Experience Spikes

An alarm bell always rings when I hear a client aspiring to “design the best customer experience.” "Best" is too subjective, too vague and too unachievable. The reality is that it’s impossible to control every aspect of the customer experience. Brands can set context, listen, nudge and provide customers with tools, but often customers will design their own experiences, sometimes in ways brands wouldn’t conceive.?

Today, customers’ expectations are rising like hyper-inflation, based on their last, best experience across all products and services they interact with. Trying to keep up with that is futile. Instead, I much prefer focusing CX investments on delivering “distinctive” and “spiky” experiences.?

Let’s break that down… “distinctive” is obvious; it means ensuring that the brand promise, unique to every company, transcends every experience. By definition, this will look entirely different for different brands. Compare a luxury retailer to a low-cost airline: in my view, both can be outstanding at CX, while delivering entirely different customer experiences, unique to their brand promise. Experiences at the luxury retailer might blend heritage and personal service with cutting-edge technology. In contrast, the low-cost airline might focus on creating automated and frictionless experiences, placing emphasis on the customer to design, control and self-serve as many experiences as possible. Savings and efficiencies from self-service and automation are plunged back into low fares... “over-service” actually cannibalizes the business model. A luxury, high-touch experience would feel entirely out of place at the low-cost airline, and vice-versa.

"Spiky" experiences (sometimes known as “signature journeys” or “moments that matter”) are those that are critical to the success or failure of the overall customer relationship. They create disproportionate value for both the customer and the employee and are where companies should invest the most in CX. Every brand has its own experience “spikes”: it could be “the unboxing experience”, the “first-time usage” experience or the “I really need help!” experience.

Part of the art and science of good CX design is to identify and segment different customer journeys into different buckets. For example:

• Experiences that add low or no value to customers/company: where possible, eliminate these experiences or deliver a "minimum viable experience."
• Example: when customers contact call centers because they don’t understand terminology in an invoice probably indicates a problem with the design of the invoice. Fix the problem at source and eliminate the contact.
• “Necessary evil” experiences: ensure robust compliance but try to make these as frictionless as possible. In some cases, there might even be a way to make these feel like they re-enforce the overall customer promise (e.g., “we take your privacy/safety/security seriously”).
• Example: when opening a new account, financial service customers need to go through regulatory checks (e.g., for anti-money laundering). There’s no way around these but there are opportunities to turn them into competitive advantages.
• Experience spikes: identify, prioritize and double down on re-imagining these experiences within the context of the brand promise.
• Example: service interactions are often opportunities to create experience spikes. From the customer’s perspective, value is created through usage (after the point of transaction) so if things go wrong, value is threatened and the customer is at their most vulnerable. Fixing complex, service problems brilliantly can be an incredible way to drive loyalty.

The different types of journeys above can all impact overall CX. If you place no emphasis on eliminating the non-value add journeys, they will increasingly create friction, unnecessary noise and wasted resources. If you fail to identify and deliver experience spikes (through data, research), you will likely fail to bring the brand promise to life and create differentiation. Conversely, if you can identify and then ruthlessly prioritize experience spikes, you stand a chance of keeping up with experience hyperinflation.?

As an example, recently we held a design open house event at EY Seren, focused on the energy transition. One of the things that struck me in the panel discussion was a comment that most energy companies think about their customers as "MPAN numbers", not as customers, let alone as prosumers.?

This example feels like a real missed opportunity to apply CX principles to identify, design and deliver experience spikes. The panelist described the oft-cited case of a retailer’s data and analytics team recognizing a customer was pregnant before they knew themselves by analyzing their purchase history. The value of this insight to the retailer is clear: identifying a customer who is pregnant is an opportunity for a ￡3,000 additional rise in customer lifetime value (i.e., the additional profit contributions from nappies, baby wipes, baby food, etc.). The panelist contrasted this simple insight with energy companies who might fail to spot critical insights about their customers

I reflected on my own experience as an energy customer last year when I installed a car charger at home. I imagine as my power consumption suddenly went up every night, this would have created quite a large data signal to my energy company that something had changed — with the obvious assumption being that I had bought an EV. If you were trying to identify and design for key moments of truth, this would be one! The moment the customer buys an EV they are likely re-evaluate their entire relationship with energy:

·???????Am I on the right tariff?

·???????Is all this additional energy I’m consuming sustainable?

·???????How do I keep my bills down? Is now the time to invest in solar? What on earth is an air-source heat pump?

·???????Are there any government incentives available?

·???????What about insulation??

·???????Who do I go to for advice?

In any sector, there are moments like these — moments that can not only make or break the customer/citizen relationship, but can really transform the relationship to an entirely different level. These are the experience "spikes" to focus on! In my hypothetical example above, my relationship with my energy company could have been transformed from one of low value, transactional and price-based; to one of high value-adding and differentiated. The energy company could have sold me a whole new range of products and services, transforming my customer lifetime value. My energy company missed a potential experience “spike” and instead, sent me a confusing invoice… I called the call center!