Thoughts on Customer Experience

I was recently asked to answer a few questions on customer experience and I thought I would like to share my answers.

How do you, in fact, deliver a better customer experience?

You deliver a great experience through looking at your entire enterprise experience canvas that includes, your customer experience, your employee experience, your business architecture, culture and what we call Experience Essence. Experience essence we define as the experience that you want your customer and employee to have when they interact with your brand. Its the perfume or the secret sauce that every interaction would have. Wether with a digital channel, a person in store or a service consultant on the phone, the experience would feel uniquely branded.

Do you need a customer experience officer?

Ideally, your CEO should be your customer champion. More important that a CXO is growing a experience or service design competency in an organisation. This can be centralised or decentralised, but having a strong leader with a single focus on designing experiences and activating experiences across the organisation is essential. Over the last 12 years of focussing on Customer Experience Management and specifically the activation and implementation of design, where the CEO put up his hand to own the journey is where I saw real change.

Do you still need to ‘delight’ the customer, or have we moved on?

I strongly believe we need to refocus on the problems we are solving for customers. Delight has turned into something fake and cheesy. We need to avoid moments of misery where we disappoint them and fail their expectations. And we need to focus on creating memories for them in the moments that matter. Life is made up of a sequence of memories and we actually remember very little of our interactions with brands. Daniel Kahneman coined the "peak end rule" and we only remember the emotional peaks in experiences, which for us as service designers is wonderful, because we can orchestrate what people remember in an experience with a brand.

Does it need a greater degree of innovation?

Customer Experience is such a behaviourally complex concept and includes all the functional, sensory and emotional aspects of what goes on the the human experience that I think we are only scratching the surface. Innovation has also become an overused word that seems to be only for the super consultants. I have seen innovation happen across many levels of an organisation with the front-line coming up with better ideas than the c-suite. I think we might be looking in the wrong place for real innovation.

The skills that are key into the future is problem solving, design and collaboration and I teach this to people from 7 years old in my robotics class to 65 year old in our employee engagement program. 

What kind of data needs to be harvested?

Most organisations that we have dealt with has a problem with data. They have too much of it an aside from their management information they have terra-bytes of customer insights collected through their voice of the customer program and they have many dashboards and scorecards but most are struggling to get a real good grip on what to do with the data and what to do next with their customer experience improvements. They struggle to turn their data into meaningful insights and the insights into impactful actions.

I believe that all the answers are already inside the organisation and with the right focus and robust prioritisation, if people focus on the right initiatives they will see benefits that deliver real results. 

How are you measuring it? What kind of metrics are you using?

Over years of being a junkie of every metric that is available in the research industry, I have really simplified my view. The following things are in my view important to track over different periods of time.... some improvements take time to show results:

• Customer retention
• Customer acquisition
• Employee retention
• Employee engagement
• Complants reduction
• Cost to serve

I have a few case studies where some actions took up to 2 years to deliver results and some where very specific activities delivered meaningful results in 4 months.

Customer feedback is becoming quicker, dialogue is more active that what it was 2 and 4 and 10 years ago. Customer expectations is shifting fast. The companies who listen, will be the ones who thrive.

What are your thoughts on some of these questions?