Who's in charge?

Last week after an especially gruelling, frustrating, painful and ultimately unsatisfying customer experience from a bank, I found myself in a discussion about the experience with the director responsible for managing the people delivering this appallingly bad customer experience.

I was determined to help the bank understand the problems it had in its operations; to get them to walk in the customer’s shoes to see life from their perspective, a skill they clearly had not learnt; and to help them address its issues so that no future customer should be condemned to such an experience.

I asked the question:

‘Who is accountable for the customer experience here?’

The answer:

‘We are all accountable and responsible for the customer experience’.

Now I understood the problem.

For the reality is that if everyone is accountable and responsible no one is. Blame can too easily be shifted and transferred and avoided.

And in developing great customer experiences and customer journeys, it is a principle of our work that someone must be in charge. It doesn’t matter who it is but there must be a go to person in the business who is accountable and responsible. Businesses need a CXO or a Chief Experience Offer sitting in the C-Suite. The customer experience, just like the P&L and the balance sheet is too important a function to be left as everyone’s responsibility.

Now at this point the person in charge of marketing may well say that as the executive closest to the customer the CXO role should be incorporated within the CMO job description. And that is a very valid argument but in truth it doesn’t really matter who is accountable or whether a new role is created in the C-Suite but someone must be accountable. There must be a go-to person whenever the customer experience is broken who can muster the necessary resources and cross functional teams to work together to find a fix. Anything else is unacceptable.

And if this person can make the following component parts of the customer experience truly amazing for their business, they will have done a really brilliant job.

·         Channel experience: Do all the channels work together seamlessly and integrated? Or do the channels operate in silos with their own rules and procedures? Do the channels engage the senses and deliver an emotional experience when it matters? Does it promote advocacy and sharing?

·         Product experience: Does the product experience live up to expectations? Does it solve the problem? Does it do what it says on the tin? Does it make customers happy, productive and hopeful when they're using it, or does it make them frustrated, angry, agitated and depressed?

·         Buying experience: What is it like to go through the sales process and buy the product? Was it easy to figure out whether the product was the right fit? Was the pricing straight-forward? Was it easy to do business with us?

·         Service experience: What is it like to need help and support?  Do people dread having to call in and get help? Are we easy to deal with? Do our people show empathy and understanding and a genuine desire to help and take responsibility for resolution? Or do you feel like they just want to get rid of the enquiry as quickly as possible?

·          Exit Experience: What is it like to leave the company, return the product, or cancel the subscription and no longer be a customer?

And don’t forget this key enabler of a great customer experience for this will say a lot about your business.

·         Employee Experience: What's it like being recruited by the company? Working for the company? Being let go from the company? If you have a terrible employee experience, you will not attract the kinds of people that will make the customer experience amazing. It just doesn't work.

So the first step to designing and building an amazing customer experience is a simple one-make someone accountable for it.

What do you think? Any lessons from your experience on how you are going about improving the experience for your customers?

Prisoner 46664

I do brands.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work but try to help businesses develop the underlying definition of their brand. I try to define what it is going to stand for; the promise it is going to make and to try to keep, to its customers; and how it should present itself to its market. 

And when we are sitting around with the brand owner trying to come up with the right sense of words to describe the brand, you can bet that no matter the brand, company, category, product, or service, the most common list of attributes everyone wants to be associated with goes something like this: honesty, accessibility, innovation, invention, forward thinking, collaborative, friendly, and easy to work with, trustworthy, leader, fun. 

Recognise the exercise?  

Now who wouldn't want to be all those things? Anyone want to be the opposite?

But when every other brand has the same words on their list this is not conducive to the development of a distinctive brand.

Let us look at it another way.

If I was to ask you to describe someone like Nelson Mandela I am pretty sure I would get words like courageous, altruistic, heroic, peaceful, wise, thoughtful, giving, caring, loving, fearless and so and so on.

Great words and accurate in their description of Nelson Mandela but the same set of words could be accurately applied to many other people, including me on a good day.

But if I was to ask what Mandela stood for, your answer might be something like ‘freedom’. And that applies to very few people and most certainly not me.

That is the difference between a true brand stance and an easy list of attributes.

Great brands really get their role in the world and their reason to exist, and pursue that mission with all their might consistently over time and across every customer touchpoint.

These brands recognise that they are not just a collection of attributes that could describe anyone but have a purpose, a stance, a value and pure mission in the world. Just like Nelson Mandela.

Great brands are never remembered for their attributes but for what gets done with these attributes.

And don’t chase and measure themselves against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in their marketplace.

But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against their stance and not against their attributes. 

And measure they the market's understanding of their reason to be — who they are and why they do what they do.

It therefore follows that it is not so much what you make and what you sell but why you do that matters and how you do it.

So in one word what do you want your brand stand for?

Light bulb moment

Does your business do market research? Does it find it helpful and useful?

David Ogilvy, the guru of Mad Men everywhere, once opined that ‘the trouble with market research is that consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say’.

You may also have come across a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. This has absolutely nothing do with market research per se but does provide some insight into how people think and behave.

And note the key word here-‘people’. Too often in marketing  we use words like ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ which hides the reality that we are serving people, with all their biases, prejudices and irrationalities.

In essence the Hawthorn Effect is derived from a series of psychological experiments from the 1920s at the Hawthorn Works, a light bulb factory, to determine if changes to the heating, lighting and other environmental factors made workers more or less productive. It found that workers' productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. This suggested that the productivity gain occurred because the workers knew they were being monitored and it was this factor which biased the results rather than the changes themselves.

And maybe this is why David O said what he said. Maybe all market research is influenced in the same way. Maybe people in a drive to be helpful provide answers and explanations to the market researchers that a) they think they want to hear and/or b) which are rational when in reality they act irrationally.

Having sat behind the mirror in numerous focus groups and listened to more research presentations than are strictly necessary, it is clear few research programmes show a real understanding of how people’s brains work.

Maybe we need fewer market researchers speaking with and listening to people, and more psychologists.

For as people we are far more intuitive, emotional and impulsive when we pass judgement and make decisions than we like to admit. Impulsivity is by far a more common human trait than calculation. We are Systems 1 people. And academic studies in cognitive psychology tell us that people take the ‘Systems 1’, automatic, route 90% of the time and then we often engage our ‘Systems 2’, considered, brain to post-rationalise our instinctive decision.

Traditional market research studies have a tendency to uncover our System 2 response. Not our System 1 response. And this is why market research findings can often be meaningless, useless and highly misleading unless we can find a way to disentangle these responses to get to the truth, if there is indeed a truth.

And why do people not engage their brains when making decisions? Why are we more instinctive than we will admit? Because if we relied on System 2 thinking all the time we would never make a decision.

The world is a complex place and because we are constantly bombarded with too much information and stimuli we find short cuts. And this why we do we what we do.

These short cuts and rule of thumb strategies shorten decision making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about what we should do next.

Instead we take the default option and do what we have always done or is the least troublesome thing to do. We do what flatters and massages our ego. We do what everyone else is doing. We do the first thing that comes into our head.

Research rarely uncovers that sort of thing. And yet as marketers we commission research project after project to convince ourselves we are meeting a customer need; or to show our bosses that we have listened to customers; or to protect our backsides. What a waste.

Instead of listening to what people say we should find ways to observe what they do and apply a knowledge and understanding of psychology to test and determine reasons why. Far more insightful.

Or alternatively find a way to explore consumer reaction just as they flip from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as they transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

So how much money do you waste on market research? Found out anything useful?