On Customer Experience – Seven Smart Questions to Ask About Customer Experience Design

The difference today is that empowered consumers are increasingly “flexing their muscles”, threatening more and more brands with rapid commoditization. As corporate leaders consider their options, they realize that virtually any product or service enhancements they make can readily be matched or bettered by competitors – and that competing on price is often a fast path to disaster. The only differentiated ‘space’ businesses can truly own is the experience they deliver to customers. But great customer experiences don’t just happen. They occur when all functions of the operation are designed to align with one another to achieve the outcomes your customers seek. Recognizing this, companies have turned to Customer Experience Design.

We believe that there’s no more positive and long lasting ROI than a body of raving customers telling their friends about your business. Good experiences breed good stories. And good stories – from the mouths of your customers – propel business growth.

The benefits of Customer Experience Design are far-reaching. By understanding which ‘promises’ are most important to your customers, then aligning your organization to make and to keep them, you get a more responsive and less-costly design overall with a number of quantifiable rewards:

• Increased customer loyalty and referrals
• The ability to sustain higher margin pricing
• Reduced employee turnover and training costs from an employee base that understands and is gratified by the key role they play in delighting customers
• Frequently, cost savings from discovering and correcting costly and customer-alienating operational dysfunctions.

Your company could probably benefit from Customer Experience Design if you answer “yes” to three or more of these questions:

• Am I in an industry that’s trending toward commoditization? Am I concerned that I’ll have to resort to competing on price?
• Does my business involve a large degree of customer service, either face to face, over the phone, or on the web?
• Have my competitors introduced positive changes that my customers are noticing?
• Am I in a highly competitive space? When my company introduces a new product, service, or idea, is it quickly matched by the competition?
• Has recruiting, retaining, and motivating employees become more difficult?
• Am I spending too much trying to attract new customers to keep my business afloat?
• Are your customers, prospects, or employees confused about how your brand’s promises are different from any of your competitors?
• Were the policies and procedures that my business follows established for the convenience of the business (rather than the delight of customers?)
• Do different departments and functional areas within my business often seem unsynchrononized resulting in disappointed customers?

The process is one that clients describe as challenging but very worthwhile. Since your brand will thrive from making – and then keeping – the right promises to customers, we follow an approach that uncovers what the right promises are, determines which ones your organization can authentically keep, and works with you if necessary to realign the organization to deliver on important but unkept promises.

We start with your customers. We listen intently to learn what points of differentiation will be most meaningful from their point of view. To do so, we use a variety of research tools from traditional interviews and observation to cutting edge techniques like facial profiling to discover the moments that have the potential to create raving fans. Often this step also involves examining the behavior and ‘hot buttons’ of your competitors’ customers.

We do similar digging into the attitudes and behaviors of your employees, particularly those with customer facing positions. The objective of this step is to understand how clearly they recognize and respond to the things that will truly differentiate you in the customers’ minds. Insights we gain from this step help assure that the designs we develop will be readily adopted.

With this information in hand, we work with the key players in your organization to describe very clearly and succinctly your “Reason for Being” – the promises you must make and keep to deliver a compelling customer experience.

We make it easy and fun for everyone to get on board by creating a Story that brings your brand to life. It’s the verbal DNA that pulls everyone onto the same page for the same reasons. Your story might take several different formats – a video, PowerPoint presentation, a document or a set of pictures. What matters is that it transmits your key messages and brand personality so that people can connect with it, believe in it, and focus their attention on the desired outcomes.

Next, we capture the present design in great detail – your customer touch points and the behind-the-scenes activities that feed them. Together with you, we consider which of these touch points are the most important (have the biggest impact, are the most memorable, define the brand, are the most story-worthy, etc), never losing sight of what is operationally effective. From these discussions we evolve a design for future customer encounters and a detailed plan for achieving that design.

We then work with you to implement the changes that the previous steps have shown will make the most difference to your customers. These may be far-reaching, from employee training to redesign of your physical space to internal and external communications to rethinking and communicating some customer and employee policies, so we work closely with you at every step to assure realistic adoption.

If you consider the negative impact and lost opportunities surrounding experiences you don’t manage, the benefit seems worth the cost.

Creating a new set of experiences during the design phase can be quite uplifting for your employees. They may take an interest in designing their own future and feel empowered by it. Creative types will show you opportunities to please customers on the front lines you never knew you had. Process-oriented folks will help you make delivering an experience better, smarter, faster, cheaper, and more enjoyable on both sides of the transaction. You WILL have to spend more time on this issue and make it a priority. Fortunately, Customer Experience Design is a good Trojan horse for making other positive changes in the business. Figure about 3-4 months for your first experience designs and 2-3 months thereafter.

Of course, building a business case for Customer Experience Design requires careful attention to the financial implications. That’s why storyminers works with you to define Metrics that Matter™ and makes measurement of these metrics a key component of our process. Knowing you have near real-time tools to monitor the results of changes often makes sell-in easier.

Customer Experience Design works best when the employee and customer experiences are designed together. Internal salesmanship is a vital and sometimes overlooked aspect of Customer Experience Design. Employees who may be asked to change their behavior are, of course, often fearful and resistant. Storyminers uses stories as one vehicle to let them discover that the future is actually exciting and full of promise, to assuage fears, and to win internal resilience for the upcoming changes. Ongoing internal communications with authentic content and genuine feedback opportunities are just as important as the communications we create for your customers.

• How do you envision the new experiences?
• How do you know you’re recommending things that will actually make a difference to customers?
• How do you tie customer and employee experiences together?
• How do you help me win the support of others in my organization?
• On what do you base experience design? (Looking for validated context)
• How do you plan on keeping the experiences fresh?
• What do you do to help the organization understand and absorb the change?
• How do you help us actually make the change take hold?
• What vendors outside of your area can you authentically manage?
• How much work do you do vs. let/make the client do?