Customer-centric cultures (or not, as the case may be)

Taking a Customer Experience perspective has a canny knack of revealing an organisation’s real culture.

 

A CX maturity exercise I ran for a well-known consumer brand unearthed a shock for the leadership team; contrary to the employee survey, pride in the brand was pretty much non-existent.

I sat down with a number of colleagues and asked what they’d say to someone who enquired where they worked. An unnerving amount of them told me they would rather say they were unemployed or make something up than reveal who they worked for.

The reason they were fielding so many costly calls from customers was that although the team had given plenty of feedback on what needs improving, it was never acted on. They didn’t have the tools or information to help customers, hand-off processes went into black holes and communications were confusing and inconsistent. They’d tried to get things fixed but everything was ‘in next year’s budget’ or not seen as a priority. They’d given up trying to change anything so the cost of failure demand was left to write its own invoices.

And the reason the employee survey was giving a false reading of ‘highly engaged’? The team ticked that box in the belief that the “right” answer would secure their end-of-year bonus. Some interesting conversations followed.

In stark contrast, this year I experienced an employee going not just “the extra mile” for me but, literally, several miles. It’s an often-used phrase with good intent but translating it into colleague behaviours is not easy.

Long story short, my flight from London to Amsterdam was subject to an 8-hour delay. So, it was getting on for midnight when I arrived at the airport’s railway station. I needed information on how to get to an unfamiliar suburb of the city for my conference. The airport’s taxi queue snaked into the night for miles and there was hardly anybody else around. Thankfully, on the platform was a friendly-looking guy in a Schiphol-branded high-visibility jacket.

He explained it wasn’t a straightforward journey to navigate and without hesitation he said he’d go with me to show me the way. I tried to insist that while it was very kind he didn’t need to do it. He was, after all as I found out later, on his way home in a different direction after a long operational shift.

A short train ride was followed by a walk across a park and then onto a bus for a few more stops to the hotel.

He got me there and he made it easy for me.  I’ve lived and worked in cities around the world so am used to getting from A to B on my own but on that dark, wet night after long delays and feeling less than chipper, I was – and still am – so grateful.

His response to my gratitude has stuck with me ever since. As we parted ways he smiled and with a huge amount of pride simply said “We’re Schiphol. It’s what we do”.

With the help of Marcel Stroop of Schiphol’s brilliant innovation team, we tracked him down to make sure his ‘above and beyond’ actions were acknowledged.

I get it, that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day and is fairly extreme. But when we talk about employee pride and about “going the extra mile” for our customers, it reminds me that we should give it a stress-test to understand how genuine it is. Do actions mirror the words?

Even with the poster on the wall with its carefully-worded proclamations, would everyone – really – be willing to do something extra, however small it may be? Not every day, but when they feel it is right.

Or does the culture mean that in reality they dare not do anything outside their process-based remit for fear of recrimination by their manager? Do they think “Why bother?” or “We don’t have time for that”. Are they proud enough to wear your brand’s logo outside of work? Do they look at each other and shrug, assuming and hoping  that someone else will do the extra bit?

It’s important stuff and a telling topic to discuss in your team meetings. What examples of good or bad cultures have they heard about or seen in their own experiences outside work? Should or could the same happen in your organisation and what are the lessons to learn?

Thank you Michel, Marcel and the Schiphol family for a memorable and thought-provoking experience!

 

As a Customer Experience practitioner and now CX consultant, Jerry Angrave supports leaders and managers who are driving forward their organisation’s Customer Experience programme.

He helps shape the thinking and plan the doing in a way that gives structure, influence and momentum to the CX activity.

The real purpose of customer journey mapping

Customer Journey Mapping

This year has challenged the real purpose of many organisations. Some have stayed true to their meaning while others have shown their true colours.

As the dust hopefully settles on the rapid changes everyone has put in place we should, if at all possible, invest in the time to understand what it’s like for a customer. Our underlying vision, purpose or North Star may not have changed but our customers’ priorities and experiences most certainly have.

We always advocate that journey mapping is done and reviewed regularly but the events of 2020 make repeating it necessary, not just an option. Chances are, most existing journey maps were created pre-pandemic and so are already out of date.

How can we build back better if we don’t understand how our customers’ priorities, needs, hopes, fears and expectations have changed?

We therefore have a great opportunity to treat customers as if they have never been to our store or our website. We often make unintentional assumptions that our customers will instinctively know what to do because they’ve been here before. If we assume they are first-timers, we’ll have heaps more empathy and be in a better position to build on what we’ve already done.

However, a perennial issue with journey mapping is that as soon as the workshop finishes, everyone drifts back to their day job. The map gets written up, maybe converted into a neat piece of software, discussed and filed away. A lack of planning beforehand means the momentum comes to a rapid halt. To have so many ideas from the programme of journey mapping can be an uncomfortable reality-check about what to prioritise and what to do next.

There might also be a dawning realisation that this isn’t just a workshop or a project but if we’re going to get it right, it’s a cultural and very strategic way of thinking about our business.

If there are any positives to come out of the pandemic and carry into the new year, one of them is the sense of “We’re all in it together”. Before that feeling dissipates back to those siloed functions where so many managers (because of the lack of a genuine customer-centric culture) find comfort, we should tap into one of journey mapping’s biggest benefits.

It’s not just about the sticky notes on the wall or the Zoom-Mural online workshop. It’s not even always just about the write-up of the journey and list of improvements. Yes, those are clearly important but now more than ever before we should ensure journey mapping stimulates the right conversations across, up and down the business that lead to the right tactical, strategic and cultural actions.

Journey mapping shouldn’t be just about finding ways to fix broken processes or find incremental improvements to the experience. It should give the evidence for asking some tough questions about how committed the organisation and leadership is to the vision.

In the journey mapping sessions people learn about their own colleagues and the job they each do. They learn about their own business and start to piece together the culture from a wider perspective.  It becomes clear that while one part of the business is very much on the “Customer-first” agenda, some colleagues are working to different agendas. They are rewarded for perpetuating the processes that are convenient to the business not the customer.

It’s hard to ignore a colleague who says they come up with ideas but their line manager tells them that’s not what they’re paid to do. It’s hard to ignore the chasm between the “Customer-First Promise” and the reality of the experience they have just articulated.

It’s also hard to ignore the fact that despite saying “We put customers at the heart of what we do”, the Exec team is seemingly happy to get just one set of customer metrics every year. Why would that be? Are they as committed to putting customers first as they say?  What can they do to help make everyone believe in it?

All these issues need to be discussed if a business is to become more customer-centric. Journey mapping is often the catalyst to have those conversations, without it they may simply not happen.

A lot has clearly changed this year. If there’s anything to change about journey mapping, I’d suggest it’s that we try even harder to see things from our customers’ perspectives and make it lead to more of the right conversations. Your boss and customers will thank you for it…

Happy mapping!

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Jerry Angrave is Customer Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company. Jerry is a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and author of The Journey Mapping Playbook published by De Gruyter in October 2020.

[email protected]   +44 (0)7917 718072

Is now an appropriate time to Spring-clean our Customer Experience programme?

People in Customer Experience roles are an energetic, passionate bunch. They are also resilient and have bags of perseverance.

Nonetheless, as lockdown restrictions persist I’ve heard from a couple of Customer Experience teams who are feeling a little lost right now. While grateful to still have a job, they were asking what practical things they could be doing to keep a sense of moving forward when many elements of their usual role were not possible.

Of course the wider context is indeed that friends and colleagues have been laid off, furloughed again or have had to find other roles and new careers. It may, understandably, be the least of your or their priorities right now. Our collective health and well-being is what matters.

But, if you are in a Customer Experience role and your thoughts turn to making the best of a bad situation, I hope these suggestions may help a little. They are based on my own experience and on what I hear others are doing. Please add your thoughts to the LinkedIn post on what else you are focusing on.

Employee experience

There are still tough times all round at the moment. If you haven’t lost your own job, chances are you know someone who has. Sparks of positivity can easily get smothered in a blanket of uncertainty. So more than ever before we must still look out for each other. A quick call, an email or text just to check-in and ask “You ok?” goes a long way.

There’s a large amount of resources on wellbeing at the CIPD website and here too from Lane 4.

Keep spirits up by sharing stories, reliving examples of brilliant (or funny) customer experiences that will give everyone a lift and a smile. It’s easy for colleagues to think everything they do is routine, one cog in a big machine, that nothing exciting ever happens. But keep talking about what made / makes your organisation different and special. Be proud to “Show and Tell” about going that extra mile. Draw out the positives from the current situation such as better ways of working, more creativity and camaraderie.

Beyond that, keep engaging as best you can, ask your team and stakeholders what they need from you, how would they improve communications and what tools, focus or information do they need to deliver the right customer experiences?

Customer engagement (even when they’re not able to be a customer)

There have been some great examples of engagement over the last year even when there might not be any customers at the door.

It’s about providing some degree of value and as long as it’s sincere can be fun, informative and educational.  Your Sales or Marketing team may be under severe pressure to wring out every last revenue opportunity; if that’s the case at least get them to be very transparent and honest rather than a badly-disguised sales pitch. We’ll all remember how we feel we were treated by companies in these times. The same goes for how our customers feel about us.

In the UK, we’ll remember how we felt when we heard the National Trust was opening the doors to its parks and grounds for free in the very early days of the first lockdown. It was necessarily short-lived but it was a hugely well-intended gesture. We appreciate airports, supermarkets and retailers giving us a behind-the-scenes look at their business and running competitions to keep us engaged. They told us what they’re doing and how we could help them help us. We doff our hat to people like Joe Wicks who gave us exercise classes every morning for free.

As they say, what goes around come around and so when we are able to, we’ll support those who showed they were on our side.

But we’ll also remember what we thought of those companies whose leadership teams treated their employees with contempt, dragged their heels on giving refunds and tried to make a quick buck ‘because they could’. Any customer engagement they tried was insincere and completely undermined by their actions elsewhere. Will we be as supportive when we have a choice about whether to give them our money again?

Review VoC and Metrics

Now is not the time for process audits disguised as customer surveys. It never has been. There are many positives to be coming out of this situation especially around humanity, kindness and creativity and if it helps rid us of pointless ‘surveys’ that’s no bad thing either.

For most companies it’s not really practical any more to ask “How satisfied are you with our payment process?” or “You’d recommend us, right?”. Those are important but there are more fundamental worries, fears, hopes and expectations going on inside customers’ heads right now.

We need to listen and listen-up well. How can you adapt your listening posts to ask customers what they need from you? How are you reviewing your understanding and reporting to drive meaningful actions? What worked a few years ago when it was set up may not work as well as it could now.

Does everyone, right around the business, know what customers are thinking, saying and doing – and why?

If you’re not doing so already, lower customer volumes might mean there’s an opportunity to close that loop; let customers know you’ve had their feedback and what you’re doing about it.

Now might be the time to slim down your surveys in order to get more, and a better quality of, response. Do you make your customers wade through 15 questions about income, postcode and their favourite film, before asking them what the experience was like and why, just to satisfy a hunger for data?

How about setting up that customer panel you’ve always wanted?

When things settle down will you carry on measuring the same stuff because it’s easy? Or, can you engineer a switch to measuring the things customers value the most and that are aligned to delivering on the strategy? Why measure advocacy rates to three decimal places when the strategic vision is, for example, all about making things more convenient and friendly? Why not plan to measure and report on how convenient and friendly customers found you? Is it a convenient time to shake off the obsession with the numbers and get the leadership team to focus instead on the qualitative drivers?

And it could be timely to revisit the persistent “What’s the ROI of customer experience?” question. Engage the boffins in the Insight or Finance teams to calculate the correlation between better experiences, higher lifetime values and commercial performance indicators.

Personal development

Keeping match fit in terms of thinking and planning is essential right now. We need to hit the ground running when we come out of this and, perhaps, put ourselves in a prime position to secure a new role.

Look at what other companies are doing to stay engaged with their customers and learn from the good and the mistakes. There are plenty of resources, podcasts and discussion forums such as those from CXM Magazine, MyCustomer, Ian Golding, Jeanne Bliss and the CXPA to name but a few. And of course, CX competency coaching and for the CCXP exam is still available remotely if you’re looking for a professional qualification.

As a CX professionals it is essential we have a commercial leaning in our conversations and actions. So snuggle up to your Financial or Commercial team to see what their challenges are, how the business makes its money and what language they use. Share a virtual cup of coffee with a Programme Manager to see how they set their priorities (and so how you might get the customers’ perspectives into decision-making).

Spend time with the analysts to understand how they turn data into insight so you’re better positioned to pre-empt questions you may get from the Board. And take time out with the Marketing heads to see what plans they have for the brand promise this year and how what they do relates to what you do.

Stakeholder management

In a similar vein to the personal development, get in touch with the leaders of your organisation, colleagues in other functions or external partners you’ve always meant to engage with but always had an excuse not to.

Understand their role and challenges. Help them understand the value of having a focus on Customer Experience. Invite them to be part of your workshops and updates and welcome them into gang of internal CX champions.  Get invited to their meetings to put your (the customer) perspective into their planning.

Nurturing those relationships now will pay dividends in the weeks and months to come when initiating the connections may be harder to do.

Journey Mapping

If you’ve not done any journey mapping before it’s an insightful eye-opener and story-finder. It can still be done remotely and personally I use a combination of Zoom and MURAL.

It may lack the immersive nature of onsite workshops and ethnographic studies but the output will be better than doing nothing. It’s a great way for people across the business and partners to come together and learn more about their own organisation. Make sure that once you’ve looked at things from a customer persona’s perspective you validate it with real customers. You’ll have plenty of ideas so also ensure you also a clarity of direction to prioritise what should be done next.

If you’ve already carried out journey mapping, now is maybe the time to move on from the ‘end-to-end’ journeys. Instead, look at those micro-journeys, key moments or other personas you never thought you’d get round to. Even a small group of three or four of you can be productive. For example, an airport might look at what it’s like for a family with a disabled person to arrive at 3am in the pouring rain. Or, what happens when a wheelchair is lost? A housing association might review the experience of someone who needs a leaky roof repaired. Or a SaaS company may map the journey of its own Customer Success managers’ first day on the job.

CX Maturity Assessment

This takes a real step back from the day-to-day business to contemplate your customer centricity. Seek views from colleagues and those you’ve not met yet in the far-flung corners of the business on whether they know what the CX vision is and whether they’re clear about the role they can play. If there’s not a CX vision then prepare one as part of the CX Strategy – no business sets out to do a bad job but is there clarity on exactly how good you want to be and how committed to that you are? What does that look like on a day-to-day basis? What will you always do and never do?

Is the brand promise to “put customers at the heart of everything we do” something employees believe in based on what they see and hear?

It’s also worth reviewing your internal governance, the beating heart of your CX programme. Are the right people involved and does it have a strong mandate? Is it working effectively and cross-functionally in prioritising and assigning actions? Is it good at finding practical ways of sharing stories throughout the organisation and bringing it all to life internally? What leadership behaviours are present or absent in supporting the customer-led goals?

Future planning

We’re clearly still on a bumpy ride and so it may seem a little challenging to plan for a future when we’ve no idea quite what it will look like.

Nonetheless, there are positive signs on the horizon and history teaches us that we will be back up and running at some point. When that time comes, we don’t want to sit there looking at our competitors with envy and wishing we’d thought of that, wishing we’d made better use of our time now.

So, if we can, make time in the diary to think what we can do in future that is right for us and our customers. How can we act and behave, change and innovate in a way that means our competitors will be looking to us with envy instead? How can we be different and/or better at what we already do for our customers? How have our customers needs and expectations changed?

Apply some Design Thinking principles to solve your customers’ problems. Get creative, get innovative and don’t put any barriers in your way. The checks and “How the heck will we do that?” can come later.

The commercial reality is that the companies who stand the best chance of survival are not just the ones who are financially, strategically and operationally well-managed. They empathise with how they fit into their customers’ lives and give customers no reason to go anywhere else.

There is no shortage of evidence to show the positive, commercial impact of better customer experiences. So having an absolute clarity of direction and commitment to strengthen the customer experience will help protect the business in the near future and beyond.

Sadly, last year we lost Tony Hsieh but the Zappos mindset lives on. It is every bit as important now as it has every been:  “We’re in the people business, we just happen to sell shoes”. It’s a mindset that many more organisations would do well to adopt in times to come.

 

It is not an exhaustive list but I hope it helps is some small way. Please add your thoughts about what else are you doing or plan to do between now and when things return to some kind of normality.

But as I said at the start, I’m very aware that many friends and colleagues are losing their jobs or changes at work mean much of this may be academic. My thoughts go out to you. We will get through it. I know that when we have to dig deep it’s surprising how deep we can go. In the coming days and weeks there will be opportunities to regroup, reset and reboot.

The global community of CX professionals is fantastic at sharing and caring and it’s great to know you are out there. In that spirit, if you simply want to have a chat about what you’re going through or if I can be a sounding board for any questions around customer experience do let me know – message me on LinkedIn or email [email protected].

 

Jerry Angrave is Customer Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company. Jerry is a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and author of The Journey Mapping Playbook published by De Gruyter in October 2020.

[email protected]   +44 (0)7917 718072

When the sales experience falls into, rather than bridges, the gap

Depending on your definition of a customer, their experience starts well before they actually buy anything.

It might be what they’ve heard from others or what they’ve seen in the news. But if the brand comes knocking on their door that first impression is also a critical experience. Many get it right because it’s based on a real empathy with those they are trying to engage with.

However, it’s not always the case. Absent a clear customer experience strategy, what we think do as a business often looks very different when looked at from the customers’ perspectives.

 

For example, if any CEO is wondering why their Sales teams are not getting better results, maybe a quick look at how their initial engagement makes yet-to-be customers feel will give some big clues.

The quotes below are all real examples I’ve had in my inbox just this last week. There are others and I’m sure you’ll have your own ‘favourites’.

They are not trying to sell me something I don’t want. In fact, I could be interested. Just not with them. If I was ever asked for feedback about the Sales experience (a rare thing indeed), it might go along these lines:

  • Putting “Our 9am meeting” in the subject heading doesn’t spur me into replying out of panic.  Sorry to burst your bubble Sales folk, but changing it to “Our 10am meeting” in the follow-up really doesn’t make any difference either.
  • Saying “I’ve tried to reach you” is just lying – technology is quite good these days so I know if you’ve tried to get in touch as often as you claim. And when your colleagues use the same line every week, several times a week, it becomes very transparent.
  • Gasping “I can’t believe you’ve not signed up yet” and “I’d hate for you to miss out” is at best patronising and lacks any sincerity.
  • What’s more, should I be interested a reply to the email will go into a generic mailbox, not to the person who is (presumably) trying to create a relationship. It just shouts even louder about how you really don’t care if I get back in touch or not.

Does somebody seriously believe this type of approach is going to create an experience I want to repeat, share and pay a premium for? If these companies had any genuine interest in what I do and how they might help me achieve success, they’d look at their Sales activity as a meaningful experience not a bullying, volume-led, can’t-really-give-a-**** transaction.

I often come across businesses who fear the Sales team always over-promise because of the way they are rewarded. They then disappear off the face of the planet while everyone else tries to rally-round, clearing up the mess to deliver something close to an unrealistic promise.

On the flip-side, maybe the Sales team is frustrated that everyone else can’t keep up. Maybe they’re just doing what they’ve been told is best. But to create a first impression experience that is confrontational, misleading and deceitful creates no trust, no relationship. No commission.

They say the experience on the outside reflects the culture inside and they’re right. In the middle of a busy day, to be on the receiving end of these type of messages says heaps about what it must be like to work there. No clear strategy, just a numbers game where some very talented people will be wilting under the stress.

Intended or not, what they are saying to me is that it’s clear their focus is just on revenue, not on me as a potential customer. They don’t care if I buy or not, there are plenty more fishes in the sea. Friend and colleague Ian Golding wrote about a similar mindset very recently in this blog.

These companies are not some anonymous outfit in a far-off land that’s acquired an email list; often they are large, global businesses who should know what they are doing. These companies will make some money for sure but that short-term approach breeds complacency and stores up problems for down the line.

If they applied a dose of customer experience thinking they could, however, make a whole lot more money. If only they didn’t push their potential customers away before they’ve even got close.

 

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Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), a CX consultant and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

Ten hidden benefits of customer journey mapping

The benefits of customer journey mapping are well documented; it’s an incredibly valuable exercise that gives the business a shared understanding of what it’s like to be a customer. And, therefore, a clear picture of what should be celebrated, what should be done differently and why.

Journey mapping is a means to an end. It’s not, as some people see it, about having a pointless happy-clappy day with Post-it notes and Sharpie pens.

Done effectively and on an ongoing basis, what customer journey mapping tells you can be one of the most effective strategic and economic tools a business has in its armoury. But not everyone sees it that way and as CX professionals we often need to help sceptical stakeholders ‘get it’.

So, for what it’s worth and to help anyone trying to convince a non-believer to begin mapping customer journeys, I’ve put together a list of some of the additional pleasant surprises – sorry, “commercial benefits” – journey mapping delivers.

 

1 Catalyst. It’s a great place to start.

Companies often struggle to get momentum behind a fledgling customer experience programme. If you do nothing else in the name of customer experience, map a customer journey and see where it takes you.

The beauty of journey mapping is that it’s easy to do and even just a couple of hours or a day’s workshop can set things on the right path.

It will challenge dangerously complacent beliefs that there is no burning platform. And even if it becomes apparent that today’s customer experience isn’t inherently broken it will provide plenty of ideas for how to keep up with expectations in future.

 

2 Engagement. Hey presto, you’ve created a CX focused, cross-functional team.

At a recent workshop I facilitated, one participant stopped in her tracks when telling her persona’s story to the group. She observed that this was the first time that organisation had brought everyone together who had some involvement across the entire journey. Pennies dropped, dots were joined and new relationships created there and then.

They’ve stayed together as a group ever since and have created mini-task forces for other journeys.

Involvement in these types of workshops creates excitement but also an expectation that things will change. That has to be managed carefully but what you do have now is an army of internal CX champions who will help spread the word.

 

3 Value. The outputs have all sorts of uses, just make sure they’re not filed away.

The biggest risk to journey mapping is that once the journeys are mapped, the persona stories are told and the findings are documented, they get filed away and never see the light of day.

Make it a living beast so it never fades away. Put the journey on a wall or on the intranet so it’s visible to everyone. It’s a great opportunity to get thoughts from other employees who can to wander past and add their thoughts over a cup of coffee. Keep it alive, use it to generate interest and action.

It prompts all sorts of conversations about the issues and opportunities. And it’s also a great visual to show new employees what their customers experience too.

 

4 Simplicity. As they say, simplicity is a very sharp knife.

It doesn’t have to be complex to be value-creating. As with many things in life it’s easy to over-engineer. Journey mapping does need to work hard to be from a customer’s perspective but often the simpler the structure and framework the better.

One client told me they were keen to do some mapping but couldn’t take the team out for a whole day. Instead, they took a bit of time in a team meeting; better than nothing. The format was quick but follows the same approach as a full workshop; sketch out what the customer is trying to do and why, then across the stages, look at what they are thinking, doing and feeling.

Then ask what you measure; do you know how well you do the most important things?

Review what you’ve written down and agree some actions. First journey map, done.

 

5 Themes. Over time, helpfully, common issues rise up to the surface.

Journey maps should never be reviewed in isolation. Whether you run one journey from the perspective of several personas or you look at multiple journeys, it’s very likely you’ll find common threads emerging.

So, while one specific issue raised may not be critical to that journey itself, we should take notice when that same issue appears in other journeys for other customers, employees or third parties.

A quick example from a mapping programme I ran late last year. Although they weren’t cited as major challenges in their individual workshops, it became apparent in every one of a dozen or so sessions that three themes stood out; there was a lack of understanding about what the brand stood for, employees desperately wanted/needed a good CRM system and there was a genuine concern about a lack of consistency in delivering the experience across all touchpoints.

 

6 Education. For me, the biggest benefits in mapping customer journeys is often the conversations happening between colleagues during a journey mapping session.

It’s common to hear things like “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you did”, “Does anyone know what happens if…?” and “If you can get that information across to me in a different format I’d be able to do my bit for the customer better”.

Because we have people from all steps of the customer journey in the room, those conversations can happen and are invaluable. They might not be the conversations you want in front of customers, which is why I’d always advocate bringing them in to the process once you have your initial draft journey. Which brings me to the next point.

 

7 Connection. As if you needed one, it’s a great excuse to connect with customers.

The good news is that you now have a journey map. The better news is that it needs validation by customers to have any credibility.

So once you’ve had those awkward educational, internal conversations you can invite customers to give their views. Even if they end up not participating, the act of asking their opinion goes a long way.

 

8 Outliers. Small sample sizes should always be treated with a big degree of caution.

However, journey mapping can unearth some behavioural outliers that are worth noting and following up on.

I recently ran an employee experience mapping session where one of the personas was that of someone getting promoted. In the “What are they thinking?” section, a comment was made that they hoped their previous peers would now “fear me”. The sticky note was written and put up on the wall. No-one challenged it despite many internal communications extolling the values of ‘our family’ and ‘camaraderie’.

Likewise, one comment from a senior executive who said they – a company who claimed to give “exceptional client experiences” – would only ask clients for feedback if the client can be billed for the time.

Such anecdotes might be limited to one or two people. They’re easy to brush aside, but if there’s a latent attitude problem – especially if that’s coming from the leaders of the business – it’s better to find out and address it.

 

9 Focus. The whole point of journey mapping is to generate ideas and be confident in what you do next.

That said, the workshops will give you tens if not hundreds of suggestions. It’s a nice problem to have but can also feel overwhelming. Where now?

Part of the solution is right there on the day in the journey mapping workshop; your colleagues. Make the most of the opportunity and ask them to vote on the issues that they think are the most important.

You might have a thousand sticky notes, but voting will give you an instant proxy for where the top issues lie and which warrant further investigation.

One word of caution though. Be prepared that when you validate the journey with your customers, they may highlight different priorities. Far from being frustrating, treat it like gold-dust. Without going through that process you wouldn’t know what’s important to them. You’d have everyone doing lots of stuff, just not necessarily the right stuff.

 

10 Fun. Seriously, have some fun.

One of the best benefits of customer journey mapping is that it’s simply a great way to bring people in your business together. It’s far from being a dry exercise and is, unintentionally, often a great way to foster employee engagement.

They’re on their feet adding value, not being talked at. They’re being asked for their opinions, to role-play personas and to think creatively. They’re asked to think about different scenarios and “What if…?” ideas.

It might stretch a few people who haven’t totally bought in to why they are there. Look at journey mapping workshops as you would a customer experience though. You want them to come away engaged and enthused, telling everyone else about it.

So if they get distracted, go off on wild tangents and have a laugh they’ll share the stories.

Before you know it, you’ll be everyone’s best friend and more and more people will want to get involved in helping you making your business customer-centric.

 

If you set out to convince a sceptical stakeholder to do one activity that increases employee engagement, deepens customer empathy and prioritises finite resources all at the same time, you’d really have to go a long way to beat journey mapping.

I hope that gives some food for thought but I’m sure you’ll have other benefits of customer journey mapping too – let me know!

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. 

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

Using journey mapping to understand and measure employee engagement

This post first appeared as a guest blog of Rant & Rave on using customer journey mapping methods to create employer brands and a great employee experience

Fewer than half of employees would recommend their employer to a friend according to Glassdoor. Would you? Have you? Allegis found that 69% would not take a job with a company if they had a bad reputation – even if they were unemployed!training journey mapping customer experience

The employee journey has many parallels with the customer journey and tolerance of a poor experience is lower. Businesses need to know that their reputation is now shared more widely than ever before. Expectations of how a company will drive our own personal agenda are high and, should they fall short, the ability find out about a better alternative and change is much easier now than in the past.

So if you’re looking to create an “employer brand”, one where top talent shouts “I want to work for them!”, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that whether it’s intentional or not, if you have employees you already have an employer brand. The bad news is it may not be the one you want.

The first step is to know what that is today, be clear about what you want it to be in future and get creative about closing any gaps.

This must be done in the context of your company’s purpose. Why do you do what you do? (beyond making money), what do you do that no other brand does? What makes you excited about working there?

Thankfully, journey mapping can help define what a ‘great place to work’ looks like.

It’s a valuable tool that gives us an understanding of what it’s like to be a customer and it helps organise the thinking and prioritise activity. It shows how well the brand promise is being kept, or not, and it brings people together from different functions to see the impact of their combined efforts.

I see many organisations map their customers’ journey successfully and reap the benefits of doing so. Far fewer, however, apply the methodology to their people, resulting in a missed opportunity.

The perception of your brand, and of your employee’s engagement with it, will vary depending on what stage they are at. A graduate looking across the sector for reasons to work for you will see things differently to a new hire going through the recruitment process, versus an employee who’s been in their job for 10 years or a high level employee who’s just been promoted into a director’s role.

Understanding the importance of employee engagement is one thing but knowing how to go about it is another. This is why journey mapping is effective, it helps to create empathy and understand around how they might be feeling, the challenges they face, or how they will change depending on the employee and how big the gap is.

 

A familiar methodology

The methodology for mapping an employee’s journey broadly follows the same structure as mapping customers’ experiences:

  1. Define the journey Be very clear about the journey they’re on. You may have a particular experience in mind such as the recruitment process, the first 30 days or going through a restructure. To help you find that starting point, you may want to map all of the events across the entire journey from brand awareness, performance reviews and ‘a typical day’ to promotion, exit and retirement. Then you can choose which one(s) you want to drill down into to become a journey in its own right.
  2. Who are they? Whose perspective do you want to map the experience from? Employee personas will be much the same as for consumers – who are they, what are their goals for that journey and why, what are their pain points?
  3. Map the journey Set out the stages, and for each one look at what they do, think and feel. What do they hope for, wish you would do, or provide? Are they motivated more by flexibility and support than money? How can work fit around their lives better? Capture the internal issues you have as a business that help or get in the way.
  4. Metrics What data or information do you have access to that shows how well you’re doing the important things?
  5. Validate Sense-check the journey and conclusions with other employees and overlay other relevant feedback you’ve captured elsewhere.
  6. Do something Take action. Agree the priority areas that need focus and who’s going to do it then keep people updated on progress.

One simple exercise to help prioritise your next steps is to plot out everything your employees have said, identifying the most important against an axis of ‘how well do you do them?’. Assuming you have collected this data, figure 1 below shows an example.

 

employee experience and journey mapping

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig1: Plotting out the areas that employees view as important -vs- how well you do them

  • If you have an issue in the top right quadrant, where it’s important to employees and you do it well, make sure you protect it and share the stories.
  • If there’s an issue bottom right, where you do things well but employees don’t much care for it, either explain where the value is and why it must be done that way or consider if you are wasting resources on it.
  • Bottom left, where it’s not important and not done well, ask why you do it at all.
  • The key area is top left – if there are things your people say are significant but you’re not meeting their expectations, that’s a key area to start.

When running journey mapping workshops you should also consider:

  1. Be aware of the possibility of opening a cans of worms, which in a way is what you want but make it clear that none of the comments need be attributable to an individual. Remember that any suspicion that confidentiality is not protected will suffocate the quality of insight.
  2. Make the session fun but keep reminding people of the need to stay in character and role-play the personas. Help them to avoid drifting back to their subjective selves.
  3. Ensure you invite people from similar levels across the business. It may mean doing several workshops but, depending on the culture, having your boss in the workshop is one thing; having their line-manager too (or beyond) can be intimidating. People either say nothing or say what they think others want to hear.

During the mapping activity, your line of questioning should be aimed at identifying what they care about most. These are good discussion topics for team meetings too. For example:

  • How do potential employees find out what it’s like to work for you?
  • What makes you distinctive as an employer and how are you communicating that message?
  • What are your employees saying in terms of what you’re getting right? What do they find most frustrating?
  • What would employees never say? (positive or negative)
  • How many of your employees engage with your social media activity, have ‘liked’ your Facebook page or follow your LinkedIn page?
  • Why don’t more of your employees share their views? (for example Glassdoor)
  • What perceptions do your employees have in terms of how their customers think about them?
  • If employees were given a branded t-shirt or jacket to wear in town at the weekend, would they be proud enough to do so?

Brands want their employees to be true brand advocates; telecoms giant O2 talks in this video about their challenges and how they rewarded employees for being brand ambassadors.

Measuring employee advocacy can actually be straight forward. If one of your employee value propositions is that you are ‘innovative’, ask them exactly that, to what degree do they think you are innovative? Make sure you link your questions directly back to the values.

The NPS approach is also commonly used as a form of measurement: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?”. Brands can explore what employees are scoring them and dive into the relationship further; those who are promoters perform one set of behaviours, whereas passives and detractors tend to display a different set of actions.

 

Journey mapping unveils the real culture

Brands need to ensure they’re not just paying lip service, putting up posters around the office that speak to being ‘a ‘great place to work’ is not a solution or way to drive engagement. The impact of what your ‘leaders’ do and say cannot be underestimated, their actions build evidence for employees of what the company culture is really like.

During a journey mapping session I facilitated, a leader of a professional services firm said defiantly that he would not make time to go out and talk to his clients to understand them better unless he could bill the client for that time.

This was also a business with stated values of giving exceptional and distinctive client experiences. You can imagine the deflated feeling in the room this then created. Worse still, the good talent will recognise this and potentially move to a competitor who is delivering the promised experience.

Some time ago, I was consulted on the customer experience of a utility company’s contact centre. Their leadership team was satisfied with the apparent high-levels of engagement reported by their internal survey. However, the reality couldn’t have been more different, their people were totally disengaged because they had to compensate for the persistent problems that management wouldn’t address.

Employees would type out feedback rather than leave it on a post-it note because they feared their handwriting would be recognised. They would rather tell friends they were unemployed than say who they worked for and they only ticked the “I’m highly engaged” box in the survey because they believed it was a prerequisite to getting a bonus.

 

Beneficial journey mapping outputs

Complacency can be real damaging force. Business leaders may say: “We’re doing well, we’re making a profit, customers are satisfied and we have talented people who know what they’re doing. Why change anything?”.

Journey mapping will however help you surface what to change and why, the activity itself isn’t the end-game but far from it. It’s a means to an end where it gives a business the evidence as to why it should do things differently.

These insights will generate engaging stories to showcase your employer brand, take these examples from L’Oreal, Zappos and Cathay Pacific. Other leading brands such as Homeserve actively encourage their employees to leave reviews online, using metrics such as their Glassdoor score as a key performance indicator.

There are real commercial benefits too, TemkinGroup helped quantify those last year in a research study that looked at the difference between genuinely engaged and disengaged employees:

87% of engaged employees will recommend your products and services to someone who might need them, versus 21% of disengaged employees.

82% of engaged employees would do something good for the company even if it was not expected, versus 19% of disengaged employees.

60% of engaged employees will make a recommendation about an improvement, versus 15% of disengaged employees.

 

Journey mapping the employee experience creates clear tangible benefits. A brand that does what it promises, attracts better talent and drives retention, this is something that doesn’t rely on paying top salaries. Employees are then empowered to give the best customer experience possible and proud to tell friends that they work for a great company.

For your employees, customers and the bottom line, this truly is the best news you can hear.

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. 

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

 

Lessons in how to embed Customer Experience

At the recent CXPA networking event in London hosted by Pen CX, the world of the CX professional was thrown into the spotlight. I wanted to share thoughts from two of the presenters, who reminded us of some of the practical yet vitally important things we need to do to bring about the right change.

First, Ali Lawrie, Head of Customer Experience at Akzo Nobel, owners of the Dulux paint brand among others. Ali talked about the challenges of bringing the customer agenda to the fore in a B2B organisation which, understandably, has had a keen focus on technical product development and the sales supply chain.

A lesson she’d learned early on was to not underestimate the time it takes to win stakeholders round where they have their own priorities. Perseverance and resilience are essential qualities of the CX practitioner.

It’s time well-spent though and an investment that pays dividends. Getting the attention was also helped in no small part by demonstrating the reality of today’s experience using customer verbatims.

To see a metric that says customers are waiting three minutes for a call to be answered may not be a catalyst for instant transformation.  But hearing the direct impact on the customer, who might be an architect about to see a key client or a hospital property manager reaching out for some quick advice, expressed in their words with the emotion that goes with it, is infinitely more powerful.

Furthermore, it can show how a company’s brand and advertising is potentially being wasted because the experience does not deliver the promise of (a variant of) “We put customers first”. It’s a valuable and necessary conversation to have with the Marketing team.

Journey mapping provided many of the insights for Ali and those exercises also created six key stages of the experience, each now represented by an icon. Bringing to life the customer experience is at the heart of an effective CX programme and so the more visible it is the better. Sharing the icons and explaining the stages now references any activity to a specific part of the journey, has helped engage and involve colleagues and makes communications clearer.

Empathyce

Your CX momentum will take off, eventually

Creating a stronger business by using Customer Experience thinking will not happen without complete engagement right across the business. To engage not just those who are customer-facing but also those who are back-office or in management roles is a big stretch for many fledgling CX teams,.

So Ali’s advice is to spread the message and create movement from within through the extended use of CX champions – finding people from all parts of the business who take an interest, want to be part of the movement and see it as a good development opportunity. They will be the eyes and ears of CX inside and across the proverbial silos.

Mike Bellis of Pen CX and formerly of Pfizer, then reflected on how he changed his approach to win people round. “I started by highlighting issues that were affecting customers and trying to get them fixed, but this was seen as creating new problems within the organisation rather than trying to fix those which were perceived to be there already”.

As this approach wasn’t developing very much engagement, Mike quickly changed tack. The new approach was to understand internal stakeholders’ issues first and then show how a focus on Customer Experience could help overcome them. Before long he was everyone’s best friend. The momentum grew as colleagues from around the globe came knocking on his door for his methodologies and thinking.

 

Anyone who works as a CX professional will know how hard these things are to do. It’s therefore reassuring to hear that with persistence they can still make a difference.

As Mike Bellis summarised, “In principle, Customer Experience is simple. It doesn’t mean it’s easy though”.

Thanks to Ali and Mike, also to Neil Sharp of Pen CX for organising and hosting the event.

If you’ve any thoughts on what can be done at a practical level to help a business become more customer-centric, please share them!

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. I give CX professionals the skills, tools and confidence to be the ones to drive their Customer Experience efforts forward.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

 

Customer Experience says mind your own business

So we now know that United breaks customers as well as guitars.

customer experience risks, customer experience consultancy, customer experience trainingKnowing how your business treats its paying customers is one thing; understanding the impact it has on them is quite another. If the organisation is focused primarily on operational logistics, load factors and revenue per mile then such practices are going to be carried out regardless.

But, there’s a real disconnect when, as the airline states, it wants to be a leader in the industry and its goal is “to make every flight a positive experience”.  I doubt anyone at United has set out to design a customer journey that involves losing blood and teeth but comments by CEO Oscar Munoz, that it will prove a “watershed moment”, acknowledge the need to be much more aware of the unintended consequences of how they operate.

 

United’s most recent problem was exacerbated because they had too many people wanting to be on that flight. At the other end of the spectrum is a UK-based airline whose problems appear to arise when there are too few passengers. Bruce Temkin recently published a report into the best and worst customer experience companies in the UK. One of the brands towards the bottom of his list is a well-known regional airline. For years the word on the street (and I can vouch for the experience) is that they have a reputation for delaying or cancelling flights. At the gate, the message is that the aircraft has a technical problem but anecdotally passengers say it often coincides with less-than-full flights. Such is the regularity of schedule changes that many now choose an alternative route and carrier if they really, really need to get from city A to city B at the agreed time.

It must be hard for loyal employees to take the criticism and yet the practice continues. Maybe it’s a cost-led strategy rather than customer-led, which is fine if that’s your choice of how to fly. Maybe.

 

A few months ago I was presenting research findings back to a Board. It wasn’t all good news. “That was spectacularly uncomfortable to hear” – the words of a Chief Marketing Officer in response to learning what his customers really thought. Thinking I was about to be shown the door, his comment was followed by “Thank you for telling us, we needed to hear it”.

That conversation stuck in my mind, serving as a warning bell about complacency; if we don’t understand our business from our customers’ perspective how do we know we’re anywhere near where we think we are? We do, absolutely, need to mind our own business.

 

I love facilitating customer journey mapping workshops. Not least, because I always ask for people to share stories about great and awful experiences they’ve had. Sadly, when it comes to bad experiences it’s often the same brands who crop up time after time.

One of those is energy company npower. I’m one of their customers and to be fair, I haven’t had a bad experience with them until now. I do, however, expect anyone in business to get the basics – such as my bills – right. But after my own first tangible experience, amplified by their reputation for customer service, I’m now heading for the switch button.

I’m a dual-fuel customer so I get two annual statements through the post – one electricity and one gas (I had asked for e-statements but that hasn’t been actioned, that’s another story). It’s a weighty envelope so I assume they’ve stuffed it full of newsletters, offers and new terms and conditions. Inside are indeed two annual statements but then each has an exact duplicate. Not only that but there is a third duplicate of each where the only difference on that version is that the amounts are all set to nil.

So if anyone at npower is wondering why their costs are heading in the opposite and wrong direction to their customer satisfaction scores there’s a big clue, right there. How do you do that? In 2017 how do you get it so wrong? I’m assuming they don’t know as I’ve had nothing by way of apology or clarification. But then if they are not so customer-centric in the first place maybe I shouldn’t expect anything.

 

In a meeting with a subscription services provider recently I was asking about how processes worked. For customers who turn up, buy and go again, everyone was all over it with metrics galore. But enter the world of the ‘What-if’ scenario and things rapidly became less clear. “If I’m this sort of customer, can I do this?”. “Do I need to do that first or do you do that for your customers automatically and if so, do they know that?” “What does this bit mean?”. And so on, all met with lots of “Umm…” and “I think…”.

I make no apology for mentioning again an example of one of the most head-the-sand cases I’ve come across. A utility company I did some work for had, according to its leadership team, very high employee engagement. It followed that while they believed their processes could be better the problem wasn’t their people. On investigation, it transpired the people were totally and utterly disengaged. They didn’t care about fixing customers’ problems and did just enough to get by. They were intelligent people but were fighting a lost cause. If they met someone in a pub who asked where they work, they were more likely to say they were unemployed or make something up than admit to working at the brand. They’d told management time and time again what was going wrong but nothing had been done. And the reason why the employee engagement score was so high was because they deliberately ticked the 10/10 box, thinking that if they didn’t say they were fully engaged they wouldn’t get a bonus. The leadership team had no idea of the extent of the true levels of engagement.

 

And that’s the point. When we take an operationally-led view we know where we think we’re at because we’ve built the processes, plugged in our systems and measured what we think is right. But look at the same processes from a customer’s perspective and we have a very different view of our world.

If we don’t know our own business, we can’t be confident about understanding how we are making our customers feel. They determine what a customer will do next and how they’ll talk about us to others. It has a real commercial impact and so we need to understand both the experience and the consequence.

We should, literally, mind our own business before our customers are the ones who bump us off.

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. I give CX professionals the skills, tools and confidence to be the ones to drive their Customer Experience efforts forward.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

 

The biggest risks to our Customer Experience efforts

Stress-testing customer experiences reveals flaws elsewhere

When people with different agendas build an experience, what could possibly go wrong…?

Ambition, commitment and perseverance. All three are critical to success but a weakness in any one of them is a huge risk to our Customer Experience plans. It will almost certainly ensure we don’t achieve what we set out to. While we focus on doing things in a new way it’s every bit as important to be aware of the warning signs that the old, destructive ways haven’t yet evaporated totally.

 

From what I’ve seen the most effective approaches to customer experience have three things in common. They have people who are passionate about their subject and a deep understanding of what it’s like being a customer. Critically though, they also enjoy a culture where the first two are allowed to thrive.

I’m often asked how organisations can cultivate those three ingredients; what should they do when they set out to become more customer-centric? There’s a long list to work through.  So assuming those things are in place, once the Customer Experience momentum is up and running what could possibly go wrong? Another long list, this time of spanners that are poised to throw themselves into the works – if we let them.

As a CEO recently told me: “If we don’t keep pedalling uphill, gravity takes over, all the effort is wasted and we’re back to square one before we know it”.

In this post I’ve highlighted just three of the biggest risks; different agendas, the day job and an obsession with metrics. They’re inextricably linked and will be of little surprise but they are chosen because, from my observations inside a wide variety of businesses, if the ambition, commitment and perseverance isn’t genuine enough these risks have a habit of becoming very real issues.

 

First up, people working to different agendas.

When employees have divergent priorities, whether they are just following their leader’s instructions or there is simply no common purpose, we get silos. It’s a convenient label that somehow explains, excuses and – worse – gives credibility to value-destroying ways of working.

You know you’ve got silos when you ask 10 people in a meeting room why the business exists or what the customer strategy is and you get 10 or more different answers. At best, there are variations on a theme, often educated guesses and sometimes no answer at all. Nor do they seem bothered, they’ve got their job to do (see below).

A large player in the financial services sector had an internal goal “to be the best”.  It was admirable and aspirational but no-one knew exactly what that meant. The highest savings rates and lowest mortgage rates in the market? Or widest net interest margin? Highest adoption rates of its app of any company in the world?

Despite the cleverly-worded posters on the wall about putting customers first, if there is not some common, meaningful customer purpose and metrics that everyone has a vested interest in there’s no way any cross-functional improvements will happen.

As a result of the fog, everyone carries on doing the things they do have clarity about. They know how their boss is going to decide whether they are meeting or exceeding expectations in the annual review and that’s their priority. No surprise therefore that we then see tensions, politics and stress with all the consequences that leads to.

Meanwhile, all the good customer-centric intent has rolled back down to the bottom of the hill.

 

The day-job default.

While part of the business is embracing Customer Experience with raw passion, the reality is that there is also a day-job to do be done. Sadly, it’ll stay that way until Customer Experience becomes just the way things are done rather than CX being seen as a function or division – and therefore seen an ‘optional extra’.

That might be because many of those who are asked to go and ‘do’ customer experience are having the responsibility added to their existing workload. Or at an organisational level, there’s just too much noise going on for anything new to make itself heard. Some don’t get it, others don’t want to get it and a few get it but resist a move out of their comfort zone.

It’s very easy to run a customer strategy session, a journey mapping workshop or an ethnographic study and then while the notes are being written up and we get it on the next Steering Group agenda, attention turns to the more ‘important and urgent’ things in our inbox.  There might be a seasonal spike in activity that needs all hands on deck.  “Project Invincible” has meeting coming up that needs a cast of thousands to attend or a new campaign is due to launch and that’s taking all available resource. Lots of reasons, but are they plausible or just a convenient excuse?

Because Customer Experience in its purest sense is about a cultural mindset, when there’s lots of firefighting to be done today it’s often seen as something discretionary, something that can wait until tomorrow.  But we know how often tomorrow comes.

 

An obsession with the score not the experience

I’ve always taken the line that if we get the experience right first, the numbers will look after themselves. Of course, whichever measurement method we choose we need to know what drives the numbers or drags them back but at least that means we’re looking at things from a customer’s perspective. Chasing the number is purely a vanity exercise.

A rallying cry to increase a customer score by 10 points might sound admirable, and it is. The issue is the way the business then sets about increasing the score. Without robust governance in place, those running the surveys will be coerced into changing the way the feedback is collected; they’re told to ask only those who’ve gone through the complete purchase cycle rather than include those who dropped out half-way. Customers will be offered incentives for giving higher scores or respondents will be given a false scale to flatter the real score.

Gaming the system is a real issue for many businesses and not all of them are aware that it goes on within their organisation. If you’re interested or concerned and want more food for thought, I wrote about a culture where the numbers are more important than people in this blog.

It’s one reason why we’re seeing more companies adopting the scores from independent review sites such as Trustpilot, Google and TripAdvisor as their key customer metric.customer experience perseverance

 

What to do about them?

There’s no rocket science here and there will be other issues that can derail our best Customer Experience efforts. Like gravity, we can only escape their pull with a bit of effort. They have patience and we have to assume they’ll wait a long time, hoping  for changes or a weakness to appear.

But if we share the principles of the Customer Strategy and show employees how the brand promises to treat its customers, if we have a governance process that informs and involves people from every corner of the business, if we ensure there is a visible commitment from the top that this is a priority for the business and if we have common customer metrics in everyone’s scorecard the risks have to be much, much lower. We’ll stay ahead of competitors and keep up with rising expectations too.

To say they are all obvious issues is, well, obvious. But if they are so well known, why do they keep getting in the way and what can we do about them? I’d love to know what you think.

 

Thank you for reading the blog on what can derail CX efforts, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help Customer Experience people do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. I give CX professionals the skills, tools and confidence to be the ones to drive their Customer Experience efforts forward.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718 072

 

 

 

I’m frightened of Christmas

They’re not the words you want a 12-year old to howl in distress at this time of year. After all, ‘tis the season to be jolly and a magical time for kids. There’s an excited energy, we break up the routine, new sights and sounds are everywhere and there are surprises galore. What’s not to like?

Except that for some – children and adults alike – it’s a list of everything that makes them highly anxious, confused and fearful;  the absence of predictability and the presence of unfamiliar environments. Responding to sensory overload, those words “I’m frightened of Christmas” came from a distraught pupil at the special needs school my son attends this week.

The noises, the lights and the changes in routine had proved too much. Thankfully, their episode didn’t last long. After a short while in a quiet room they were soon back in class, joining in again as if nothing had happened. Such is their world.

But it is a reminder that people see the world, and interact with it, in very different ways.  We can learn a lot from them when we’re designing and improving customer experiences. While many organisations chase the “Wow!” moments,  there is a significant element of the population – nearly one in every four of us suffers a mental health problem – for whom less is more. shopping centre customer experiences

If we designed experiences or provided alternatives for those most affected it stretches the thinking so we get it right for everyone else too.  We all want pretty much the same things – we want things to work as promised, we need them to be easy and if they create the right memories we’ll do it again.

For someone with a disability, having that reliability and consistency is essential.  The consequences of not having them can be significant. It’s not just a nuisance or a niggle if a product or service doesn’t work; it can be outright distressing at best. To take a journey into a retail park or through an airport might take weeks or months of preparation for the person affected and the people around them. For them it’s like walking on ice and it doesn’t take much for everything to fracture and turn into disarray.

It can be simple things that tip the balance – a schedule change, hand-driers in the toilets that are deafening or shouty officials trying to rush everyone through. If we evoke fear and panic in someone, the implications for whether they’ll come back again are clear.

Especially for someone with autism where emotions can be amplified, having their expectations managed – and kept to – is key.  It doesn’t matter if it’s about the day’s timetable or going on a holiday, knowing what’s going to happen gives structure, boundaries and therefore security.

So if there’s a tipping point as the experience gets worse, beyond which customers simply won’t come back, that fulcrum is a lot closer for people with a disability. Experiences that don’t work properly for them feel like their world is in freefall. They feel they have no safety or security and it’s a scary, lonely place. Families and carers with them will do their best to manage the situation but if we assumed everyone would feel the same way, we’d create much more robust and consistent experiences for everyone.

We focus on designing experiences to be emotional ones wherever possible. And that is absolutely the right thing to do for reasons that are well-documented. But it’s critical to evoke the right emotions. Sometimes, the worst thing we can do for people is ‘surprise and delight’ them. What might work best to keep them coming back is simply an environment where things are calm, friendly and steady.

For example, I’ve researched what passengers say to each other about what makes the ‘best’ airports in the world. They are quiet, clean, friendly, quick and easy to navigate. Nothing complicated.  It’s why therapy dogs (and pigs) at airports work so well.  The principles can apply to any company in any sector so it’s why film screenings where the sound is turned down, the lights are up and there’s no advertising to wade through are so popular. And it’s why restaurants who give the option to send information before a booking about how the dining ‘experience’ works, show pictures of the food and provide safe ‘time-out’ spaces are creating personal and commercial benefits all round.

Evoking the right emotions in our experiences meaning we know which ones they are for different groups of customers, understanding why that is and how to make sure they are present every time. If we see things the way people with a physical or invisible disability do, it forces us to expand the thinking about our experiences in a different, more robust and better way. And that is something companies should embrace, not fear.

I hope your Christmas and the festive break is everything you want it to be.


Follow Jerry Angrave on Twitter @jerryangrave


Thank you for reading this blog about people with a disability and customer experiences. I hope you found it useful and thought-provoking.  I’m Jerry Angrave, a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP).  I’m a Jerry AngraveCX consultant with an extensive corporate background and I also specialise in professional development for those in, or moving to, customer experience roles.  Feel free to contact me with any questions – by email to [email protected] or by phone on +44 (0)7917 718072.  More details at the website www.empathyce.com.