many problems which I've brought to someone's attention on different occasions. They smile and thank me for doing so, and that's exactly where it seems to end.
You have consistently bad experience with this chain, and have even gone so far as to write to the management -- with no real response -- and yet apparently you keep going back. So this chain has something you need that you cannot find an easy substitue for. A special yummy food, late hours, location, or perhaps being a chain they just offer the security that you know wherever you are, you will know what to expect when you go in (including bad customer experience).
I've been doing this for a long time, and have learned a cardinal rule: the employees you deal with on the floor are a reflection of the management that controls them.
If management doesn't care about customers, no matter what kind of advertising slogans they put out, the employees quickly get the message and they learn if they want to avoid suffering, its best for them not to care themselves. Its a rare person who will continue to struggle with impediments and lack of external reward to overcome the system to provide service to a stranger.
If management cares, they figure out how to motivate and enable the employees to care, too. Most employees start out WANTING to help the customer, and turn into sour, bureacratic minimalists only after having been punished or consistently frustrated in their attempts to do the right thing. Talk to these people and you will find the large majority have good reason to behave the way they do. There is a reason the customer experience is similar in all the branches of chains. Management.
As long as there is some factor driving customers to put up with bad customer experience, management can ignore it or make it a low priority. Because the only thing that gets management's attention is sales. If sales are OK, nothing much will change. Management will pat itself on the back for doing a great job, and usually doesn't even know the real reasons why they are successful (sometimes they do -- see, for example, Microsoft, cable TV, plumbers, a trendy nightclub). Only when management feels pain will they do anything to change. What usually happens is that somebody else comes along and duplicates that unique factor, maybe with a better produce, maybe with better service, and as soon as customers like you have an alternative, they vote with their feet and their dollars. By the time management sees the decline, its often too late to do anything about it -- often because they don't even know what their customer experience is like (and when told, don't like to hear it).
I agree with much that you say. What this chain offers is locational convenience and slightly cheaper prices than the competition. However, there is not such a great difference in the price that I might not choose to shop elsewhere if there was another option readily at hand at the particular time I want to make a purchase. But, one thing I have learned is that mediocre customer service is so widespread, that you have just as good a chance of getting bad service wherever you go, so you might as well get bad service where it's convenient or the price is right! This is one reason why I don't switch banks in spite of a few less than stellar customer experiences. However there is an entire mall not far from my house that I avoid like plague, becuase generally speaking the service is pretty bad at most of the stores located there. I'll shop near my job or get in the car and travel 20 miles before it would even occur to me to go there.
I also agree with what you say regarding management setting the pace and tone for the attitudes among the subordinate ranks. However, because management doesn't suffer the direct consequences of a customer's ire there is little motivation to change, especially if sales are reasonably good. I believe sales are often maintained at a certain level because customers either have little *meaningful* choice about selecting a provider of a good or service (for example telephone service or electricity, at least until recently) or little *meaningful* choice in whether they will obtain a good or service. For example, in my current job as a law librarian, about 65% of it is spent dealing with legal publishers and making sure our S/O's and subscriptions are on track and up to date. I can tell you that they have yet to master the 4 simple rules of improving the customer experience.
If it were up to the librarians, there are certain publishers for which we would cancel most of our subscriptions just due to the administrative hassle of dealing with them, however that would precipitate a small revolt amongst our attorneys, so as intermediaries between the ultimate end-user, we are trapped within a customer experience nightmare. There was one particular publisher for which certain aspects of their billing and their ability to properly maintain customers' S/O's was so abysmal that the library liason invited librarians to attend a focus group at which managers from key departments were present to hear the problems many were experiencing firsthand. You could tell this was an eye opener for many of them, who are generally shielded from such encounters. Another time my supervisor and I met personally with this same liason and another manager. The manager subsequently admitted that she had not realized the company made is so difficult for customers to do business with them.
However, as you point out, this shortsightedness ultimately causes companies to lose out on potential sales either direct or through word of mouth, because when able, customers will make very active and conscious choices to support or not support a business. So I think it does come back full circle because when annual sales targets are set, sales people may have to be aggressive to reach those targets instead of the good or service selling itself as it were.
One thing, think I disagree with is that it takes pain before management will sit up and notice. In my opinion, the pain is so removed from what caused it that it is often difficult for them to really make the connection between the two. I think what happens instead, is blame is laid at the feet of staff with the least control over the situation rather than where it truly belongs, which means management's making policies and seting up processes that facilitate rather than impede the customer experience and then consistently adhering to them.
I'm interested in learning more about the IA and usability practices that you define as overly complicated in this article. I agree that the scope and nature of a project should in some part define the complexity of IA and planning that goes into it. However, a catch-all matrix of IA tasks vs. project types is something that would be very difficult to create. So, examples from your experience would be helpful.
Enjoyed the article.
- Charles