We must act in the customer’s best interest, not once in a while, but consistently. This means offering outstanding products and services and being helpful, courteous and quick to follow up. We need to be keenly aware of the competitive landscape and quick to act. The field – the employees closest to the customer – should drive this process and have ample resources and authority to be the best at serving customers. Our strength resides in the field. We must exceed customers’ expectations and constantly make it easier for them to do business with us. [My emphasis.]

This language may sound familiar. It may even echo the language of your own company’s mission/vision statement. Perhaps there are posters around your workplace boldly proclaiming similar corporate commitments.  As an advocate for your customer, I find these principles and posters admirable; however, I can tell you from personal experience that the mission articulated by the company quoted above and the experience of doing business with said company are in diametrical opposition.

So why does the actual experience of interacting with so many companies often belie the customer-centric principles they claim are fundamental to their success?  Here are six surefire causes we have identified as we’ve helped various companies improve their experiences.

1)      Senior leadership has got the talk but not the walk. Providing your customers with a highly valued experience requires self-awareness, discipline, consistent monitoring at the frontlines and prioritized processes for standards, governance and an imperative of constant improvement.  This level of commitment requires backing up the words used to describe the desired experience with both clear expectations regarding employee behaviors and with the resources your employees need to meet or exceed those expectations.   

2)      Customer Strategy is a long-term play in a short-term world. Truly understanding who your audience is requires ongoing vigilance. Unfortunately, many well-crafted customer-centric efforts designed to gain long-term competitive advantage are often sacrificed to meet short-term needs.  For example, a decision to cut costs by outsourcing “Customer Care” can distance your firm from valuable direct interaction with and feedback from your audience.  Implementing an enterprise-wide IT-driven change designed to reduce overhead without consideration for how it will affect the people using the new systems can lead to costly decreases in productivity.  Stuff happens. Things change. The one constant should be monitoring and reacting to how those changes are influencing your customers and employees.

3)      The business treats various customer touch points separately. Customers don’t care about the distinctions your organization makes between its traditional marketing and its digital marketing, or the organizational separation between your sales organization, your marketing organization, and your service organization, or that you distinguish new account activation from customer service.  All your customers care about is having their expectations fulfilled.  They are often frustrated because the various touch points are managed and measured disparately; thereby creating an experience that feels different one touch point to the next.  Exemplary customer experience sees all touch points as parts of a single overarching experience.  (Digital marketer Jim Sterne wrote eloquently on this topic recently.) The key is to understand what you want that overarching experience to be and make certain each touch point moves you closer to that goal.

4)      Leadership perpetuates an irrational gap between the Business and IT.  An excellent customer experience requires the alignment of all systems and people with a common vision of that experience.  Imploring your people to deliver exemplary service without providing them the resources necessary to do so will fail. Your various business disciplines and the technologists who support them need to be in it together.  They need to share the same vision.  They need to see how that vision manifests in real life.  And they need to be held to the same business-based measures of success.  Organizations that have cracked the customer experience code have done so in part by bridging the gap between the Business and IT.

5)      Customer experience reflects your employees’ experiences. When was the last time your company reviewed the experiences employees have of working for your company? When was the last time your company assessed how employees perform their respective roles in the context of what company leadership expects them to achieve? Are your various organizational units truly aligned around the principles your company has set forth in your mission/vision statements?  We have learned that behind every fragmented, inconsistent and unsatisfying customer experience can be found an equally fragmented, inconsistent and unsatisfying employee experience.  Great customer experience begins at “home.”

6)      The procedures your employees follow don’t align with the experience you want your customers to have. Policies and procedures are put in place for good reasons – e.g. security, privacy protection, consistency, regulatory concerns, efficiency, etc.  From a customer experience perspective, the problems start when your frontline people are trained to treat SOPs as inflexible. Companies that differentiate themselves through attention to customer experience provide employees with an understanding of the intent of the rules and with guidance on the how to bend them. Think about how you felt as a customer that time an employee accepted your return without a receipt, or took a little extra time on that service call to walk you through the online interaction because it saved you money, or ___fill in the blank. Frontline discretion combined with the training on how to use it in a way that aligns with the experience you want your customer to have are among the most important tools you can provide your employees.

Odds are one or more of these conditions exist within your company.  This list makes clear just how hard it can be to live up to the expectations organizations set with the grand words they put in their mission statements.  It requires a serious commitment from C-level and buy-in at street level to assure that people’s behaviors and the systems that support them are all aligned and measured in accordance with the goals set by the organization. We call this Strategic Experience Alignment (SEA)^SM.

This is about the bank that “serviced” (I use the word loosely) my home equity line of credit (HELOC), and it goes something like this…

Chapter 1) I dutifully make my monthly payments early for three years.

Chapter 2) The bank’s automatic reappraisal of the value of my home leads to a form letter saying I can no longer access my credit line.

Chapter 3) I call and am told my house has been compared to selling prices of others in the area. I inform my Customer Service rep the comparables they used don’t match my house. “That’s what our records show for your address. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do.” Of course not.

Chapter 4) I dutifully continue paying down my outstanding balance waiting for the HELOC to be automatically restored at a new, lower level.

Chapter 5) No restoration notice arrives even as I approach a zero balance, so I go to their web site. I find the option to email them. The error message tells me I have to register before I can send them an email. Register? That provides no value to me, but okay. I enter my loan number and it isn’t recognized. I can’t register!

Chapter 6) I call, again. After deciphering the automated call center menu, I reach a Customer Service representative who can’t help me (irony). I need to talk to someone who deals with reactivating accounts, which apparently doesn’t qualify as a customer service.

Chapter 7) I am transferred. Several static-filled muzak minutes later, I have another human being on the line.

Denouement:  Here’s the deal: If I want the HELOC reactivated I have to pay for an appraisal and reapply.

Post Script:  Really!  I mean, really?!  Are you kidding me?

Systems and desired experience not aligned

What I have just described is a bank’s integrated online and offline “Customer Service” system that is seemingly strategically devoted to making my experience of doing business with them so painful that I will refuse to go through the experience ever again. Do you think that is in their mission statement?

I told you that story so I could make the following point:  Businesses that succeed are those that differentiate themselves by making the experience of doing business with them delightful. To do so, you have to ensure that every system and employee that is part of the experience is doing their part to sustain a successful, ongoing relationship with your customer. When it is done with intention, planning and by design, we call this phenomenon Strategic Experience Alignment (SEA^sm).

SEA Starts at C-Level
SEA is founded on a very basic principle: For your business to be successful, your audience must succeed in its interactions with you. Of course this statement must be qualified. Customers aren’t always right or always reasonable. But their expectations are generally set by you; all they are looking for is for you to live up to them. If you do, all those people and systems you’ve ostensibly designed to provide some bottom line benefit to your company will pay off. Whether the benefit you seek is increased efficiency or lower costs, increased sales or greater brand awareness, your success hinges on the audience achieving what they set out to accomplish by interacting with you.

The fly in this ointment is that your customer probably has different criteria for success than you do. You may be thinking, “Success is this guy registering so I can get him into my database and shove marketing messages at him.” Your customer is thinking, “I just want to email customer service a question; why do I have to go through this registration process before I can get a simple answer to my question?” Pretty good question. And a pretty solid barrier to your company’s success since the customer who can’t see the value in registering is just going to go elsewhere. So how do you avoid putting up these barriers to success? By making aligning your people and systems around the facilitation of customer success a strategic imperative.

While many business leaders we speak to about the concept of strategic experience alignment agree with its basic tenets, few fully appreciate and connect two key truths regarding what it takes to create real business value in your interactions:

1) You must cede a substantial amount of the control of the experience to your audience, and…

2) To ensure success, a company’s entire organization needs to be aware of and aligned with the experience your audience desires.

True audience-centricity requires a company-wide commitment that begins at the highest levels of the organization. Without this directive, various departments or business silos will continue to do their own interpretation of how to deal with your target audiences. Inevitable conflicts will arise and those conflicts will likely express themselves in ways that disrupt the desired customer experience.

Okay, cool acronym, but does SEA really mean anything?
SEA is an approach to experience design that begins with your target audience and ends with your business objectives. It utilizes proven tools and methodologies to answer three fundamental questions:

• Who is your audience?
• What are your various audience members trying to achieve?
• How must your organization align to help your audience members achieve their goals?

SEA marks a fundamental shift away from a traditional “bottom-up” focus on measuring the effectiveness of isolated interactions with specific audience touch points, such as a website or a call center. Instead SEA begins by mapping the desired audience experience in the context of the organization’s strategic imperatives. It then seeks to align business objectives and tactics with that desired experience. The resulting alignment provides the foundational strategic guidance for any and all initiatives affecting the outcome of the experience.

For example, if asked to assess the effectiveness of a company’s customer-facing website, SEA dictates that we first look at the entire customer experience the website is designed to support. We consider what the customer does before considering interaction with the web, what aspects of the experience the customer prefers to handle online, how successful and satisfied customers are when interacting with the site, what the customer does after leaving the site, et cetera. This holistic approach to experience design can be applied to every interaction between a company and its audience, whether online, offline or between the lines.

Among the questions I anticipate many readers having are: 1) What is Experience Design? and 2) Why should I care?

Wikipedia provides a serviceable answer to the first question. I’ll paraphrase here adding a few edits based on my own language bias. Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the entire experience and the facilitation of the desired outcome.

XD methodologies help a business answer three fundamental questions any time it sets out to evaluate or to develop an interaction with its audience: Who is my audience, really? What are they trying to achieve? How can I help them achieve it? The answers to these questions form the foundation of the solutions we design and develop.

Why should you care? XD is founded on the principle that business success is directly dependent upon the successful interactions among the business and its various audiences. These audiences can include customers, employees, partners or vendors. Experience has shown us that understanding what your audience wants to achieve and how they can best achieve it empowers a business to focus its interaction design on facilitating the achievement of those desired outcomes.

Take, for example, the XD exercise of creating detailed personas or profiles of target audience members. A large pharmaceutical client of ours used this technique to help guide the development of communications and training required for an international change mangement initiative. A recent article in the NY Times describes how Ford Motor Company used personas to drive the design of the 2010 Fiesta, Ford’s best selling car in Europe and number 2 seller overall.

Most of MISI’s current XD customers know of us by the handle UX, for User Experience. Why have we changed our initials? Because user experience is a subset of experience design that focuses on human-computer interaction. We’ve broadened the application of our research and design skills to include interactions that do not necessarily take place with a computer interface, such as the aforementioned change management engagement or a hospital way finding study.

We welcome you and your comments to Xperience This. As much as we want to share what we’re thinking, doing and learning, we want to hear what you think. To this end, it is not a daily diary. If you choose to participate you won’t receive alerts of new posts more than a few times each month. Our motto is if you don’t have anything to post that has value, don’t post anything at all.

So, welcome: we hope you find this a rewarding Xperience.