Total CX

Give Customer Experience Leaders Authority as well as Responsibility

In Part 3 of the Customers.com Handbook, What Roles You'll Need to Implement Your Customers.com Strategy, Patty stresses the importance of making sure that the role (or roles) that lead the customer experience charge has clout in your organization. Her suggestions for a new customer-centric organizational structure include:

1. Put Your Top Execs in Charge of Customer Experience Governance

2. Give Customer Segment Owners P&L Responsibility

3. Nurture Customer Communities by Customer Segment

4. Drive Company-wide Priorities based on Customer-critical Issues ACROSS Segments

Sound advice. But many organizations have already put people and projects in place that don’t necessarily follow these guidelines.

In our experience with client projects, the most successful co-design and customer innovation initiatives always have high-level executive support. But in those projects that die on the vine (before even getting started) or get stalled after a promising start, the person given the mandate to improve the customer experience is lower down on the corporate totem pole, and doesn't have the unfailing support of the powers that be.

Customer-Centric Initiatives that Never Happen

Getting a customer experience initiative off the ground requires proper scoping of the project and defining valued deliverables, all of which requires deep and thoughtful listening to the sponsor's requirements and ultimate goals. However, a well conceived project doesn't necessarily get approved. This is especially true when the sponsor is below the VP level and isn't responsible for a line of business with the associated P&L. Typically, someone at the C level recognizes that the company should be doing some customer experience programs, and puts the onus on a VP level exec to figure out how to make that happen. The VP looks for someone to take ownership, and often turns to someone at mid level in marketing, who either doesn’t have other specific responsibilities but is a good worker, or someone who has a lot of responsibilities, but makes things happen.

Unfortunately, by the time this customer-experience program leader gathers all the information on what type of project can be done and can be successful, the senior executive has moved on to other priorities and is loath to commit any significant budget to the initiative.

How NOT to Provide Documentation

By Patricia Seybold

Most of the world has become Apple fans, even those who don't use Apple products. I thought about that last night, as I unpacked and provisioned my new Blackberry sent overnight from Verizon Wireless when my old phone died. (No, I can't get decent AT&T service, so I can't use an iPhone, the Android isn't available in a dual-mode GSM version from Verizon, and I am a Crackberry addict). As I pulled all the doodads out of the Blackberry box, and dived into the manual in order to just learn how to put the battery in, get the device activated, and begin to figure out how to use it, I find myself muttering, "this sure isn't from Apple." Apple would have provided a simpler box of goodies and a one-page set of pictures and instructions that would show me the 4 steps I needed to take. Verizon and Blackberry expect me to wade thru the manual and figure out what's in the box. The good news is that I am very happy with my new Blackberry Bold.

The bad news is that very few companies have figured out how to provide "get started" instructions or assembly instructions for the things we need in our lives. Apple does a good, but not perfect job. Their "getting started" documentation is great. But I have still been confused by what they take for granted when I try to use their devices.

The current trend in documentation is to provide picture-rich instructions that are universally understandable no matter what language you speak. This is great in theory. Graphics are attractive and accessible. They save a lot of money and time by preventing needless (and often bad) translations. But as you'll note from reading Ronni Marshak's article, there's a problem with illustration-only instructions. Many of us are verbal, not graphical people. A set of complicated illustrations can be very confusing. Case in point, my husband and I spent 5 hours last Saturday assembling very well made and affordable bunk beds. But the other Amazon reviewers claim to have spent only 2 hours! We had to redo a number of things because there were no words or symbols explaining what you needed to pay particular attention to in doing the assembly. So we had to retrace our steps a couple of times. My brother loves video instructions. But he, too, complained bitterly when he and a buddy were trying to assemble his Endless Pool (indoor swimming lane) and the assembly instructions were in the form of a video. Imagine that you're doing a plumbing job and you need to climb out of the enclosure and go rewatch that section of the video. (I guess that's what iPads are for, but I don't think you'd want to risk the potential damage by using it during your home fix it project.) How do YOU like your instructions?? And how do you test them before you ship products to customers?

Here's Ronni's article:

Use Your Words
Although Pictorial Instructions Avoid Localization Issues, Some of Us Don't Respond Well to Diagrams
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, August 19, 2010

Why Not Provide Support When Customers Value It the Most?

By Patricia Seybold

I can’t count the number of times that frustrated customers have told us how much they hate the hoops they have to jump through to access customer support they’ve paid for. Just when they need help the most is precisely when it’s hard to come by. Customers are required to enter a contract number or user ID they don’t have handy. Or they haven’t purchased the 24x7 “platinum” service; only the 5-day “gold” service. Or the person on the phone can’t match their identity to their ownership of the product for which they need help. Or the help they need isn’t technical in nature; it has to do with a subscription that expired (when the customer didn’t even know they HAD a subscription), so they have to call or be routed to a different number. Or the person they reach can’t really solve the problem. He asks a lot of basic questions and offers canned answers—what a waste of time! Or the subject matter expert isn’t available in a timely fashion.

Yet, getting access to someone who can solve a difficult and urgent problem is a great relief and it’s a relationship-building moment. Most customers are even happy to pay for premium service on demand, just to get an urgent problem solved.

What to Think about Before You Hit the Send Button

Back in the early 1990s, I evaluated a bunch of marketing automation systems, which have morphed into merchandising, ecommerce systems. One of the features that most of the early software included was called Touch Control. Touch Control kept track of how often you “touched” a customer through any of your channels: phone, email, snail mail, etc. Common wisdom encouraged companies to make sure they weren’t touching customers too often for fear that they will feel pressured into action—making a purchase, responding to a survey, etc.

Today, with the ease and low expense of email marketing, etailers are touching us daily, with offers that are often indistinguishable from each other. The sales and specials stop having meaning when they come at you relentlessly.

In my article, Sending Clear and Appropriate Messages: Do’s and Don’t for Communicating with Customers via Email, I look at some common mistakes that companies are making, including:

• Over-communicating

• Under-communicating

• Sending misleading messages

• Sending messages that induce stress in customers

Remember that every one of your email messages represent your brand and your company. Misusing the channel can turn customers off and negate the value of this touchpoint.

Read article here.

Approach to Customer Experience Management Remains Current

Looking through the body of work that we have published over the years, Patty and I were taken with how much of our research is still current after a number of years. In her article on Customer Experience Management, originally written in 2005, Patty explains that your customer experience mission is to delight individual customers by designing ideal experiences for particular audiences, segments, or groups of customers—people who care about the same things and who have the same needs and desired outcomes. You want to optimize the quality of the experience you offer to each group of customers so that they perceive and appreciate the value of your brand. At the same time, you want to deliver the most appropriate level of service, based on the customer’s context, to please him or her, without overspending on the things that don’t matter to the customer. By understanding, anticipating and meeting customers’ needs, you increase customer loyalty while lowering your costs to serve. Truer words were never spoken—not then, not now.

How to Approach Customer Experience Management
An Overview of Patricia Seybold Group’s Recommended Game Plan
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 27, 2010

When Communities Converge (or Collide)

For years, we’ve always advocated—nay, evangelized—that customers and employees/stakeholders should be on the same page, with access to the same information, so that everyone has a 360-degree view of what’s going on. Part of our advocacy was promoting the convergence of customer and employee communities. But, as Matthew Lees, our community and social media mastermind points out in his article, Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?, creating a comprehensive community to address customer issues and employee issues doesn’t really make sense.

Although employees have (or should have) the goal of providing a great experience and easy access to relevant information to customers, the information they need in a community is about stuff that customers, frankly, don’t care about—HR stuff like payroll, expense reimbursement, insurance issues, and the like. And, while specific employees—especially customer-facing employees—should know what’s going on in customer blogs, this is typically a small portion of the entire staff. Not everyone on your payroll needs to be involved in a customer support community, or an innovation community, or…whatever it is that customers want to “commune” about. Their jobs, while always in support of making customers happy, albeit often indirectly (good HR policies make employees happy; happy employees stick around longer and can provide better customer support, for example), are not intended to solve all customer problems. Most employees will not become more productive by knowing about a workaround for an absent feature in the product. Nor will customers become more loyal to your brand because you offer a dental plan.

The key to effective communities is to understand the goals of the community and decide who should participate. So, based on Matthew’s insights, we will get off the “everyone should know and participate in everything” soapbox and concede that instead of converging, disparate communities may just collide.

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Can a Single Social Technology Support Both Internal and External Communities?
By Matthew D. Lees, Senior Contributing Editor, May 13, 2010

The Wrath of Customers

Are We Blaming Providers for Things Beyond Their Control?

By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 6, 2010

NETTING IT OUT

Customers sometimes—or often—get unreasonably angry at their providers, even when the provider is not to blame. Although the customer might well be overreacting, I recommend some actions that can help smooth the waters:

• Be empathetic

• Treat them as individuals

• Understand the scenario

• Assume the responsibility

• Come up with creative alternative

• Apologize…and mean it!

Customers, you also need to understand that most customer support people are just trying to help—once the anger passes, be gracious.

UNREASONABLE CUSTOMER REACTIONS

Betrayed by an Online App!

I had a very critical meeting with a key client. The meeting was to examine the results of an extensive customer co-design initiative to determine the immediate next steps and make sure the project would move forward optimally. I was completely prepared; had all my information; the results were impressive; my recommendations were (I think) brilliant. But I hit a very hard wall five minutes before the online meeting was due to begin: I couldn’t access my Google Calendar!

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

Strange Design Choices Slightly Mar a Great Customer Experience

I recently was invited to be the luncheon speaker at the MAPC (Associated Mail & Parcel Centers) annual trade show and conference held at the Indian Lakes Resort in Bloomingdale, IL (outside Chicago). The conference/show was a blast, but I want to talk about the customer experience that the resort (part of the Hilton chain) offered.

In general, the resort provided an excellent customer experience. The resort is visually stunning, designed, I was told, by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, with indoor waterfalls and the use of rocks and other natural elements that brought the outside inside. The resort staff was attentive and responded to each of my requests (foam pillow—I’m allergic to feathers—and to have my air conditioning fixed) within minutes. Both times I received a follow up call from the manager to ensure I had gotten what I needed. I even got an apology card slid under my door from the front desk manager about the broken air conditioning (which was quickly repaired). It was obvious that the staff had been well trained with customer satisfaction in mind.

The conference facilities were well appointed and attractive. The individual guest rooms, at least the one I had, was very big, well lit, had free Internet (as well as free wi-fi throughout the resort), and a well-stocked in-room mini bar. Each room also had a lovely stained glass design on the vaulted ceiling (which would be even better if it lit up, but you can’t have everything).

The designers really thought through the customer experience when designing the guest rooms. From little things like a stainless steel ice bucket (which keeps ice frozen for MUCH longer than do plastic buckets) to mounds of pillows on the bed and big flat screen TVs to my favorite feature, the most comfortable bed I every slept on (and it wasn’t just me; the conference floor was buzzing about the beds), the room was a pleasure to stay in.

But the room designers made a few mistakes—and they are strange ones.

There was a connecting door to the room next door—you know, the ones where, if the occupants of both rooms unlock the doors, you can move from one room to another. This is a great feature for families or other parties that travel together and need more space. However, in my room, at least, this connecting door was in the bathroom! If I were part of a two-room set up, I know I wouldn’t want the kids passing through while I was, well, “occupied.”

More concerning, the peep hole in the main guest room door—a critical security feature that lets guests ensure that the person at the door is expected and welcome—was so high, you needed to be at least six feet tall to see through it. This isn’t just annoying, it is dangerous!

I did mention these anomalies to the manager during one of her calls, but she laughed them off as quirks of the rooms. I really think that the peep holes, at least, merited more consideration than that.

So, it just goes to show, no matter how well you think through your customer’s experience, there are always some things that need to be addressed even after you think you’re done. Make sure you go through the experience that you offer your customers, even when you have a high satisfaction rating (I would go back to this resort with pleasure). You might find that there are things that need to be fine tuned to live up to the excellent standard you hoped to set.

What’s a Customer Chain and Why Is It important?

By Patty Seybold

Without customers, you have no business being in business. Everyone has customers. Businesses have customers: the businessperson or consumer who uses the end product or service they produce. Government agencies have customers: the citizens and residents they serve. Nonprofits have customers: the people whose needs they serve. Yet if you ask the people in most organizations who their customers are, you’ll receive a convoluted answer. Why is that?

The Answer to “Who are Your Customers?” Seems to Depend on Whom You Ask and What Role They Play in Your Organization

The brand manager for a car brand will describe a specific group of end-consumers as his target customers—34- to 48-year old soccer moms in upper middle-class suburban neighborhoods. But, if you ask the sales rep at a car manufacturer to describe his customers, he is likely to talk about the businesspeople who own the largest dealerships. The product line marketing manager for that same brand may spend most of his time working on incentives and collateral for the salespeople at the car dealerships.

An insurance provider’s VP of Sales may describe his independent agents as his customers. The product line marketer who prepares collateral for a new insurance product is focused on making it easy for the insurance agents to introduce that product to his clients. A Web merchandiser may be responsible for developing Web content targeted for end-users who are searching for affordable car insurance in their states.

Many smart people within well-respected companies consider their wholesalers, distributors, agents, brokers, or retailers to be their customers because these are the people with whom they interact on a daily basis. Dealers, agents, brokers, retailers, distributors, and wholesalers are not, strictly speaking, “customers.” They are channel partners who help you reach and serve your end-customers. Certainly, keeping wholesalers, distributors, and retailers happy and attending to their needs is critical.

However, the real customer for any business is the end consumer of the product or service it produces—the person or company who uses or consumes that product, not the ones who distribute the product to the user or even, necessarily, the ones who pay for it.

When asked who his customers are, the head of government agency may answer that it’s the taxpayers, of course. But, when you then ask about the services the agency provides and to whom they’re provided, you quickly learn that the government agency that’s responsible for children’s welfare views at-risk children as their end-customers. The agency responsible for public health worries about the health of all of the people in their jurisdiction, including passers through and illegal immigrants—not just legal citizens and/or taxpayers.

If you ask the marketing director of a not-for-profit who his customers are, you’ll usually get a great description of his ideal donors. But when you ask the executive director of the same not-for-profit who her customers are, you’ll get a compelling description of a specific target audience, a detailed account of the situation in which those people find themselves (and why), and a rundown of the services these people need that his not-for-profit provides.

Surely, keeping taxpayers and donors informed and on board is vital. Yet the real end-customers of government organizations and of not-for-profits are the people for whom they provide services, not the people who pay them to do so. So an end-customer is often not the person who pays for something. It’s the person who is the raison d’être of the organization.

People in Different Roles Interact with Customers at Different Links in Your Customer Chain

A lot of the confusion that abounds in most organizations about who the end-customer is and for whom we need to optimize our business processes has to do with the many different levels of customers, partners, and stakeholders we serve.

The Customer Chain: It’s Customers All the Way Down

We used to refer to demand chains and supply chains. Now that we’re designing complex customer-centric ecosystems; not just value chains, we’re experimenting with the idea of a customer chain. The end-customer is at the top of the chain. There are different kinds of customers and partners all the way down the chain. As you design or improve your ecosystem, you’ll want to streamline the scenarios for the customers at each level of the customer chain. But you should always start with (or at least bear in mind) the critical needs of your end-customers.

Ronni Marshak offers a simple way to wrap your mind around a customer chain: follow the route to market a bag of potato chips!

Supporting the Customer Chain
Start with the End-Customers, but Make Sure You’re Making It Easy for Every Stakeholder Between You and Them
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, April 8, 2010

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