Total CX

Converting Insight into Action: The Operational Debrief

Collaborating with customers to co-design your future products, services, processes, business models, and experiences is no longer a new concept. Heck, we’ve been doing it for over 20 years! But many organizations still find it difficult to act on the insights they gain from working with customers. Even when they have clear priorities from customers, they still don’t seem to be able to gain traction to take action quickly, with the budgetary and people commitment necessary to see it through.

We have been using an approach that we call an Operational Debrief to provide the energy and momentum behind these customer priorities and the resulting projects needed to make them happen. Here we present the barriers to quick action and how the Operational Debrief can overcome these obstacles.

~ Ronni

Turn Customer Co-Design Insights into Action
How to Gain Momentum by Turning Customer Scenarios^® into Operational Scorecards, Recommendations, and Action Items
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, and Ronni T. Marshak, EVP & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, May 10, 2013

You spend time, resources, money, and sweat and tears to collaborate with customers in a co-design session. But then all the great ideas die on the vine (or stagnate on to-do lists). We offer a methodology for an Operational Debrief that has worked for our clients to get them moving on turning their customers’ insights and priorities into working projects.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

Capturing Customers’ Emotions During Co-Design

By Patricia Seybold

Ronni Marshak continues looking at how customer emotions impact their relationships with your organizations and your brands. In an enhancement to our Customer Co-Design methodology, Customer Scenario^® Mapping, we encourage capturing how customers might feel depending on how well you help them achieve their goals. Doing so can give you a line of site from customer priorities through your bottom-line opportunities based not only on how they measure success, but also on how they are feeling while doing business with you.

~ Patty

Assigning Emotions to Moments of Truth
Enhancing Customer Scenario^® Mapping by Capturing Feelings
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 15, 2012

Customers are people first and foremost. And their emotions come into play as they traverse their scenarios to their desired goals. Capturing how customers might feel depending on how well you help them achieve their goals can give you a line of site from customer priorities through your bottom-line opportunities based not only on how they measure success, but also on how they are feeling while doing business with you.

Read a sample and download the full report in PDF.

Designing a Successful “Outside In” CAB Program

Over the past decade, our Customer Co-Design consulting practice has expanded to creating and facilitating Customer Advisory Boards. Our clients are primarily large B2B organizations who embrace the customer-empowered approach to CABs in which customers’ issues and priorities are the focal point for the meetings, rather than inviting customers to be wined and dined and subjected to endless marketing hype.

Patty Seybold offers a blueprint for creating an effective CAB by highlighting what customers want from this type of group gathering:

1. Network with Peers
2. Get Insights from My Peers about Specific Issues that Are on My Radar
3. Solve a Thorny Problem
4. Validate Our Roadmap
5. Be Taken Seriously; Make a Difference
6. Get Best Practices and See How We Compare to Others
7. Build Strong Relationships with My Supplier’s Top Execs and Subject Matter Experts

How well does your CAB (or plans for a CAB) stack up?

Creating Customer Advisory Boards that Your Customers Will Love!
How to Design a Successful “Outside In” CAB Program for Your Customers and Top Executives
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, October 25, 2012

Discovering the Value of Customer Success Metrics

By Patty Seybold and Ronni Marshak

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario^® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

Searching for ROI? Make Sure You Have the Right Metrics

Discovering the Value of Customer Success Metrics
By Patty Seybold and Ronni Marshak

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario^® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

Don’t Leave Your Colleagues Unprepared for Customer-Facing Events

For years, we’ve been drilling into you the importance of customers first—making sure they have all the information they need to do business with you, buy and use (and repair) your products, and to co-design your future products, processes, and strategies. We often take internal stakeholders—your colleagues—for granted, assuming they will know what is expected of them when meeting with customer groups. So this time, I want to reinforce how important it is to prepare your co-workers (and bosses) for any customer co-design or Customer Advisory Board session.

In the co-design and CAB sessions that we run for our clients, we have a specific set of rules for how employees (whether they are your top execs or your down-in-the-trenches workers) are to participate. For example, we specifically ask that no one from the hosting organization interrupt the customers during the group interview that we call the issues and vision discussion. Now, we can just tell them not to butt in, but that creates hard feelings (towards us) and, even worse, a lack of engagement during the session. When we fully prepare these internal stakeholders, we explain why we want them to remain silent (to let the customers determine the direction of the discussion and to let them build on each others’ comments and ideas), we offer them the opportunity to take notes while they are actively listening to the conversation, and we assure them that they will be given the opportunity to ask their top questions at the end of the customer discussion.

How To’s for Emailing Co-Design and CAB Customers

By Patty Seybold

Many of our loyal readers/followers/members/clients are customer experience executives or executives charged with launching and/or evolving new products and services. That means you’re often hip-deep in customer-facing activities—planning customer advisory board meetings, pulling together cross-functional teams and customers to gather requirements and brainstorm new possibilities. Many of you ask us for help and advice when running, planning, or facilitating these activities. You also ask us to provide you with templates, best practices, and what not to do. So, it’s in that spirit that we try to publish and disseminate what we’ve learned over the years in an easy to use and accessible manner. This week, Ronni Marshak offers detailed advice and examples of how and when to use email to build and maintain your relationships with customers in and around planning a customer event.

Tip: When Group Emails Are Welcome. Here’s something that most customer experience or marketing professionals balk at doing that I have found to be amazingly effective: Right after you’ve gotten a group of customers together to co-design and/or to discuss their and your strategies, send them a group email. Include all of their email addresses in the clear so they can see each others’ email addresses and they can reply to all. This might seem counter-intuitive—after all, people value their privacy. They’ve already swapped business cards. And you usually provide them with an official follow-up list of contact information. But the informality of a group email right after the event tends to rekindle the emotion and fun of learning and sharing together. You’ll be surprised at how many people will “reply to all” about how much they enjoyed the event and/or new ideas they’ve had. You can build on that “group email” to continue the dialogue using a simple list/serv type group communication. You don’t HAVE to create a formal “workspace/private community” for every group of customers you interact with. Often a simple email list is all you need to keep the conversation going!

Tips for Email Communications for Customer-Facing Engagements
The New CSM Guidebook: Part 3: Communicating with Customers
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, May 10, 2012

Local Motors: Forging a Customer Ecosystem to Transform the Automobile Industry

Patty Seybold poses a question: Can you transform an industry from the outside? That’s what Local Motors has been doing since 2007 with its mission of creating game-changing cars with an unprecedented standard of customer service. And the way the company is doing it is by creating a true customer ecosystem that embodies the six characteristics of a successful ecosystem:

1. Help customers achieve and/or manage something they care about.
2. Design for specific target audiences.
3. Provide a “secret sauce” that transforms customers’ ability to get things done.
4. Attract partners & suppliers who can contribute to these customers’ success.
5. Align the entire ecosystem to meet customers’ success metrics.
6. Embed, co-brand, and be ubiquitous so customers will encounter and use your secret sauce no matter what their starting point is.

There are a number of take-aways for you and your company that Patty presents, but the one that really resonated to me is you can spawn a vibrant ecosystem of partners and suppliers once you have a core and sustainable community of passionate customers who want to create their own designs and to appreciate and learn from others. It’s amazing what a community of passionate customers can do for a business.

Here is a short sample of Patty's Case Study.

Local Motors: Open Source Car Design and Local Manufacturing
Forging a Customer Ecosystem to Transform the Automobile Industry
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 26, 2012

Can a Customer Ecosystem Approach Bring Families Together?

When I read Patty Seybold’s fascinating take on how Local Motors is transforming the automobile industry, I was taken with her mention that father-and-son teams have become a target audience for designing and building new, cool cars. I started imagining the dad-son teams working together in their garage, figuring out how the dashboard should look, whether the car needed a spoiler, and other car-like things that I, honestly, don’t know anything about. I pictured the excitement when they got feedback and support from a community of other car enthusiasts. I even saw the arguments and disappointments when something didn’t work well (and then envisioned the almost sitcom show moment when the son runs down the stairs yelling, “Dad, Dad, I figured it out!” and they hugged and rushed out to the garage to work together in family harmony).

And I envied that (okay, fictitious) moment—although they probably do occur in some less made-for-TV moments. But the model to have open source design for different kinds of “built” products—the design of goods that can be manufactured and, eventually, sold, is intriguing. So I started extrapolating on how this model can continue to bring families together—and get the females involved. I thought smaller—appliance design, fashion design, new concepts in telescopes, exercise equipment, board games. Not that any of these are as complex (or perhaps as sexy) as designing and building a great new vehicle. But they are things that a family (or friends, or community group) can work on together from conception, to design, to fabrication, to manufacturing.

What differentiates these from other DIY kit projects is the addition of the ecosystem—the providers of tools to do the design, materials to do the fabrication, and the community of like minded enthusiasts to advise, help with problems, give suggestions, and cheerlead the project to completion. And, who knows, maybe help the family market a new breakthrough product that the whole world can enjoy. In my vision, the ecosystem becomes the extended family. Wouldn’t that be terrific!

Pivoting Your Business Model Based on Customer Feedback

Koko Fit Clubs are the health center franchisees of the Koko Fitness cardio and strength training system whose creation is the subject of this week’s article. The Koko Smartrainer weight (and later cardio) exercise programs are 30-minute interactive exercise regimens done on the Smartrainer machines, which include visual instructions and realtime visual feedback as well as a dashboard of how you’re doing—against your goals, your former sessions, even against your friends! The sessions are all self-guided and personalized, and they change as your body and fitness levels change. (To see more about the experience of using the Koko systems, see the video, Welcome to Koko FitClub - The World's Best 30 Minute Workout). The clubs have a loyal and vocal fan base, as evidenced by the endorsements:

“I absolutely love it. I think this is exactly what I need. Thank you for making it so affordable to have personal training. I love that I don’t have someone watching my every move, making me feel uncomfortable, but I have the guidance and support of a personal trainer.”

– Michelle

“This is exactly what I was looking for. I needed a quick workout on my way home, without all the hassles. Koko workouts only take about 30 mins three times a week. They are guided by a computerized trainer that tracks your every move on a thumb drive. The key seems to be going slow (not seeing how fast you can blow through a set). No crowds to dress for and your entire workout can be done on one machine in flipflops. Stop by for a demo! ”

– Michael C.