Don't Give Customers And Employees Exactly What They Ask For

The title of this post seems to be the opposite of what you'd expect to hear from someone who claims to understand Experience Management (XM). But it's advice that I've been sharing for years, and I've recently given it to several companies.

Here's a guiding principle: XM is not about fulfilling everyone's individual requests. It's about considering those requests in all of the decisions that you make.

Five Steps For Considering Feedback

Let me start by putting everyone at ease. I believe in listening to customers and employees, and their feedback should play an important role in shaping the decisions that an organization makes. However, that is different than giving them what they ask for. You need to think of this chain of activities:

1. Listen to what customers and employees are asking for
2. Try to understand their underlying needs and desires
3. Put those needs and desires into context of the entire population
4. Think about the long term goals of the organization
5. Design experiences that balance people's needs and desires with what the organization needs to be successful

In some cases you may end up giving customers and employees exactly what they asked for, which is great, but that can not be encoded as the standard operating procedure.

Example: B2B Tech Industry

One of the best examples of being too responsive to individual customer needs is in the tech industry. Over the years I've advised many of the world's largest software companies. Many of them had historically given their B2B clients exactly what they asked for... everything from different contract terms to unique branches of their software code. While that may seem like the right thing to do in the near-term, it caused a lot of problems over time as it became impossible to develop a coherent approach for supporting clients. And while the unique code lines seemed great at the time, engineering and QA teams had to split their resources across so many different instances of the software that it hampered their ability to offer new functionality and maintain stability.

So I've pushed tech companies to be more prescriptive in their approach. Steer clients towards decisions that help the tech vendor to help the client in the long run. Show them how these decisions will actually help them in the future. Clients don't want dead-end software and expensive support costs, but they don't necessarily factor that into their requests. They often ask for what they believe they want in the moment.

You Need A Vision Of The Future

One of the key factors in all of this is having a strong sense of what you want to accomplish as an organization, step four above. This vision for the future needs to play a critical role in how you make decisions. Without it, every customer or employee request can feel like a mandate. And the collection of decisions that you make to appease those individual requests can easily add up to an incoherent approach that is hard to manage, and impossible to scale.

I always say that great experiences are coherent, so they tend to be proactively architected and not responsively created (or crafted from a series of compromises). One of the key ways to achieve design coherency is to start with a clear vision. It helps align all of the many small and large decisions that go into what customers and employees ultimately experience.

So What About Employees?

I've had many recent discussions around the topic of post-pandemic back to work strategies. Companies are trying to be responsive to the needs of their employees as the COVID threat dissipates. What do you do if employees want to have their old desks back or stay working remotely or shift to a four-day workweek? Well, you go through the five steps that I've listed above, start with listening and understanding. But you can't just give employees what they ask for. You need to balance their requests with your long-term vision for how you want your organization to operate, your offices to expand or contract, and your culture to flourish.

Some Related Thoughts About People

As you consider applying the five steps above, here are some things to keep in mind:

• People who provide feedback are not always representative of the full population or of your most important segments
• People are better at describing the things they don't like then they are at designing solutions to their problems (they don't understand the capabilities or constraints of the organization)
• People tend to think about their current situation, while organizations need to have a longer time horizon
• People are complicated. They're intuitive, self-centered, emotional, motivated, social, and hopeful (checkout the XM Institute launchpad, Understanding Human Behavior). So you need to factor all of that into your efforts.
• People are affected as much by how you roll out and communicate a decision, as they are about the decision itself (some times even more so).
• Even if you don't give people exactly what they ask for, they should still feel as if they've been heard