Xperience This!

Let me tell you a story…
You probably have one like it, so I’ll keep it short. It’s about a company’s strategic alignment of its people and systems to assure I have a particular customer experience. And it’s about why I’ll never do business with that company again.

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.