Shop till you drop-from funnels to fishbones

Is the High St dead?

It has recently been reported that vacancy rates in the High St are at an all time high with a significant number of these vacant lots being described as ‘long term sick with little or no prospect of reoccupation as shops’.

It’s really easy to be gloomy and to blame politicians, the state of the economy, out of town shopping, the internet and a host of other factors for this situation. The reality is that consumer behaviour has changed and it is not going to change back no matter what the politicians and planners do or how the economy recovers.

So shops RIP?

No. And here’s one reason why.

A few weeks back a friend of mine bought some tiles online to be collected from his local DIY store. When he went to collect the assistant advised him that he had checked all the tiles to make sure they all had the same batch number; asked if he had the right grouting; advised him on the right tools to buy; and provided some advice on how to do a good job.

Brilliant.

And lest anyone thinks that this thinking is only relevant to the traditional retailer, think again. Such thinking also applies to anyone who sells stuff. And that must be just about every business in the land.

But for High St retail to survive it must learn to think differently about what it does and how it does it.

The traditional way of thinking about the role of the shop has been as a stage in the Sales Funnel, the place where consumers came to buy. And as a customer journey this was seen as a total linear process. The internet and in particular mobile connectivity has changed all that and with it new retail business models, think click and collect, have emerged and will continue to emerge. As someone said ‘if you are in bricks and mortar you must be in digital too…or you are dead’.

Consumers now will come into the shop armed with all the latest knowledge, will look at the products, will go back online to read reviews, compare prices and hopefully buy. This journey looks less like a Purchase Funnel, more like a Purchase Fishbone. And must be understood.

Consequently whereas in the past the bricks on the High St were the place the shopper went to buy. But going forward the store will be the brand and product showcase that drives revenues across all channels, less a profit centre and more an essential brand overhead that helps build meaningful product and brand saliency.

In this world the store is a destination that will augment the brand experience and will be focussed less on driving sales and more on engaging the customer through dramatic customer experiences and in-store theatrification.

And in this environment the role of the sales assistant is vital. As customers become increasingly well informed they expect more from the service they receive in store. They expect their store assistants to be empowered, informed and able to match the high level of knowledge of the consumer but also add to it and provide additional value. After all, if automation can take care of the purely transactional or navigational aspects of service, then investing in a human had better offer something more for their money and give customers a compelling reason to venture into a bricks-and-mortar store.

And if you want to see the future take a peek inside a Nike store, an Apple store or Selfridges. These stores direction sign the future and for any local High St to survive as a retail centre every butcher, baker and candlestick maker needs to examine these trends and think how these might be applied closer to home.

The connected, always on consumer is here to stay as are out of town shopping centres. And as we can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube, everyone with an interest in the High St needs to embrace these changes and think long and hard how to respond.

So what do you think about the future of retail? Do you think it’s on its last legs? Where have you seen examples of great retailing that fills you with optimism for the future of the High St.

How was it for you?

They say if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. I beg to differ.

Last week I received a text from my bank asking me to score by SMS my latest interaction with their call centre. Simple enough.

And, given everything else they’ve got on their plates,  you might find it refreshing news that banks were at last taking customer satisfaction seriously and tracking the service performance of their channels. It is unusual for a business in any category to track performance and customer satisfaction to this degree.

Hopefully they will not use the information provided by its customers to roast those of its service staff who failed to get a good score. I do hope they remember my belief that no one gets up in the morning to give bad service. Instead bad service is the result of poorly designed processes, poor systems and training. It is the infrastructure that leads to bad service not the people.

Is  this level of tracking really a good thing. And I take issue with the axiom that you need to measure to manage.

For in my case while the interaction I had on the phone was pleasant, efficient and helpful, my experience of the journey was awful. And I would hypothesise that it is perfectly possible to have a whole series of perfectly good individual interactions but still get an appalling experience.

And this is where I think my bank went wrong.

Having just done extensive research into how businesses develop their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, businesses, like my bank, which emphasise measuring and maximising satisfaction at touchpoint level are getting a distorted picture suggesting that customers might be happier than they actually are. For these businesses are failing to understand that customers view the experience as a whole and not by the organisational silos that must combine seamlessly to deliver the integrated service required through the journey and across the experience.

My bank lacked this understanding.

Instead if businesses truly feel that measurement is required to manage and to track its service performance, it is surely better that they take a more holistic and joined up view of the service they provide.

Firstly view the journey and experience as a whole. To address this we would encourage businesses to understand better their journeys as a whole, not just a single touchpoint or channel of communication.

Secondly, instead of dissipating their resources across a broad front of touchpoints and journeys, identify those that really matter to customers and those with most impact on business performance. And apply the measurement tools there.

And lastly and more importantly, measure satisfaction with the entire journey, the holistic experience. In my case it would have been considerably better and more accurate not to check out my level of happiness with my call centre call but my satisfaction with my bank’s ability to transfer an account.

This is checking satisfaction at customer level not channel level. And truly demonstrates an ability to walk in the customer’ shoes.

A business that seeks to measure and manage complete customer journeys will not only do its best at touchpoint level but will also gain a better understanding of the root causes of areas of dissatisfaction in the journey; and will discover more effective ways to collaborate and to break down organisational silos.  

And that is good news for the customer.

How do you measure and manage customer satisfaction? Any good tips to share and pass on?

Talent show

I have a young friend currently trying to enter the marketing profession. She has applied for

countless graduate entry roles in various businesses and agencies around the country and she is unimpressed with the poor communication, the lack of respect shown when it comes to timescales and deadlines, and the complete absence of feedback, even from some of the biggest brands in the world.

And it is more than likely that these failures are systemic to the recruitment process not just the treatment meted out to the most junior of applicants.

When you listen to her tale any professional marketer would be appalled if their brand, a brand whose reputation they will have carefully nurtured and be dedicated to protecting, treated customers and prospects in a similar way. Yet it seems ok to treat prospective talent in such a brand damaging way. And if it treats potential recruits like this, just how does it treat colleagues? And does the way it treats its people align with the customer experience it is seeking to deliver? And more fundamentally should those charged with responsibility for the brand, usually in marketing, take more responsibility for the employee experience?

We all know that happy colleagues mean happy customers but I recently read that we don’t want just want happy customers and colleagues, we want engaged customers and colleagues. This means colleagues are more willing to build an emotional bond, will give more effort to build and deliver a great customer experience, will consent to giving more of themselves to your brand and to your customers. And this can only be good for the customer.

Ideally the customer experience and the employee experience ought to be perfectly aligned. But how aligned are they? And do we think that the colleague journey from recruitment through to resignation and beyond has been designed to deliver a great and fully aligned colleague experience? The results from the experience of my friend would suggest that in many cases they might not be.

And in a recent example when dealing with a business that claims it puts the customer at the heart of all it does, it was clear that its staff were so concerned with making sure that they do things right even to the point when this was not always in the interests of the customer. The management culture encouraged compliance with the rules and processes rather than doing what was right.

Having just completed research into identifying the principles being adopted by businesses to map out their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, we did not find one business doing this for colleagues.

There is surely a great opportunity for businesses to build a truly experiential brand by applying the principles of customer journey analysis and design and by learning to walk in the shoes of those who work in the business through

-          The recruitment process

-          The on-boarding process

-          The on-going management and servicing process

-          The leaving process.

And through these journeys asking and considering

-          How well does the employee experience match the desired customer experience ?
How well are these fulfilling colleagues’ rational and emotional needs?

-          Where are the service breakdowns?

-          How well are these experiences aligned with the brand promise? 

-          How can the communication and delivery eco-systems address and fix any problems and issues?

-          What are the critically important parts of these journeys?

As the economy recovers the market to acquire and retain talent will become increasingly competitive. To be successful in this market place businesses could learn much from the principles of customer engagement and the thinking used to develop a great customer experience and apply this to building a great colleague experience.

And of course building a great colleague experience is surely critical in building a great customer experience.

So if you work in marketing today, invite your HR colleagues for a coffee and start to discuss how together you can build a truly effective colleague experience.

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?

I'm a bad loser

Once again we have had a great summer of British sporting success-Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, the first Scottish British to win there while playing in long trousers; Justin Rose wins the US Open (golf); the British Lions, albeit with a lot of Welsh help, win the series against Australia; Chris Froome wins the Tour de France, the second Brit (well nearly!) in succession; and England have retained the Ashes. And there will no doubt be more success to come.

Following on from last year’s Olympics our sporting triumphs are beginning to spoil us. Just as well because we all hate losing. No matter how much the British are admired for their long track record of plucky failure, there is no doubt about it all of us are bad losers. Indeed you could say we hate losing more than we like winning.

We might say that we all hate a bad loser but the way our brain works means we are most definitely not a good loser.

Consider this simple experiment-half a class of students were given a mug and the other half a large bar of chocolate. The costs of each were the same and beforehand the students were as likely to choose one as the other. Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to the chocolate bar and vice versa, only one in ten switched.

There are plenty more experiments like this providing a large body of evidence that people, and that means you and me, really are loss averse and will put more effort in avoiding a loss than they will to realise a gain.

And this can be a source of great customer dissatisfaction too-people are more likely to get more grumpy and dissatisfied when they think something they are legitimately entitled to is taken away from them than they feel satisfied and pleased when they are given something. George Osborne knows a lot about this.

This means that brands have to think and take these feelings into account when thinking about and designing the customer experience and the customer journey.

Last week I was informed by a hotel loyalty membership programme that as I hadn’t used the service enough in the past 12 months, in other words I wasn’t making as much money for them as previously, that I would no longer be entitled to certain privileges and benefits. I was however assured that should I ‘restore my usage to the levels seen previously over the coming year my privileges would be restored’.

Remember I am a bad loser.

Immediately my opinion of this brand plummeted; I now wanted to use them less not more and move on; and I wanted to tell the world about how I was being treated.

A common mistake made by brands is that they think people behave and think rationally. In this instance they believed that I would think it sensible and rational that because I wasn’t using their services to the same extent as previously that I would accept that I wasn’t entitled to certain privileges and benefits. But that is not how I think. It is not how people think.

People also think and behave emotionally.

And that is why brands when thinking about the customer experience and the customer journey must think of it as far more than a rational process. It is an emotional journey too and this must be taken into account. It is therefore important that when designing the ideal customer experience brands must think about how the customer might be feeling and want to feel and must incorporate psychological thinking and learning from behavioural economics.

Perhaps if my hotel brand had considered these factors they would have done a far better job of explaining my changing status and in helping me come to terms with my loss.

Instead of just telling me that my privileges were being with withdrawn perhaps they might have allowed me to pay a fee to retain them; or let me know that they had changed their approach to benefits for someone like me; or that as I wasn’t using my privileges and benefits they would like my input on how they might better serve me going forward.

In other words don’t blame me for the loss; help me to come to terms with the loss; and help me to change the way I thought about the loss. That would be the emotional way to design the experience.

We all like a good loser. And we all hate to be seen as a bad one. But the reality is we are all bad losers. And given this we can and should design an experience that recognises this and which takes these feelings and emotions into account to demonstrate that we are not really losing.

Do you think about this when you design your customer experience?

Is the customer always right?

In customer service there are only two rules. Rule 1-the customer is always right. Rule 2-if the customer is ever wrong, re-read rule 1.

So what are we to make of the recent story of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant who recently refused to scan a customer’s groceries because the customer would not stop talking on their mobile phone?

Is this a breach of a Rule 2?

I must admit to being really torn on this one.

But philosophically we need to ask if we get the service we deserve. And this is as true for customers as it is for the businesses that serve them.

And if we agree with this philosophical point of view how do we change the rules of the game?

I am a terrible customer always looking to find ways to improve the service I get. I work on the principle that if I accept poor service I am condemning the next customer to shoddy and inadequate service. So I have a duty to let businesses know when and if they are getting wrong and how it might be improved.

More of us as consumers ought to do this and be less British, stoical and phlegmatic about this.  In short we need to complain more.

But businesses also need to demonstrate they value excellent customer service and that they truly want to deliver a brilliant customer experience that wows and surprises their customers. Too often too many businesses see service as a cost to be delivered as cost effectively as possible. Instead see it as an investment and show how much they really care about service.

This really concerns me.

Businesses have a great tendency to say one thing when it comes to service but do something else. And people will watch more than they listen. Consistency of message is of the utmost importance.

And so if customers get the service they deserve, businesses also deliver the service they deserve.

But to earn a reputation for brilliant customer service there are some simple things businesses can learn to do that will help them wow their colleagues and their customers and show a real passion for delivering a consistently awesome customer experience.

·         Show that you really value customer service and that those who deal with customers are the real value add to the business. All businesses should only contain two types of staff-those who serve customers and those who serve those who serve the customer. So why do we have a Head Office? This highlights the hierarchy. Why not name this Customer Support Centre?

·         Demonstrate real leadership. Get senior management to spend at least one day a month dealing with customers on the front line. No excuses, no ifs, no buts. A powerful signal to all in the business that customers and those who deal with customers are important.

·         Learn to walk in the customers’ shoes. How often does your business think about the customer experience when it is re-engineering its processes and systems from the outside in? Too often this is done from the inside out. Rare is the business which seriously thinks about who its customers might be, what they want and how they might be feeling when they touch the business. Rarer still is the business that takes such insights into account when re-designing its processes. Time to start.

At the end of the day it is about having a passion for service excellence and if the business has this passion this will be shared by its people. Simples.

And where does this leave me on the issue of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant and the phone-glued-to-the-ear customer? 

Still confused. But maybe if businesses showed they really valued customer service and those who deliver it, maybe the customer might learn to appreciate them too. It’s worth a try.

Let's talk shoes

How long could you talk on the telephone with a stranger? 5 minutes? Half an hour? One hour? More?

What about if the conversation was about shoes?

How about 10 hours 29 minutes?

This was the 'world record' set for the longest customer service phone call by Zappos, the online shoe retailer with a very unique definition of good customer service. And they are so proud of this record as its spokesperson was delighted to explain,

' Zappos first core value is to deliver wow through service and allowing team members to stay on the phone with a customer for as long as they need is a crucial measure of fulfilling this value'.

I am not sure what was talked about for 10 and half hours though I believe that one pair of Ugg boots was in fact sold. However it does demonstrate Zappos legendary dedication to its customers.

Now this example might be a tad excessive. And the business case for this call might not be  financially sustainable. But it does raise one important question in my mind-how effective are call handling metrics and targets?

Too often call centres target average call handling times. In other words the average length of the call, or conversation with a customer or prospect, must not exceed say 90 seconds. And colleagues whose average exceeds this target will be subject to 're-education'.

So what happens in this environment-colleagues on the phone rush to finish the call as soon as possible to avoid breach. It must be like watching the Countdown Clock. The priority is to finish the call, not resolve the customer problem. Is this good for business? Is this good for the customer? No and most definitely no.

Last week I heard of a utility company, though I'm sure this tale is equally applicable to banks and anyone else with a large and even small call centre operation, whose rate of efficiency as measured by average call handling was amazingly high yet whose C-Sat scores were depressingly low. And there is a correlation.

For to keep down call handling times call centre colleagues were rushing through the calls with a high tendency to action single requests for service even though the customer might want to do more than one service action. And so this led to unhappy customers and the customer needing to call back. And so the number of calls into the call centre increased too. And you call this efficient?

This is a lose lose. It's not a great customer experience. Nor an efficient business model.

Now I am not advocating that 10 hour conversations about shoes should become the norm in our call centres. But I do say that by allowing our call centre colleagues to take the time necessary to help customers without the need to watch the clock, our call centre conversations will be more rewarding, more fruitful, more engaging, more customer focused and yes more productive and efficient.

If Zappos have found this out surely it is time that everyone out there with a call centre which imposes time limits on calls found this out too.

Trust me-talking about shoes can make for happy smiley customers and happy face accountants too.

Message in a (wee) bottle

Those of you of a certain age, and I count myself in this cohort, will be aware that the first signs that the ageing process has begun are diminishing eyesight and the addition of Specsavers to our retail repertoire.

And this is a problem when staying in hotels.

Last week I had occasion to stay in quite a few hotels while travelling. And in each of these hotels I encountered the same problem.

( Those of you of a younger generation will not know what I am going to talk about now so you can skip the new few paragraphs but please come back before the end to learn the moral of this tale and its application to marketing practice).

And it is quite a simple problem.

In a hotel room where is the last place you are likely to wear your glasses? In the shower, of course.

And yet the writing is so minuscule on the wee bottles that anyone with less than 20:20 vision must surely struggle to work out if they are putting shampoo or conditioner or even perfumed hand lotion on their tresses. It never seems to occur to anyone in the hospitality industry that this might be an issue for the ageing who are becoming visually challenged

I mentioned this insight first to the woman in the corridor with the trolley who makes up the rooms and then to the reception staff and was informed that everyone says the same thing; that they are sick and tired of flagging this up through line management, staff suggestions schemes and the like; but 'they ' just don't listen.

And here is the paradox-those closest to the customer have no influence or ability to make things happen; and those with most influence in any business are the furthest away from the customer. I call this the Customer Experience Paradox. And it is a puzzle that all businesses should be looking to resolve.

Sure businesses will listen to the customer by conducting large scale customer research programmes and no doubt the hotel chain mentioned above will have some sort of C-Sat tracking, though curiously I have not yet come across this. Maybe this is a business that isn't after all interested in hearing what its customers think.

In any event I doubt that such studies will pick up the small but irritating critical non essentials like the size of writing on the shampoo bottles. But it is by paying attention to the small details, the small irritations, the small delights that can set a brand apart.

And to do this it must find ways to solve the Customer Experience Paradox. Perhaps by paying more attention to the collective wisdom of its staff and finds ways to ensure that their wisdom is collected and shared. And I don't mean the usual Staff Suggestion Scheme but a channel where those closest to the customer are brought face to face with those with the ability to bring about change.

Alternatively those at the top of the organisation commit a day per month to spend on the shop floor, working with colleagues who deal with customers and even with customers themselves. Nothing could do more to help 'them' understand the frustrations, needs and emotions of their customers. Walking in the customers’ shoes is a very powerful catalyst for chance.

Hopefully someone in the hotel industry is listening and when I next stay in a hotel I might be able to wash my hair without fearing I am putting the wrong substance on my locks and that my hair might fall out.

One small step and all that...

Now that we are back at our desks stuffed full with turkey, pudding and chocolate, let me start the year with a question…

When did you last try to deal with your business as a customer might and look at your business through their eyes?

Probably not recently.  

It always amazes and astounds me that while sales returns and financial KPIs get monitored ruthlessly the customer journey is frequently an overlooked business issue with accountability and responsibility often muddied.

And yet there are businesses which see this as a route to real competitive advantage.

The key to this is for businesses to learn ‘to walk in the shoes of their customers’, so they might examine from the outside-in how they come across. Often customer journey planning is based on inside out thinking and obsesses about internal details.  By thinking outside-in, one business uncovered that while its procedures were obediently followed, no one thought to communicate what was happening to the customer for up to 4 months.

Through speaking with a number of leading edge businesses from a broad range of sectors across the private and public sectors, I learnt that the ability to walk in customers shoes is key to what really smart businesses are doing  to turn what is often a prosaic process driven exercise into a programme that delivers tangible and lasting benefits.

These businesses align fully the journey and the experience with the business and brand strategy. The customer journey for a Waitrose customer will be very different from that experienced by say an Aldi shopper yet since both are fully aligned strategically, both will be equally effective.

Another insight was the importance those with highly distinctive customer journeys place on understanding and responding to customer feelings and emotions at key moments of truth.  Most journeys tend to be built around reliability and speed of response. While important, these factors will not offer advantage. Interventions that appeal to the gut will.

I also learnt that, and this will impress Finance Director’s everywhere, good understanding will also help reduce cost as journey analysis can help identify bottlenecks, duplication and outcomes of low customer value. One business promised to delivers its product within 28 days but builds costly processes to deliver within 7. Except in extreme cases 28 days fully met customer needs, allowing significant costs to be stripped from the business without adversely affecting the customer experience.

Lastly the role of the leadership team is critical here.  As the saying goes, to improve airline food, serve it in the board room. To deliver enduring competitive advantage the C-suite must invest the time to walk in customers’ shoes. A powerful signal to send to colleagues that this matters.

Of course there is far more to building a great customer journey than I have been able to describe here but you have been warned to expect much more on this topic in the weeks ahead. So, as the late great Neil Armstrong might have said… just think of these insights as the first small steps on a hugely rewarding journey.

Letting the train take the strain

Last week I had to visit London and it was in the unlikely setting of the train station that I found inspiration for this week’s words of wit and wisdom.

For it was at the train station that I met a truly inspiring man and for those of us involved in the business of marketing and the marketing of business the example he sets should one we should all aspire to follow.

This is his story.

While waiting to travel  I came across the Marketing Director for the line – there he was meeting, greeting and talking with the passengers, his customers. As someone in the same line of business, I was curious why he was out and about at this ungodly hour. His reply interested me.

‘We have just introduced a few changes and I was interested in hearing what my customers thought about it. And I wanted to support the staff’.

Now compare this attitude with my recent experience with the call centre of a major and very well known business, an experience far from smooth and efficient. And getting nowhere with the customer service team I asked to speak to their Head of Customer Service to be told ‘I am sorry but he does not speak to customers’.

Are you as amazed and as dumfounded at that statement as I was? This is an organisation where I was assured that ‘your call is very important to us’ and ‘customer service is our number one priority’. Yeah, right. But it is also an organisation where its senior management do not think customers a species important enough to speak with.

Too often marketing teams and senior executives learn their customer feedback through the prism of a market research report or a presentation of customer complaints. Rarely do they meet customers and get feedback raw and emotional, nor experience what customers are experiencing.

I recently read an interview with the American general who led the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who said that ‘you cannot build understanding or engagement through a bullet proof windscreen’.

And what applies on the battlefield can also be applied by marketers who too often seek to build understanding through their own bullet proof windscreen. Only we call it market research.

One major financial services company I know regularly asks its executive team to walk in the footsteps of its customers through a series of real transactions and also record and log their observations, feelings and emotions. In this way those who are mandating the process to be followed come face to face with the reality of their decisions and their instructions at the moment of truth for their customers. This business is learning a lot from my American general.

All of us in the business of marketing can learn from this and get out from behind our bullet proof windscreens to talk with customers and to regularly shop the customer shop.

And this will send a very powerful signal to your customers and to your front line staff, the kind of an organisation you want to be. And you will be amazed at what you will learn and uncover.

In the meantime I will continue to let my favourite train take the strain.

Home sweet home

In recent months I have finally paid off my mortgage and for the first time in 25 or so years I own outright every single brick, roof tile and breeze block. It is a great feeling knowing that you are no longer out at work to feed that particular monkey. And if you are not yet there I hope that it will not be too long before you too are in this position.

And I hope that when you get there your mortgage lender understands the principles of a great customer experience better than mine did.

It was not that they made life especially hard when it came to obtaining and completing the necessary paperwork. Indeed for a large business they were actually quite efficient. And I am sure that they did everything they were supposed to do right.

But the customer journey they had designed no doubt to be as efficient as possible, really failed to grasp the significance and emotionality of what was to me a major life event. And this is where those who designed this particular experience went wrong.

Would it have hurt them to enclose with the paperwork  a nice letter acknowledging the significance of this event; thanking me for being privileged to be part of this journey with me;  and wishing me all the best in the next stage of my journey through life?

I have spoken before about the need for marketing folk to experience the customer experience if they want to understand the frustrations, and hopefully the joys, that customers will endure and sometimes enjoy when doing business with your business.

But there is a lot more we can and should do if we want to develop and put in place mind blowingly great and truly differentiating customer experiences.

Now many people may think that it is only entertainment type businesses or those in say the leisure and hospitality industry who need to fuss about the customer experience. Wrong. In my opinion whatever the service or the product a customer is buying or receiving, that customer will have an experience of some sort and all service encounters in all businesses provide an opportunity for emotional engagement, however mundane the product or service might be. Repaying a mortgage is hardly a Disneyworld experience, is it?

So no matter your industry or sector, you should concern yourself with the customer experience and if you work in marketing, you ought to obsess about this whether you work in financial services or retail; automotive or FMCG; education or hospitality; and even, especially, the public sector.

I would like to suggest that anyone thinking about the customer experience should consider three broad principles. 

Move from operational service quality to customer perceived quality. Too many businesses emphasise and maybe over emphasise operational service quality. This needs to be balanced by the need to examine and think about how the service being delivered is perceived by the customer. Operational service quality, delivering the service to specification every time, is a great way to regularise the service experience cost efficiently but might not be so great for the customer. I am sure that in my case the operational service quality was high in that the service was delivered to specification with calls and letters being answered within set timescales and the like but the experience still left me with a hollow feeling. More should be done to understand the quality as perceived by me.

Look beyond the basics.  It goes without saying that anyone with a passion for improving the customer experience will identify the touch points that matter along the customer corridor and remove foul ups and snarls in this area. But we must do more. Delivering on these foundational experiences, the minimum standard customers expect in their everyday contact with a brand, does not define it or differentiate the brand. This is merely an essential building block, and if not present, will turn customers away. But instead we must look beyond the basics to deliver true delight and a unique brand experience. We must find and develop the differentiating experiences which have the potential to separate the brand from competitors and signature experiences which are essential to defining the brand uniquely and which only your brand can do and can become known for.

Map emotions not just behaviours. Too often we limit analysis of the customer journey to how our business behaves across and through the customer corridor and we compare this to how the customer wants us to behave to provide a detailed customer journey map through this corridor identifying improvement opportunities as we go.  Usually these maps will focus on things like reliability, responsiveness, accessibility and problem solving.  But how often do we plot out or obtain data on how the customer is feeling at each stage of the journey through the customer journey, how the customer wants to feel and even how we want the customer to feel? This might not come easy to businesses used to thinking rationally and making decisions based on hard facts and solid data but emotion mapping through the customer corridor is as essential as behavioural mapping. If my mortgage lender had thought harder about how they wanted me to feel or indeed was feeling, I am sure they would have developed and delivered a more emotional and a better experience

Great customer experiences don’t just happen. They are carefully designed and beautifully constructed. And I do wish more businesses would think more about this. After all they owe it to their customers.

How do you go about building a great customer experience in your business? What factors do you consider?

All thoughts welcome.