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Short course in customer experience
Customer experience is really easy to understand. You just have to be willing to keep it simple.
It all starts with this. There are two parts to customer experience: the customer, and the experience.
The CUSTOMER is a person. A human being. Your neighbor, your aunt, your postman, your car mechanic, your librarian. This is a person who deserves to be listened to, not just "monetized" or reduced to a number in a database somewhere in the cloud.
The EXPERIENCE is everything that happens to that person as they interact with your company. It all comes to them as one experience. Your company might have five silos or three operating units or eighteen warring factions, but for better or worse they create just one experience for that customer.
The customer and the experience. Understanding these two very simple ideas are the basis of all customer experience work.
Now, the next step is to create a good experience, and for that you have to do two things:
1. Treat the customer as a human being (i.e., listen to them).
2. Look at the experience from the customer's perspective (i.e., empathize with them).
In other words, to create a good experience, just act in response to the ideas above: the customer is a person, and the experience is the one single everything that happens to them.
Put a different way, the best companies in the world today are those that understand customers' needs - by listening to them - and offer their services and design their products in a way that empathizes with those needs.
It sounds simple. Maybe this all sounds like a string of platitudes. Perhaps I should have made it sound more official... seasoned it with some buzzwords (would you like innovation with that?)... or perhaps I should have coded it in academic language that only human-factors grad students could parse?
No. Like I said at the beginning, you have to be willing to keep it simple. What you do in customer experience work (simplifying, clarifying) is the same way you should talk about what you do (simply and clearly). That's most of the challenge, just keeping it simple.
Consider the hairy knots of problems that come from veering away from that simple vision...
• Let's over-analyze the data to feel like we're doing lots of work (but then never arrive at any basic understanding). Pow!
• Let's play politics to prove that our faction is better than the other internal faction (and, by the way, customers can choose our side or take a hike). Zing!
• Let's fire any employee or consultant who dares to tell the truth about the problems in our experience. Problem solved!
• Let's use ever narrower specialist disciplines to show that we, the practitioners, are the true guardians of experiential knowledge. Nailed it!
Now to be fair, there is a place for the toolkit. Once the basics (see 1 and 2 above) are established, there are occasional uses for scenarios, concept models, site maps, content strategy, maybe even card sorting and personas, if they float your boat. But those are all TOOLS, not the answer, just TOOLS that are strictly subservient to a company's basic understanding of its customer experience.
So... you understand all of this. What's next? Where does a company or practitioner go, what does one do, to really improve skills here?
Go out and have a good experience. You learn experience by having it.
Read a book. Not necessarily a book on user experience, but perhaps one that widens your horizons and creates and describes and engages you in some good experience.
Find other kindred spirits, either in your company or outside.
Along those lines, to beat my own drum, you might...
• join the Councils, the network of good-experience-oriented executives and managers in 400 companies (email me - mark at goodexperience.com - for details)
• attend Gel 2010 in April in New York, our annual gathering of Good Experience readers, where we'll explore the concept of "good experience," in person, through a two-day series of shared experiences.
Meantime, explore these themes right now by watching Gel Videos.
Keep it simple!
Reading this article was like finding the perfect greeting card that communicated what I feel about user experience.
Thanks.
Mark, great post. But I think you should be careful when you mix the words simple and easy. In my experience, simple is rarely easy. Simple is simple. It sometimes takes a lot of shedding of ego, process, unneeded resources, distractions, and past assumption before you can get to simple.
One of the most enjoyable articles I have seen on the subject.
So much CE talk revolves around the company, the process and the tools.. ironic.
Thanks for sharing
or you could start practicing compassion. to people inside your organization and to the people outside of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion#The_Buddhist_tradition
It really IS simple -- and yet so easy to twist once you're inside a company -- getting bogged down in inside-out rather than outside-in thinking. High-profit CEM overall would be a lot easier to manage if everyone within a company also carefully managed their internal customers with an eye toward their impact on superior external customer experience. I like your advice to focus on (1) listening and (2) empathy. I recently wrote a related post: http://customer.ology.com/do-the-whole-job-for-customer-experience-success/
Thanks,
Lynn
mark, thanks for your simple course on CX. I did a reference of this essay in chinese on my site here: http://wavebehind.org/2010/02/customer-experience-123.html
Mark, this is so clear and simple it may go over the heads of those who need it the most. -g
Looking at the customer's experience from their point of view is a good first step. After speaking with high level person in the President's office of a major telecom about my horrific customer experience, understanding ways to change the corporate culture is the much harder part to initiate.