Normally when I write a customer experience (CX) related blog post it is about something that went very wrong. After all, I’m just like most people. Something goes right I tell my husband and a couple of friends. Something goes wrong, tell the world! This time, I want to talk about the impact even a small great experience can have on brand loyalty – and how it can lead to changing hearts, minds and behaviors.

Believe it or not, despite all the multi-touchpoint experience design I do, I am 100% an in-store shopper… or I used to be.  The ability to see and touch the actual products I am going to spend my money on is very important to me, as is the money I can save on shipping. (Hey, that extra $10 can lead to an even nicer pair of shoes!).  All of that changed, of course, with the arrival of my daughter a few months ago.  What used to be long afternoons of wandering the mall for a great bargain have turned into wondering the halls of the web for…oh, say the cheapest deal on baby formula.  Sigh…

All during my pregnancy people were telling me to get ready for the world of online shopping.  I insisted that while I might break down for formula and diapers, NEVER would I be “one of those moms” who does all of her personal shopping online.  That said, towards the end, hitting the mall was not so much of an option. Resignedly, I opened up the Mac and went online.  And I hated it – with one exception… Diapers.com.  

What first got me was, of course, the free shipping… SWEET!  Then, I started to realize that they had a great selection and an easy to use website with a very quick and logical shopping cart flow (imagine that – they even got the shopping cart right)…  

But I digress.  Where I am headed with this story is that over these last few months I’ve come to realize that Diapers.com isn’t great just because of the online experience or even the live service and support experience, but because of the very human experience they provide. Here’s an example.

A recent order was, of course, a case of powdered formula. Unfortunately, one of the tins had the seal lifted, so I was a little nervous about not just using that tin, but the whole case.  I sent a note to Diapers expecting them to give me a return / exchange, but that this would probably take a week or so to process.  Not so – the response email was within 15 minutes and while short in sentences, very personal.  Not just an offer to replace the tin, but “we will get the entire case reshipped, toss the old one…” and all of this wrapped in understanding – “I can only imagine how upsetting that must have been with a new baby at your side”… And this is not an isolated instance.  I have had several very impressive exchanges like this with them. Bravo Diapers.com.

Now admittedly I’m an experience designer, so of course I want to share my big takeaways from my experience. Anecdotal and personal as they are, combined with what I have learned researching and designing others’ experiences, there are some significant “truths” here I’d like to reinforce for all you marketers out there trying to figure out how to turn new customers into loyal ones.

1) Make yours a truly human interaction – Anybody can provide standard, generic, “your business is important to us” service or support. It makes all the difference in the world when a product website or a company employee recognizes that I am a human being and would like to be treated as one, not just another customer.  This distinction – “I can only imagine how upsetting that must have been…” – makes all the difference. It makes an emotional and memorable connection and begins to create the relationship and affinity that ensures I come back for more. Remember that online doesn’t mean inhuman – it is an opportunity to be even more human. Here’s how…

2)  Use what you know and remember me – I share info with you so you can better serve me. So go ahead – show my recent purchases when I login, tie your recommendations to related items I have purchased, and be smart about it. If I just bought a little black dress from you, I might need shoes, but the odds are pretty good that I don’t need another little black dress. For example, what Diapers.com does so well is make it easy to reorder what I would logically reorder – e.g. food and diapers. And it doesn’t waste my time highlighting an order I am not likely to reorder – e.g. a specific toy I just purchased.   

3)  Make it crazy-easy to do business with you – Design your experience not from the perspective of what you can do and support, but from the perspective of what I need to accomplish and how / when / where.  Designing with me in mind leads me to trust you in a variety of contexts, not just the one I am most familiar with. Most important, keep it simple. Think about your favorite brick and mortar stores: more than likely they make it really easy to find what you’re looking for, to get help if you need it, to stumble upon other stuff you like and to check out when you’re ready. Too often shopping online is characterized by too many irrelevant choices, lousy search results, forced associations and no readily available help.

4)  Do not underestimate the impact of the little things on an overall experience – Before the formula incident, I was a fan of Diapers.com, but now I am a true loyalist. The thing that nabbed me wasn’t how fast or cheap their service is, but literally that little line in the email about knowing how upset or frustrated I might be as a new mother. Just that little bit of empathy, that human touch is all it took to win me over. Fix the problem without that touch and I’m thinking you did what was expected. Include it and you alter how I think about you.

What is probably most amazing about this whole experience with Diapers.com is that now instead of comparing online experiences to live ones I do the opposite. I am comparing live experiences to my recent online ones.  My behaviors have changed as well. I only go to stores when I have to. I shop online not because it is cheaper, but because I am finding it can actually be more human. Now that is a statement to ponder!

MISI XD AD and strategist Lisa Woodley leads a workshop at a Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit. The topic: how to prepare internal teams for the changes to come and create internal advocates when a company implements new technology solutions. Based on her experience helping companies understand and manage cultural change, Lisa writes a white paper. The topic: The Dawn of the Era of iT - how new trends in information technology are forcing IT organizations to be more customer-centric, with their “customer” being the employees they serve.

I travel to Moscow to present a keynote at UX Russia 2011. My topic is Beyond the Interface to the Interaction. I organize the presentation around three of MISI XD’s 10 Immutable Truths of XD. One of the truths I focus on is #6: XD Acknowledges that Employees are People Too. Among the points I make in my presentation is that companies have come to recognize that employees are customer experience professionals’ secret weapon. They experience the customer’s issues, they generate real world improvement ideas, and they build the links between the company and the customer experience.

Customer Experience (CX) - the idea of designing the end to end, multiple touchpoint, multi-modal experience as a whole as opposed to a series of discrete interactions – has been maturing as a discipline for many years. More companies are appreciating the power of CX to differentiate their products, services and/or brands in the marketplace and to create loyalty. Titles like Chief Experience Officer or SVP of Customer Experience are becoming more common. And new CX maturity models – measures of how committed an organization is to a strategy of customer-centricity – are being introduced into the marketplace by a variety of practitioners. What has not gotten as much play as we believe it should, is the role each employee plays in contributing to the desired outcome of a great, loyalty-inspiring customer experience. As Jerilyn writes in her white paper, “If you or your colleagues don’t buy into the value of your product, your brand and the customer experience you are seeking to create, you won’t be able to live that promise when working with your customers.”

No surprise then that Employee Experience has been a major theme at MISI XD in recent months, and will continue to be as the results of our work with our current clients develop into additional insights to the power of individual employees to make or break the customer experience.

Event #1: July/August Issue of Interactions Magazine Arrives

 The cover story by Professor Liam Bannon is Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centered perspective. I was immediately smitten by the title because this has been a theme I have been preaching to my team and anyone else patient enough to indulge me over the last 5 years. It’s not enough to involve “users” in the design and development of interfaces to technological tools. There is no such being as a “user.”  We are people who use technology. We use technology in the context of trying to accomplish something. In order to design effective interactions (not merely usable interfaces to devices), designers must design with an understanding of the broader context of use and of the person using the tool.

Bannon’s article gives this seemingly self-evident yet often ignored perspective much needed context of its own. He outlines the history of the discipline of designing human-computer interactions. (The article is a must read for anyone interested in developments in the field of HCI over the last 30+ years.) When Professor Bannon gets to the present he observes, “This perspective of ‘human-centered design’ as a paradigm shift takes the term ‘human-centered’ to mean more than simply ‘considering the user’ in technology development. Rather it places our understanding of people, their concerns and their activities at the forefront in the design of new technology.”

He goes on to point out that understanding people reaches far beyond our use of any particular technological device to include matters of ethics and shared values. Today, he argues, human-centered design means understanding what it means to be human. Great stuff.

Event #2: The Resignation of Steve Jobs

He had been on medical leave since January, yet when he formally announced his resignation as CEO, Apple stock fell over 5%. This despite the fact that he will remain the company’s chairman. Regardless of what you think of Steve Jobs – and opinions range widely – there is no denying that Apple was reborn on his watch, climbing from #287 on the S&P 500 10 years ago to battling Exxon for the #1 spot as the world’s most valuable company. Listening to one of several retrospectives I was struck by a comment made by a Walt Mossberg, personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal that for me summed up Jobs’ transformative impact on the world of personal computing. Mossberg noted, “He makes products for the actual users of the products.”

In a SF Chronicle article about Apple alums who have started companies of their own, Matt MacInnis, the founder of the digital textbook platform Inkling noted, “We all tend to come at things from a software- or hardware-for-a-person worldview, because that’s how Apple operates so intensely at all levels.” By “we all” he’s referring to people who founded companies with names like Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, Android, LinkedIn…enough said.

Event #3: A Project about Employees’ Attitudes and Behaviors gets C-Level Attention

Finally, this last Friday account director Lisa Woodley wrote an email congratulating her project team for the results of their work to help transform the attitudes and behaviors of the employees of one of our marquee clients. Our experience design challenge in this case had nothing to do with the technological tools these employees have been provided. There was no reconciliation of business requirements with functional specifications to perform, no usability issue to address. The problem was that people had lost touch with the intrinsic value of their jobs, and the resulting attitudes and behaviors were affecting individual and company performance. Our team’s challenge was to help them rediscover the thread between the tasks they perform every day and the very genuine corporate mission to make the world a better place. She quoted our client sponsor as saying, “Everything is really resonating, and people are passionate about what they are saying. The work completed so far is having an impact that exceeds my expectations, and my expectations were pretty high.”

Always great to have a happy client. But what really struck me was what came next: “The outcomes of our success,” Lisa wrote, “include being invited to present our work at a meeting in October for all the CIOs of all the businesses under the [company] umbrella.” Our work focusing on employee engagement and how it enables better collaboration is going to be a topic of discussion at a meeting of senior technologists whose typical charter is to “leverage” technology in order to reduce costs (read: cut jobs) and increase efficiency (read: do more with less). And this CIO presentation will happen just a few weeks after Lisa co-leads an in-conference workshop on the importance of preparing employees for tool and platform changes at CBI’s Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit on Mobile and Cloud Initiatives; a 3.5 hour workshop about people at a conference for IT professionals.

Taken together these three events represent a powerful theme. Bannon, a professor and the director of a design center at a university, champions a more human-centric design approach largely to an audience of people who are academics, theoreticians and design practitioners. Steve Jobs is a champion of people as users of consumer electronics, commonly called customers. Lisa’s team championed the cause of people as employees. Practitioners, customers and employees – a trifecta of human-centricity. These are just three examples of what I see as a growing and welcome trend in the world of experience design as it applies to the design of technological solutions: the rise of the humanists. There’s hope for the planet after all.

In 2004, in a Scientific American article titled The Tyranny of Choice,  Barry Shwartz  posited a counterintuitive argument about the effects of having too many choices (e.g. do we need 38 different kinds of milk?).  He questioned why “people are increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.”

I count myself among those who struggle with choice.  I am virtually paralyzed when handed the phone book sized menu at The Cheesecake Factory.  The only place I find an easy time eating out is at a wedding (i.e. Meat, Chicken or Fish works great). 

This idea of the tyranny of choice got me thinking about a similar phenomenon that occurs with rapid innovation and change.  The speed at which new products, interfaces and services are introduced is generally something to admire and celebrate as “Good”.  But it is as daunting as it is impressive, and there’s not always a positive experience for the customers or employees faced with all this change.

True Story: A company wanted to extend their website service into the mobility space with a new app.  Without betraying too much detail, the application was to be accessed only when a four-legged loved one gets lost.  As I read the RFP, the human impact questions of such an app started flowing: e.g. What do people do differently when they are in a state of panic?  What could be unique to a design that might help them remain calm/focused and successful in their search?  At the very least, how can we make sure that we don’t make an already difficult situation worse? Small as this project was, I really wanted to win it, as it was a great opportunity to research a rare, context-specific behavior, and one of those ‘feel good’ projects that could really help people in difficult times.   

Of course, the senior execs at this company wanted it on their iPhones yesterday and as cheaply as they could get it, so typical deadline and cost pressures were at play as well.  The good news was that my primary client knows and values the need for experience design research.  The bad news was that the competition (the incumbent agency) offered to build and fully deploy production versions of this mobile application on both Blackberry and iPhone for half the price of just our research alone.  How does one make a case for research when it’s twice the price of the actual product? 

Things are changing.  Super fast.  Rapid innovative leaps in mobile technology, ever-easier tools for building applications, cloud-based applications that consolidate and streamline development… all of these advances pose interesting challenges for the Experience Design community.  When it’s cheaper to build an application, launch it and ‘fail forward’ in a live environment than it is to do the upfront research to validate the wants and needs of your audience, your competition is developers, not agencies or large systems implementation shops.  It’s two 20-something college guys who work remotely, making money hand over fist pumping out $20K applications while we can run up that tab with a modest Discovery session.

Welcome to the New World

How do those of us who believe that design is a human-centric undertaking that benefits profoundly from research compete when innovation is in hyper-drive and the cost of failing quickly is perceived to be so much lower than the risk of moving too slowly?  The answer is we can’t compete with a “just build it” mentality. But we can change our perspective to fit the times. Here are three ideas for ‘guerilla’ tactics that can help ensure that the target audience gets a say in the experience/tools they will inherit. Note that the efficacy of each one is highly dependent upon your particular situation.  

1 – Beta research populations – Providing a new application or service to a broad audience increasingly seems to have become a contest to see who can deploy the fastest.  Well, one way to address the need for speed is to suggest a pilot program.  As opposed to putting out to everyone live, see if it’s possible to reach out to a small but diverse subset of your audience.  This is a great way to really see what people are doing with a live application, which can often satisfy the speed-to-market forces at play.   You MAY be able to do this.

2 – Managing the change – Just because you can’t have input into a design doesn’t mean you can’t help improve the impact that design has on people.  With cloud-based apps, ERPs and mobile apps, it’s likely you simply won’t have the chance to change an interface.   When the interface can’t change, focus on the people who must.  Sure, the preference is not to have people forced to ‘fit’ the technology. Nevertheless, sometimes that’s just the way it is. We have many examples of how we – experience designers working beyond the interface – helped bridge the gaps that can frustrate people and affect adoption.  You SHOULD be able to do this.

3 – Know your history – Always know what research has been done and leverage it. Don’t assume you are a pioneer in any research effort.  Certain clients, even entire industries have done their own version of research similar to what you might propose.  And there’s often general behavioral/psychological/sociological research related to the specific channel/ system/ device you’re charged with optimizing.  A little detective work can often uncover patterns and models that can help inform design.  You can ALWAYS do this.

Human evolution is increasingly outpaced by technological evolution.  Though our ability to adapt to new interactive paradigms  is impressive (e.g. even Grandma can pinch and swipe now), the pace of change has implications beyond the interface itself. As experience designers our job is to think beyond the interface to the larger context of the interaction; beyond the pinch or swipe to the human emotions and behaviors the interface is designed to serve. We can only do so if we insist on finding ways to engage humans in our design processes.

POSTSCRIPT:  It is worth noting the winning vendor for the lost pet mobile application did not successfully deploy the application, and costs were much higher than originally scoped.

All the players in the experience are taking their lumps. Pharmaceutical companies are accused of inserting themselves into a process in which they don’t belong in; Payers are accused of only caring about what will save them the most money; Physicians are scolded for not taking a more proactive role in improving the experience; Pharmacies…well, no one really seems to know exactly what to do with pharmacies these days as they actively search for the right way to redefine their role.  In my experience as both a consumer of healthcare products and services and as an experience design professional who has done a great deal of research on various interactions among these players, the root cause doesn’t fall on any one, rather on all of them collectively.

FYI…There’s more to this blog post, but if you are interested in learning even more about today’s patient experience and why patient’s fail to follow their doctor’s orders, join MISI on 2/24/2011 in Philadelphia at the Patient Adherence Cocktail Convention hosted by MISI, WoolLabs, and Smart Brief. Visit Wool Labs for more information or to register

As I was saying, today’s patient (or healthy person) experience is a complex web of touch points and information sources that don’t have any one connecting point.  There is no central role ensuring that information exchanged in discussions or interactions between the patient or caregiver and any one product/service provider is captured and available to all players in a coordinated “team” strategy that leverages collaboration.  Furthermore, equating “self-managed” healthcare to “patient-centered” healthcare is muddying the waters even more. Care must be centered on the patient without requiring the patient to manage the system of delivery.  

Healthcare is a team experience. As healthy people seeking to stay well or as patients seeking to address our various conditions, we have a vested interest and responsibility for our healthcare.  But that responsibility is shared. We are key stakeholders and decision makers, but we can’t manage our care alone.  And the more complicated our conditions, the more help we need.

This perspective has been brought into sharp relief for me by my personal story and by a recent article in New Yorker magazine.

My Story: The Abridged Version (For the detailed telling, go here.)

I am a pregnant woman who also has a preexisting health condition.  I troubled over whom to call when my preexisting condition flared up – my GI specialist or my OB? I called my OB and her response was eye-opening: “This is the one time in your medical health where you get to have a strategist.  In the same way that I coordinate lab/hospital visits and all of your insurance interactions related to your pregnancy, I also coordinate any specialist visits you may require.  You will always start with me.” What a novel idea.

With my OB as my personal healthcare strategist, these are some of the differences I have experienced…

Role of the Pharmacist was Clearly Defined: The pharmacist immediately acknowledged not only the current reason for the visit, but also the fact that I was pregnant. While she did have an alternative suggestion for me around my medications, she made it clear she would be filling the current prescription and simply writing down the suggestion for me to take back to my doctors for a follow-up discussion if I so choose.  

Complete Access to a Collaborating “Team” of Doctors: For the first time ever, I do believe there is one person who has a complete view of my health.  More importantly, I also believe that there is a “team” of doctors working to ensure my continued good health.  Both doctors work together (without me playing go-between) to collaborate on a course of treatment that helps me get better and keeps my baby’s health needs in mind.  They are also managing the health insurance interactions.

Proactive Team Ownership of My Wellbeing:  My doctors are checking-in to see how things are going with the medications, my pharmacy is making some good recommendations for additional steps I can take that support my doctor’s treatment;  my insurance company is providing additional live resources for me to leverage as I go through my pregnancy.

No one person’s experience can be generalized across the healthcare experience spectrum. But my experience does reinforce a recurring theme in healthcare: The need for better and more open collaboration and communication among all of the players involved in managing any patient’s health.  A good patient experience isn’t about a solitary owner; it is about a good point person who is knowledgeable in all touch points and objective enough about the emotional part of health management to take the lead, grab the pen, and “own” the coordination, leading all players toward the same mutually agreed upon desired outcome.  In other words, a personal “healthcare strategist.”

The New Yorker Article
While formulating this position, I came upon a fascinating article by surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande in New Yorker magazine called The Hot Spotters.  The article is about how some pioneering doctors are rethinking how those who use the healthcare system the most are treated.  One of his subjects is Jeffrey Brenner, a physician in Camden, New Jersey, who decided to combat excessive medical costs by treating the “super-utilizers.” (In Camden, one per cent of patients are responsible for thirty per cent of medical costs.)

Brenner formulated his own team concept. It includes a nurse practitioner and a social worker. They make regular home visits and phone calls to check in about new and existing complaints, unfilled prescriptions, and other complications that could land these patients back in the hospital. They help apply for disability insurance and fill out paperwork for state-run housing where their medication can be overseen. They encourage these super-utilizers to improve their lives with steps like quitting smoking, cooking more, and joining Alcoholics Anonymous. And the results are striking, both in cost reduction and in better outcomes for the patient.

This is exciting stuff and something I and others at MISI XD are paying close attention to. This team concept with a lead “strategist” is very compelling on many levels. The reason this strategist cannot be the patient is that with rare exception we are the least knowledgeable about how the healthcare system really works and what options are available to us, and because we are too emotionally involved with the experience of our health.  The role must be filled by someone who understands the entire healthcare system and is tasked with achieving the best outcome for the as dictated by the patient.

In my experience, with few exceptions coordinated team care seems to be limited to 1) the very wealthy; 2) people in crisis; 3) pregnant women.  The $64B question is, “How do we institutionalize the team healthcare concept for everyone?”

To learn more about today’s patient experience and why patient’s fail to follow their doctor’s orders, join MISI on 2/24/2011 in Philadelphia at the Patient Adherence Cocktail Convention hosted by MISI, WoolLabs, and Smart Brief.  For more information and to register, go to: http://www.woollabs.com/conference0211/

Your objectives will ultimately drive the types of research you choose to conduct – interviews, focus groups, natural observation, journals, card sorting and so on. But when the budget is tight and every piece of a project is under the financial microscope, you can use some of the following guerilla research tactics to gain an actionable level of audience understanding.

1.     Research Before Your Research

Arm Yourself with Knowledge and Hypotheses Prior to Research

Take the time before a study to learn as much as you can about work done on related topics and audiences.  Study relevant prior research done by your compay or others, review data you are already collecting from touch points such as your website, read industry white papers, and examine your main competitors. Use your research to form some solid hypotheses. By testing pre-determined hypotheses, you can learn more about the topic of interest with a smaller number of people.

Good For: Testing with small numbers of people; studies with a highly targeted focus

Not Good For: More exploratory, comprehensive insight-gathering studies; projects with minimal lead time before research

2.     Friends & Family Recruiting

Talking to Anyone is Better than Talking to No One

If the budget can’t afford a recruiting agency, if the client doesn’t have the bandwidth to recruit internally, or if there isn’t enough time in scope for you to undertake formal recruiting, you can always reach out to friends and family. While it may seem very informal, remember that your friends and family are people who use products and services just like anyone else. Friends and family often feel special that they are invited to help on one of your projects, and it gives them a chance to see what you’re working on. 

Good For: Studies related to products/services with general audiences; projects and budgets that do not allow for professional recruiting services

Not Good For: Studies related to products/services with a very narrow audience group; studies involving privacy-sensitive information (ex. needing participants with a certain medical condition); projects where participant “bail-outs” would compromise the entire initiative

3.      Social Media for Broad Audience Outreach

Gaining Baseline Understandings through Your Social Networks

When you don’t have the time or budget for up-front, broad baseline research, social media can be a great tool. Both the researchers and client representatives can pose a question to people in their social networks. People are surprisingly willing to answer quick poll questions and the answers to these questions can help inform decisions in the design process.

For a recent non-profit client, MISI Company was tasked with redesigning their website based on best practices and then validating the design afterwards. In order to make sure that we were on the right path, our research team tapped into their social networks and asked a very simple question that ended up informing several key design decisions – “What three things do you need to know before donating money or time to a non-profit organization?”

Good For: Projects that only have time/budget for testing before or after design – not both; gaining audience insights in preparation for stakeholder discussions or in addition to more formal research

Not Good For: Research studies that are investigating more behavioral aspects of audiences; questions that require long answers or a back-and-forth discourse; studies that aim to understand motivations and thought-processes more so than final actions

4.     Research from a Remote Location

Reaching Global or Long-Distance Audiences from Your Home Office

In many situations, remote testing could be a significant cost-saver. Depending on the type of research study that is being performed, there are a variety of technologies today that allow researchers to hold a valuable conversation with audiences all over the world. For instance, many studies could be performed using a survey tool, a conference line, an online screen-sharing service or a combination of all of the above.

In a recent employee-based global research initiative, MISI Company reached over 150 employees in 8 countries, all from local offices. Through the use of various online tools (such as an audio conferencing/recording service and an online survey tool), our research team was able to gather accurate insights, conduct a confident analysis of a large diverse population, and create actionable goals based on the insights of that analysis. Depending on the goals of the study and how it is being conducted, your international or geographically widespread research still could be highly effective without the costs and time involved in travel and lodging for your research team.

Good For: Studies with participants in multiple, distant locations; projects with very short research timelines and/or budgets that do not allow for travel and lodging

Not Good For: Research that involves complicated tasks; studies with audiences who are not tech-savvy; studies in which body language can be an important observation

5.     Slimmed Data Analysis

The Debate Between Accurate vs. Precise

When analyzing the outputs of a study, researchers can spend months slicing data one million ways, finding and explaining the random outliers, or running numbers to create a pile of statistics in order to provide clients with the most precise data analysis possible. A quicker alternative is to deliver accurate findings that achieve the goals of the research but are not as precise and detailed. For instance, after being active in all aspects of the study, a researcher can often make a statement such as “Most people liked the size of the product, while very few liked the color.” Along with this statement, researchers may look for specific supporting data; however this approach of presenting accurate but more generalized findings as opposed to highly detailed, precise findings could save significant time in the post-research phase and still achieve all of the goals of your study.

Good For: Stakeholders who are interested solely in accurate actionable insights and recommendations

Not Good For: Stakeholders who expect participant statistics and precise findings; findings that will act as baselines for future studies

It is important that when you are planning your research initiative, you consider the impact of any cost-saving measure and ensure that it does not interfere with the effectiveness or accuracy of your research. For instance, some of these guerilla research tactics may not be ideal for large, mission-critical initiatives that will have significant bottom line impact. But when you are working on a more modest project and know that you need evidence to support your decisions, ask your experience design partner about the applicability of these approaches. They have the experience to help you decide which guerilla research tactics will work best for your project so that you don’t have to break the bank.

I learned as part of being acquired by Walgreen’s, Duane Reade introduced a flexible vaccination service, allowing customers to get a flu shot any hours that the pharmacy is open (albeit not well advertised). Some large survey by a market research company probably told them that 87% of customers don’t get flu shots because of inconvenient timing.

But who cares why they are doing it! This is great, or so I thought, until I started this seemingly ideal patient experience process.

I returned the next morning and the pharmacist said, “I’ll meet you over there.” I had no idea where there was, so I waited while she gathered the necessary clinical materials (gloves, needle disposal bin, etc.) from multiple locations and carried everything to a table with 2 chairs outside the entrance to the employees-only pharmacy area and placed everything down in a pile. Picture Rachel Ray carrying ingredients in her studio… except this is someone’s health, not chimichangas.  

Would you get your flu shot here?

I mentioned to her that it was great that she was offering flu shots at any time.  “Yep, we all had to get trained,” she said. I proceeded, “But it’s sorta a pain for you, I mean you have to stop what you’re doing to do this?” She replied,  “Yeah, it can be….”

The flu shot was painless, pharmacy staff was pleasant, and for me the overall experience was just fine. I’ll put aside:

• The original “we are backed up” issue (although many customers may not)….
• The poor advertising about the flexible service…
• The 7-min wait for ‘nurse-in-training’ pharmacist to prep…
• The confusion about where I should sit because of the counter divide between pharmacy staff and customer….
• The seemingly discombobulated setup that gave the impression this was their first time doing this….

Those are issues that can be solved – though not easily – with better customer communications and improved spatial design. But what about the pharmacists and employees at Duane Reade who need to literally stop the  work they are doing and the flow of their day for each and every flu shot customer? And if they don’t, they have more of those “15-minute backup issues” and potentially disappointed flu shot customers….

Or what about those non-flu Rx customers whose experience is disrupted by the flu shot processes – those patients who simply need to ask a question about their new Rx while the pharmacist is busy giving flu shots. Finally, what about these inefficiencies’ subsequent impact to DR’s bottom line? For every flu shot customer, assume 10 minutes of lost pharmacist work time.

This is a great example for why you can’t have blind focus on the customer, patient or any single group. Without considering the experience and change management for all people: pharmacists, pharmacy support, customers (both flu shot and not), Duane Reade may have started a tidal wave of good intentions that has ripple effects to the business that they didn’t see coming.

So why not apply this same principle when designing your employee experience? After all, employees are essentially your organization’s internal customers. Often companies will focus their internal efforts on improving performance on processes and new tools/technologies, but that misses a big part of the picture.  Process improvements and new tools won’t have their desired impact on your bottom line if your employees don’t embrace them. Simply announcing such changes won’t ensure your employees are aligned with your business goals; and it certainly won’t turn them into advocates.

Design your employee experiences to make an emotional connection, and you change everything. When designed to delight your employees, new processes become something they follow because they want to, not because they have to. New tools become those things they’ve been asking and waiting for to help them do a better job.

To put this in context, consider something like the current push towards enhanced collaboration.  Say you have a corporate mandate to increase collaboration among your globally dispersed business unit.  And let’s assume you’ve done the research to confirm that a collaboration tool is the answer to your business need.  Custom or off-the-shelf, you’ve built it, and with launch a few months away it’s time to think about providing some basic training.  That’s a good start, but will likely not be enough if you want your employees to truly adopt it into their daily working life.

You may be thinking, “Understood, but they don’t have to like it. They just have to use it.”  That may be true, but the question is not will they use it; you can always make them use it.  The real questions are will they use it in the way you intended, and will that use achieve your business goals as you intended? Will employee resistance or fear regarding the use of a new tool create more productivity issues than the tool was intended to solve?

If employees don’t embrace your collaboration tool and truly view it as something that makes them better at what they do, they will only use it as required (if that much), and it becomes useless to the organization.

So how do you make that emotional connection?

1. Understand your employees beyond their job function.
You need to understand how your employees feel about collaboration. Not about collaboration tools but actual collaboration with others.  Is it something that comes naturally to them, or do they tend to work alone or in silos. What motivates them? If they are not collaborative, why? Do they have fears around collaboration? Are there misperceptions regarding what it means?

You also need to understand their pain points. Get at what frustrates them on a daily basis.  Showing them how a certain tool can help them overcome these frustrations will make them feel the tool was developed with them in mind.

While you are getting at what frustrates them, find out what makes them happy about their job. What is working? What inspires them? What gets them out of bed in the morning? This reveals their perception of success and value and also helps you understand the things that are working for them now.

One of the biggest pitfalls of launching a new tool is changing something that the employee thinks already works. While the tool might provide a better way to do something, there will be a learning curve or a change in behavior that is required.  Just as customers react strongly to changes in experiences they are accustomed to, employees tend to be especially resistant to this kind of change. You need to make them understand why this new way is better for them in the long run.

2. Build realistic personas that capture not only their function but also their wants, needs, and fears.
As part of the exercise of getting to know your employees, document core personas that can be used for a variety of purposes going forward, including communication and change management. Continuing with our example of collaboration, include the more emotional aspects like attitude toward collaboration and change, or views of success. One employee type might be something like: “research scientist, biologicals, collaboration resistant”. This tells you that messaging, training, and roll out need to speak not just to what they do and how they do it, but also to how collaboration (beyond the tool) will enable the success that they (and the organization) value. That success might be something like the ability to develop more innovative products faster.

3. Develop an overarching promise for the change and create value propositions that map to the employee types identified in your persona exercise.
What do you hope to achieve with this collaborative tool? What will each employee type stand to gain from use of it?  Tell them.  Make sure to denote more than just the positive messages. If there are particular messages to be avoided, (such as telling administrative assistants that it will increase their productivity when they already feel they are overwhelmed with work), make sure they are noted and communicated out to anyone (including supervisors) who might be charged with delivering communications about the tool to the employees.

4. Develop real-world scenarios to show the tool in action.
Use the value propositions and employee personas to develop real-world scenarios of how the tool can be used, and what value will be gained from using it. Long before the tool launches, you need to garner excitement and receptiveness to the tool. When employees see someone just like them using a system or tool to overcome the same frustrations they have, it provides powerful evidence the tool was developed with them in mind

5. Develop an employee-centered communications plan and align all communications points to the promise and value propositions.
Don’t base things like frequency and timing of messages on the roll-out schedule of your development team; base them on the information needs of your audience. Tailor the visual design, messaging and channel to what will resonate with your audience. Whereas posters might work for some employees, others might prefer to get regular email updates straight from the top. They may even have trusted sources, such as their direct supervisors from whom they want information directly. Identify these trusted sources and give them key messaging points that they can communicate to people who may come to them for answers.  Put the timing of these trusted resource messages into your communications plan.

By understanding your employees on an emotional level and finding ways to connect your strategies, initiatives, and plans to their own success, you can overcome many of the barriers that often cause the employee experience to fall short. Done right, even your most fearful or skeptical employees may become internal advocates for the change to which your organization aspires.

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.