Ravi Rao on Customer Experience.
Ravi Rao is a McKinsey alum and neuroscientist who is the author of Emotional Business. Ravi has led sessions at several professional development events for consultants that I’ve organized, and he always gets fantastic reviews.
Ravi was my guest on the second episode of this show, and it remains one of the most downloaded episodes, so if you like this episode, go back and check out Episode 2.
Ravi is my guest on Episode 28 of Unleashed-How to Thrive as an Independent Professional.
We talk about one really creative framework that Ravi has developed that helps you think about customer experience in a new way.
I used this framework on one of my own projects right after I learned about it from Ravi, and the client loved it. I was really pleased that Ravi agreed to come back on the show to walk us through it.
Check out the show notes for a link to download the framework. Please do use the framework, and please do include a source line that credits the book Emotional Business by Ravi Rao.
Will Bachman: You developed a creative framework for thinking about customer experience in a new way. Can you give us an overview?
? Ravi Rao: I think when companies think about customer experience, they’re typically thinking about feedback. But to limit customer experience to fixing complaints really misses a much bigger, broader question: what do you want people to feel?
Maya Angelou had a great quote that I heard her say 20-some years ago. ‘People forget what you say. People forget what you do. People will never forget how you make them feel.’ The question becomes what do you want your clients to feel? I’ve organized a framework that talks about the emotional experience of people when you sell them something or provide them a service. If we only focus on the product or the service, we miss the real opportunity.
How did you arrive at your framework?
I was trying to get a sense of what those emotional experiences are. Over time I traced it back to what we know from neuroscience research and child development research about the kinds of things that promote interactions that people feel good about. A combination of observation, personal experience, professional experience and watching clients presented a fairly robust framework that allows me to say here are the elements for providing great emotional experience to a customer.
What are those elements?
There are seven categories of emotional experience. For convenience’s sake, I’ve used a mnemonic technique of listing them R through X.
- R is responsiveness
- S is status
- T is tenderness
- U is unique customization
- V is velocity
- W is Wow factor
- X is extra, and I know extra starts with E, but it’s just easier to remember that X is for extra
It’s a healthy checklist we can point to and say, ‘Are we going to do that one? Did we miss that one? How are we doing on each one … terrible, mediocre, average, or great?’
On all of these, you may live with being mediocre or sort of towards the bottom quartile, and that’s fine. That’s a choice. It’s probably problematic to be at the lowest 1%. At that point, you’re going to get feedback from clients or customers who say, ‘I don’t want to continue working with you or purchase your service.’ The high end takes a lot more effort and investment. It takes a transformation. You figure out where you’re going to be. If you’ve got problems, do you want to go from a problem area up toward the average, or are you really trying to shoot for high levels?
With each of these seven there’s a spectrum. This isn’t a binary that you either are or you aren’t. It’s more a question of to what degree is being at the top part of your service strategy, and service strategy is an alternate word for emotional experience.
How do these work in practice?
So, if you’re thinking about responsiveness, we’ve all worked with people who get back to us within an hour, and then other folks in the average range, and we all have somebody that whenever we write to them, weeks go by and they don’t reply. One has to determine where you want to be on the spectrum. What you’re doing is making a choice. What degree do we want to be this? For responsiveness, the emotional level is saying, ‘We will not leave you abandoned and feeling like I can’t even get a hold of these guys.’
Status is another very helpful emotional experience that companies provide to their customers and clients. You treat everybody with respect and according to your values, but every business, whether independent consultant or a large company has that 10%, 20% of their clients or customers that are responsible for the vast majority of the actual revenues of the business. The question becomes how to retain those customers. You offer something along the lines of upgrades or perks. You figure out ways to allow them to recognize that you really value their business, and that creates the emotional experience of feeling special. The same is true of tenderness. It’s saying, ‘I recognize who you are as a person and not simply an organization or vendor or revenue.’ I’ve seen over and over again that people almost always go with not the highest quality proposal, but the reasonably good quality proposal with people who are likable, with people who are human.
Can you share an example of a company that is great at tender loving care, and of how uniqueness works?
From the very beginning, Southwest Airlines emphasized this idea of caring for people. Their flight attendants use humor in the upfront safety briefing, and they smile when you walk up to the counter in the airport. Another example is the theme park and cruise lines of Disney. They made a very deliberate effort to make sure each guest understands that they are valued and cared for. It takes a tremendous effort and emphasis internally to make sure that each guest feels that way.
Making sure guests feel valued provides the emotional experience. When you talk about uniqueness, things like Burger King saying, ‘Have it your way.’ If you decide that your emphasis should be on customization you say to the client, ‘If there are things that you really value, let’s figure out how we can do those.’ And being able to tell people that they don’t have to worry that they’re going to buy something that they don’t really want or need.
How does velocity become an emotional experience?
Velocity is one that a lot of companies out there are trying to do. I’ve seen a few hospital systems now say, ‘Be seen in our Emergency Room in under an hour,’ and that’s part of their marketing. They’re going after the idea that you will minimize or eliminate waits altogether. You see rental car companies these days having their elite members bypass waiting in line at the counter, and instead looking up on a board and going straight to their vehicle.
You can change the customer’s emotional experience by doing things in a different system or in a different process that allows them to feel that they’re fast, because there’s no waiting associated with it.
The same is true of the Wow factor. We walk into any potential sales interaction or client engagement with a set of expectations, but when we take the approach of delighting the customer or amazing the customer or surprising the customer so they’ll just gasp and say, ‘Wow, we knew we were getting this, but we had no idea we would also get this.’ Some type of pleasure is created on different qualitative dimensions. If you just have the bread and butter service that’s okay, that’s a strategy. If you want to deliver something totally unexpected, that takes effort. That takes time, that takes resources to figure out what that should be and how to do it. You have to go out of traditional thinking and go to more design thinking, more into what is the underlying experience we want to drive. If you can say ‘Wow’ for the way a firm delivers a service, that’s a really impressive thing and memorable for a client.
Talk to me a little bit about the final one, X for extra.
Extra really is a very basic human need, which is the idea of proving abundance. It’s the activities and statements and behaviors and messaging we use to make sure that people feel and understand they’re getting real value. This is to say, ‘For whatever price point there is, you’re getting more than you thought you would get.’
A simple example is that in different retail environments the receipt will say something like, ‘You saved $6.83 today by being a Rewards member.’ This idea of promoting what people are getting for the price they’re paying leaves an emotional experience.
How do you go about using the framework as a strategy to improve customer experience?
There are three approaches to applying this framework. The first is at the senior executive level, asking if there’s a need for a fundamental rewrite about how the company functions. The second is not as expansive: it’s to understand segmentation: to say that for this group of customers responsiveness is critical, but others shopping for the same product may have a higher need or desire for status, or loyalty, or the Wow factor.
The third approach is for individual sales people or consultants serving the organization to ask, ‘What is it that this individual single person standing in front of me wants?’ It’s important to realize that humans are not identical and don’t want all seven elements thrown at us with every transaction. But if I were to say, ‘I, Ravi, want these two, and it makes it very hard for me to be a loyal customer unless those two are consistently in place,’ that’s helpful. We can start to customize our individual sales approaches and ultimately be more successful.
What is the biggest challenge of adopting your framework?
The hard part is if you launch an initiative to improve customer experience and you move all of the elements just a little bit, you’re actually not going to get any better in terms of market share or in the promoter scores or any of the key factors.
What it ends up taking to fix really, really broken areas is to pick two or three that you can say, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to become distinctive at it.’ There will be arguments in the leadership room, but that’s the right argument to have, to figure out what are the two things where you can become distinctive. There might be risk associated with it. There might be downsides associated with making that big of an investment. But business teaches us over and over again that successful companies figure out where to make their big bets by being analytical, by being very deliberate about saying, ‘That’s what we’re going to be distinctive at.’ And business shows us that sort of being mediocre on everything is not a path to long-term success.
Where can people find more information on the framework?
I’ll definitely post it to LinkedIn, so if someone listening isn’t connected with me on LinkedIn, they can find me that way. I’ll be putting them up on my own website in the near future once that’s launched, and I love hearing from people on Twitter. On Twitter, I’m Emobizguy, E-M-O-B-I-Z-G-U-Y. Anything we talked about here is in the book, Emotional Business. When it was first released it was number nine on Amazon’s business book listing, and it’s still in the top 2,000 business books. There are 25 pages about this framework in the book, so if you want to get into it with examples from healthcare and insurance and a bunch of other industries, they’re all there.
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