Total CX

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.

Collaborating with Customers; not on Behalf of Customers

People still talk to me about the ROI of collaboration—both the practice and the software to support the practice. They ask to see the numbers—how much do I make/save by using Web Conferencing or Chat? Although you can sometimes actually put a number on it—specifically when the collaboration tools are used in online support situations, thus reducing cost of calls to the contact center and increasing closed sales—the real benefits of collaboration come from working with customers and partners. My definition of collaboration is the process by which two or more individuals work together, synchronously or asynchronously, to achieve a specified result, where all parties have a voice in the process. When you collaborate with customers, their voice is heard loud and clear. And you can better understand their needs, expectations, and where they find value in what you do for them. And it is this value that translates into revenue. It’s important to remember that the true payoff of collaboration comes from innovating together, ensuring your customers’ success, and creating great relationships with your customers by working with them, not just on behalf of them.

Collaborating with Customers
Working Together Across Company Boundaries
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, October 28, 2010

Context Is King!

By Patricia Seybold

I never cease to be amazed by the richness, breadth, and depth of contextual information that customers will provide. You can garner this deep, rich context through observation/ethnography, interviews, and customer design sessions. We use all three techniques.

Whichever tools you choose, your goal is to understand:

* What are the important differences among types of customers?

* What are they actually trying to do?

* What is the situation that this type/group of customers finds themselves in when they are trying to do X?

* What's going on in their environment?

* What’s on their minds?

* What do they care about?

7 E-Business Basics

By Patricia Seybold

"All Business is E-Business," Christer Ljungdahl (one of "Patty's Visionaries"), reminds me almost every time we talk. Christer has been responsible for years for leading and evolving National Instruments' Internet strategy—for customers as well as employees and partners. NI's Internet strategy and evolving infrastructure have fostered tons of customer-led innovation, as hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers from thousands of disciplines share their epiphanies and their struggles, as kids and their mentors play with LEGO Mindstorms robots to spawn the next generation of sensor-savvy engineers, and as NI releases new intelligent plug and play products to help us make sense of and interact with the physical world. Christer's Internet strategy goes way beyond the basics that I described 12 years ago in Customers.com Classic. Yet he has clearly mastered all of the 7 basics that those early Internet Visionaries put in place.

Here's the second chapter of the revised Customers.com Handbook—designed to complement Customers.com Classic with a set of How To's and basic building blocks for anyone who wants to refresh their e-business strategy or is working on their mobile strategy. As we move on to (or back to) the future in social media and community, it's a good idea to make sure that you haven't neglected the basic customer-centric building blocks in crafting your outside-in, customer-centric (e-)business strategy.

How to Plan and Implement Your Customers.com® Strategy
A Handbook for Your Customers.com® Initiatives—Part 2
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, July 29, 2010

Use Customer Experience Mapping to Create Alignment and Buy-In

By Patty Seybold

We've written a lot about the advantages of engaging with customers to co-design their ideal experiences. What we haven't written enough about are the benefits of getting a group of warring department heads together to role play the customer experience they'd like to be able to deliver. This is always an eye-opening exercise!

Once you start doing customer experience mapping (whether you use our Customer Scenario Mapping method or someone else's approach), you'll discover many useful opportunities to use it within your organization. You can make customer experience mapping a formal part of every project kick off. You can use it informally, in the middle of a meeting, to shed light on a thorny issue. There's no better way to get everyone on the same page about making it easier for customers to get things done and making it easy for customers to do business with you. In her article, Map Ideal Customer Experiences with Cross-Functional Teams, Ronni Marshak points out that there are at least four different situations in which you should get out your stickies and markers and get into your customers' shoes!

Map Ideal Customer Experiences with Cross-Functional Teams

Why and When to Map Customer Scenarios with Internal Stakeholders
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, April 22, 2010

Seeing the World Through CX-Colored Glasses

I talk…a lot…about customer experience. Since working on Customers.com with Patty in the mid 1990s, the concept of providing a great customer experience has been a perceptual filter through which I evaluate almost all aspects of my life. For example:

• Massachusetts has terrible road signage. Although small side roads typically have a street sign at every corner, main roads often have no signs at all. So, when you come to a main road from a side road, well, good luck figuring out where you are. Bad customer experience!
• Continuing with the driving theme, when I’m on one of these side streets, stuck behind an oil truck that is filling a tank at someone’s house, it doesn’t matter that I don’t use oil from that vendor (at least not now). Bad customer experience!
• When I go to a restaurant to meet friends, and I can’t get a table until everyone in the party arrives, bad customer experience!
• When I’m watching one of my favorite TV shows (“Lost” anyone?) and a news anchor interrupts to tell me the breaking news that the police are still chasing a car they’ve been chasing for several hours, and that there is nothing new to report, bad customer experience!
• When I’m in a public bathroom, and the “Never Out” toilet paper dispenser needs a brand new roll started, and I can’t start the roll without shredding it into a million pieces, bad customer experience!
• I’m on an airplane using my laptop on the little tray table and the person in front of me reclines his seat (which always seems to recline more than mine), and pretty much closes the lid on my computer, bad customer experience!

Yes, these are common petty annoyances that everyone experiences, and comedians make their careers by pointing them out. But they stick with you. And they have consequences. When my condo association recently decided to change oil providers, one of the distributors contacted was Brenner Oil. My reaction was very negative because I have been stuck in my car behind Brenner’s green trucks far too often in my neighborhood of narrow roads. We went with a different company (okay, they offered a better deal, but if it had been a wash, I would have voted against Brenner).

Owning the Customer’s End-to-End Experience

In Customers.com, one of the critical success factors that I believe often gets downplayed in real life is “Own the Customer’s Total Experience.” This means that your job doesn’t start when customers come to your Web site and it doesn’t end when the sale is completed. From the moment the customer even considers acquiring the type of product or service that you offer through the last time in that person’s life that she will ever even think about that product/service, you need to provide a great customer experience.

You have to own the experience even when you aren’t the company providing it. All your providers and partners offer customer experience, and you have to be involved in making sure it meets the high quality standards that you want to offer customers. When you are looking at your supply chain and your demand chain to identify the partners you want to work with, make sure that your evaluation criteria includes a commitment to providing an excellent quality of customer experience, and a shared view of what that means.

Let me share one of my favorite real-life experiences. About 15 years ago, Patricia Seybold Group decided it was time for new lobby furniture for our office. We found a manufacturer’s catalog that had some furniture we really liked, and the distributor had it in stock and could arrange delivery within a few days. But then the customer experience hit the wall. The first time we expected the furniture to be delivered, the delivery people never showed up. The next time, the delivery driver showed up empty handed with a sheepish grin and said that he couldn’t deliver the furniture because he had “parked on a hill, and if I open the back of the truck, the furniture will fall out.” No, really, that’s what he said!

Make It Easy to Stop Being a Customer

In these hard economic times, we keep being reminded how important it is to keep the customers that you have. But sometimes you simply can’t. The customers aren’t moving to another provider, they are simply doing without.

So it is important to also offer a great customer experience for the customers you are losing so that, when things get better (soon, we all hope!), they will be excited about returning to do business with you.

Looking at finances this week—and facing a major construction repair project in my condominium— I realized that I had to cut down on expenses in anticipation of a possibly bleak financial year and continuing investment losses. Just yesterday, I had two very different customer experiences related to reducing my costs.

An Unpleasant Product Cancellation Experience

First, the bad experience:

Months ago, I ordered a beautiful, yet relatively expensive sweater online from an etailer (Roamans.com) with whom I have often done business, and with whom I have a great history. The sweater was backordered, but I was informed it would be shipped before the end of the year. During the holidays, I got an email notice saying “good news, your backordered item has been shipped and should arrive within 5 to 8 business days.” And then I forgot about it as I went about celebrating with family and friends.