Customer Experience Design

Business vital signs

We all know that doctors relay on vital signs in order to understand how ill a patient is and what the causes might be. Pulse rate, blood pressure, pain levels, states of consciousness, visual clues to physical trauma etc. They all help diagnosis and treatment.

Businesses also have vital signs. There are the obvious ones that the financial investors and senior managers tend to focus heavily on. Revenue, profit, levels of debt, business costs etc.

And there are other ones as well that often give some really insightful clues about the underlying health of a business. Here are three really obvious ones:

How many of your staff buy your products? If you sell Rolls Royce’s then the answer is probably going to be ‘not many!’ Understandable. But if you’re in a mass market business such as insurance then the answer you should be looking for is almost all of them. And not just a product. There should be several products. If your staff are not buying your products then it begs the question of whether the products are actually any good, or just how motivated your staff are in selling stuff they themselves won’t buy. There’s a well proven and powerful relationship between business success and staff product advocacy based on their own purchase of these products. Staff who place personal value in the things they sell will do so in a much more engaging and authentic manner than those who are simply trying to hit volume targets for some commodity tey care nothing about.

The frequency and depth of contact between your senior managers and real customers. If your senior managers are insulated from direct customer contact by layers of reports and subordinate managers then you’re probably in trouble. Managers who manage without having an intimate understanding of their customers’ needs, wants and desires simply do not have the customer credentials needed to be a true customer focused company. Whether it’s arrogance, lack of moral courage or just laziness, shame on you for letting this happen.

The size of the gap between what you say and what you do. You may say that you’re ‘customer centric’ and that you’re committed to delivering a great experience for your customers – but if you then focus on the minutiae of process and targets and bureaucracy and authority and penny pinching – don’t be surprised of no-one really believes you when you say you care about your customers. Don’t be surprised if your staff don’t embrace the latest service strap lined issued by head office.

What vital signs are you missing?

Inside out design

Thanks to Nick for pointing out that the image in my earlier posting about Lotus Notes was very small.

Here's where I could get very defensive - which is what most businesses do when faced with criticism from their customers. I could point out that all Nick had to do was click on the image and a much larger one would have appeared in a new window and suggest that the error was his in not doing what I'd intended he do.

And even though the image does appear in a new larger window if you click on it, the fact that Nick didn't do that is not his fault. It's mine. Because I designed the experience of reading my blog. And I failed to consider that maybe he and others wouldn't think to click on the small image.

How many time have you experienced being on the receiving end of self justication from organisations claiming that it's your fault that things didn't work out as they'd hoped because you didn't do what they'd intended? Or how many times have you been the person defending the poor design on behalf of your organisation?

Moost of these mistakes are caused by the simple fact that having an inside perspective means we know more than our customers about the experience we're creating. Unless we're really careful this can trick us. And when you combine this was natural human defensiveness about the things we've created... well then you can see how problems can occur.

Thanks for your feedback Nick. I'll act on it.

The times they are a changin'

One of my favourite bloggers is Hugh McLeod. I recommend everyone visit his website.

Anyway, one of his most recent postings introduced the idea that ‘GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED’. This is a great observation, although I’m not sure that it quite hits the nail on the head. I wonder if a more apt way of looking at this is in terms of ‘Good ideas require change to implement then, and it’s the change that alters the balance of power in relationships.

We see this time and time again. Businesses get stuck in the rut of doing things that they’ve always done and know how to do well. Things like tactical promotion of some product or other. Coming up with new advertising campaigns. Developing some new product features to an existing product. Chasing sales targets.

Businesses organise so that they can deliver against these short term things. And the people involved are targeted and measured against them. So introducing something new which may require them to think and act differently; which may remove power (real or perceived) from them; which may threaten the relative stability of their day to day world – well, those can be tough challenges to get past. Especially if the new ideas and the changes needed to deliver then are just so different from what people have been used to.

If you’ve got a business which has traditionally focused on being a low cost provider, which has traditionally believed that you can’t be a low cost provider and deliver exceptional service – and you then introduce the idea that actually you can be both low cost and high service if you just change this and this and this. Well… get set for a tough battle.

But these are battles worth fighting if the idea is good enough. If the change is important enough. If the prize is big enough.

Designed by idiots for themselves

Every day most of us come across things that have been designed with either no thought to them, or have been purposefully designed by an idiot who can’t think beyond the technical knowledge that he’s using to do the design work in the first instance. Software programmes provide some of the richest and most inane examples in the designed by idiot category.

Take this message below which Lotus Notes flashed up at me today. Pure gibberish.

But of course it’s not.

It was actually created by someone. A programmer working on Lotus Notes actually came up with these words and instructed it to flash the message to users when a certain something happened.

The only problem is that I have no idea what this means, or what actually happened in the background while I was using Lotus Notes. It means nothing to anyone, except perhaps the person who created it in the first place.

And that means it has no value.

A channel that you may really need to build

Picking up on the idea that I raised in this post – one of the things that a group of creative employees challenged to Design a way for us to deliver such a powerful customer experience that each of our customers brings new customers to us might do is to create a word of mouth channel. This is an example of the kind of operational / organisational change that would need to occur in order to start delivering a different approach.

So, in addition to existing web, telephone, direct, intermediated channels etc, all of which are supported by organisational structures and resources, there could also be a word of mouth channel. With budget. With business plans.

Of course this is just illustrative, and word of mouth could easily apply across the other channels in any event as people on the web tell other people on the web about a company for instance. But as an interim step in testing, learning, and building capability it’s a sensible one.

And then once your business has started to capture some volume via this new channel, and has the metrics in place to prove it, then how much easier it will be to take the next step forward and re-organise even more in order to more meaningfully align to word of mouth as a core strategy.

This is only one possible way in which a group of committed, empowered and creative employees could deliver change – based on being asked a different kind of question to the one that usually gets asked. It may not be the way for your company. But why not ask yourself some different questions and see what kind of answers you come up with – even if they’re just theoretical ones for now. The answers might surprise you. Might make you want to do some things a little bit differently.

Marketing bollocks

I watched The Apprentice on the BBC last night. It’s the first one I’ve seen from the current series. Oh dear. All the jostling for position and back stabbing. It’s like watching car-crash television. But it did provide a really insightful lesson in just how far up its own arse modern marketing really is.

We had the trendy, moody Asian guy. The one who talked about how the product had to ‘take it back to the street’. The one who said that he ‘built brands for a living’. Bollocks! Marketing professionals don’t build brands. Customers build brands. They either like what you’re selling or they don’t. You’re brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what your customers say it is.

Then we had the ridiculous situation in which a bunch of middle class, 30 and 40 something corporate types all decided that they knew what today’s teenagers thought was cool and what wasn’t. I roared with laughter when I saw the presentation from one of the teams in which a very white, very middle class woman in her 40’s suggested that she understood just what motivated the kids in her target market (many of whom were clearly black male teenagers).

And then we had the extensive market research. I’m not normally a fan of market research. I am a fan of talking to customer though. Something neither group did. Although one group did go around photographing some of the trainers worn by some people walking by. Outstanding.

And to cap it all off, half the people in the two teams seemed to work in marketing for a living. What we saw was pretty much how they actually do their jobs in real life. For them, marketing is about the advert. The campaign strap line. The music. The song lyrics.

The really sad thing is that this is pretty much what we see day in and day out across the whole marketing industry. To them marketing is about the smoke, lights and mirrors of advertising.

I recognise this in the company I work for. I see it across the television, cinema, radio, printed press, and internet. Wouldn’t it be great if the marketing industry saw marketing as so much more than this? As something that was built around building great experiences for each customer. About establishing connections and relationships with customers. About creating loyalty and advocacy.

Flash git getting what he deserved

My wife recently spent some time in hospital, and from the chair next to her bed I had a good view of the spaces reserved for disabled drivers at the main entrance to the hospital.

Imagine my interest then when a Ferrari F430 Spider snarled it's way into one of the few empty spaces and a fit and healthy looking guy in his mid 40's jumped out and strollled leisurely into the hospital.

I was very annoyed. I looked at his windscreen. No disabled sticker. I looked again at him. Yep, still fit and in no obvious distress as he walked away from the car. I looked again at the car park signs. There was no doubt that he was parked in a disabled parking bay. It was clearly marked as were all the other ones either side of it.

So I watched and waited. For about half an hour the car attracted an awful lot of attention. Most of the men and quite a few of the women who walked past it gave it admiring glances. It's a beautiful car.

And then a security guard appeared. He looked at the windscreen. No disabled sticker. He looked at the registration. Very personalised. And then he smiled. He wrote a parking ticket out. He was smiling all the time he filled the form out. As he walked away he looked back and smiled.

For next hour the car continued to receive admiring glances. Many people smiled when they saw the ticket stuck to the windscreen.

And then fit and healthy guy appeared. He saw the ticket. He scowled. He tore it from the windscreen and read it. He scowled some more. Then he got in, started he engine and snarled his way out of the car park.

I've no point to make other than that I smiled as well  when the ticket was put on his car. If you're going to drive a  £160,000 car with personalised plates and park it in a clearly marked disabled parking bay, then don't be surprised if the people around you take a little bit of pleasure in you getting a ticket. Even if you're wealthy enough for it not to matter. 

If you want a different answer then change the question

What companies ask their employees to do for them is fundamental to what they actually deliver. And far too often  companies ask their employees to do things which create no long term value for either them or their customers. Here are two different challenges that you could set the same group of employees. Both are concerned with revenue and growth and profit. Only one of them is likely to be successful in the long term.

Challenge 1. Design a way to sell as much of product X as we can in the next 12 months. Seems like a sensible challenge to set the people who work in a business doesn't it? No business can succeed without sales. And if you can shift high levels of volume then you'd be doing something right wouldn't you? Especially as this is the kind of challenge that gets set in most companies  most of the time. So the employees will find ways of shifting volume. Of hitting and exceeding targets. Of creating sales behaviours that can deliver against this challenge. And if these work in year 1, then do you know what? It probably makes sense to do more of the same in year 2, especially as our competitors are adotping the same kind of strategies.

Challenge 2. Design a way for us to deliver such a powerful customer experience that each of our customers brings new customers to us. This is a challenge based around a completely different strategic intent. One that recognises the value that comes from having business strategies which avoid commoditisation. Which avoid a price and promotion based feeding frenzy. Which avoids ultra thin margins or even losses. Which avoids blah, blah advertising. Which recognises that customer loyalty and customer advocacy are enormously powerful drivers of commercial success. 

And if you set your employees challenge 2, and equip them with the means to be creative, then the chances are that they will come up with some simply astonishing ways in which to build customer loyalty and customer advocacy. Things that will make you say wow.

So what challenges are you gonna set your employees and your colleagues? 

Interested enough to pay for it

Back when the world was flat (well almost) the postal system in the UK used to work very differently to how it works now.

For a start, you had to pay to receive a letter. So if the postman arrived at your door with a letter you had the option of either paying him sixpence so that you could open and read it, or refusing the letter and paying nothing in which case it would be returned to the sender.

Now of course it costs nothing to receive a letter.  Apart from your time in wading through all the spam,  your irritation at getting it in the first instance, and your frustration at the rubbish that so many companies throw at you in the hope that you'll buy something from them.

This makes me wonder if the original way of doing things might have some value after all? You wouldn't pay to receive rubbish and spam would you. So maybe that would make advertisers and marketers do things a bit differently. Maybe they'd have to work on developing ways you trust in them so that you'd be interested enough to pay for anything they sent you.  So you'd give them your explicit permission to market to you.  Yes of course it requires a different approach. A different attitude. A different intent.

Most things that are hugely successful have these too.

Is that all?

Had a lovely holiday in Cornwall. I never cease to be impressed with the Cornish coast. Simply wonderful.

One of the things we went to see during our time down there was the Eden Project.  I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.  The vision and ambition behind it is stunning. The engineering achievements alone beggar belief. 

As you enter the grounds of the site there's a large welcome sign which announces "We're just a group of ordinary people who are trying to change the world. Come and join us." Wow! What a wonderful aspiration. What an amazing success it's been so far. And long may it continue to be so.   

But it's still not enough apparently. As we were leaving I overhead a couple talking about their visit. The wife  / girlfriend actually said to her husband / boyfriend "Is that it then? What a con."

Good God woman! What on earth did you expect in addition to the amazing vision; the astonishing engineering; the wonderful design; the legacy being created; the tension for positive change; the millions of enthusiastic visitors; the sheer bloody wonderfulness of it all?

OK, so not everything was perfect. The lady who served me in the restaurant seemed a bit miserable (she did have a cold), and I wasn't too fussed about the environmental game zone created at one end of the site. But these are small gripes.

And then the comments of the moronic couple made me realise. No matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, there will always be someone who  thinks it's not enough. Someone whose expectations are simply way more than you can deliver against.

So don't try. Achieving a warm glow in the bellies of 100% of all potential customers is never going to happen. If you can make 90% of your potential customers say wow then you've got it cracked.  You'll lead in your market by a mile.