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.

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.

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.