The “real” role of a Customer Experience person

Twelve years ago, I left my inhouse, corporate CX roles and set up Empathyce. I’ve had the privilege since then to work with brilliant people in a host of B2B and B2C sectors around the world on their Customer Experience culture and programmes. I’ve seen inside many companies, am always learning and even wrote a book on journey mapping!

But one thing I have seen is how often a role with “Customer Experience” in the job title means different things to different people. If you or your organisation is looking at developing a CX function and the team wants to know what they’re in for, I’ve listed below some of the responsibilities that don’t normally fit a templated job description – feel free to add your own to the list!

So, here goes. Among other things, your role as the go-to CX professional in your organisation is to be…

1 An always-on value expresser – be clear to your boss, colleagues and Board what value you and a focus on CX brings. Keep reminding them what difference it will make and why should they bother listening. In the midst of everything else happening it’s easy for CX to be seen as ‘nice to do’. Plenty of sceptical stakeholders don’t, or don’t want to, get it. They roll their eyes at the very mention of “Customer Experience” and, at best, begrudgingly pay it lip service – but then in the next breath they’ll tell you they’re never going back to a particular restaurant because the service was rubbish. Keep banging the drum!

2 A common thread creator – articulate in just a few memorable words what a customer-led future looks like for everyone. Work to have it adopted as an integral part of the way people work. A future that everyone, whether on the front-line, in a shared back-office function or outsourced third-party can get behind and is rewarded for. Use the aspiration to link what they do with everyone else, not just you.

3 A dot joiner-upper – your organisation-wide view will find people who should be introduced to each other. They might be working on the same customer  journey without realising it or they are tackling similar issues. Look for cause and effect – how do the culture, systems and processes create (unintended?) outcomes and financial results. Make sure the CX effort and priorities are aligned with what the Board wants in the short, medium and long term. And, is the experience true to what the brand is spending money on promising?

4 A language changer – shift the perspective and change the internal narrative from “us”, “we” and “our processes” to “customers” and “how does this affect them and their lives?”. Are there examples of internal language you use with customers ‘just because’ it’s always been done that way yet it makes no sense to them? Introduce the concept of emotions in discussion and how the responses to your experiences drive or erode value.

5 A vocal ambassador – shout loud to remind the business that its customers are real people, not tickets or reference numbers or “Dear valued customer”. Do the leaders and managers know who its customer personas really are?  Make the voice of the customer heard and understood why it’s important. Keep asking what the impact on a customer is of this process or that decision.

6 A workplace psychologist who watches out for silent assassins and political animals – those who say little in meetings, appearing to nod approval but then put up barriers. They nod their approval to your CX aims but behind your back tell their team to stick to doing whatever makes the most money in the short term. Know when you’re being set up or support is being deliberately withheld. Where you can though, treat your stakeholders with a CX mindset – create value for them and, while it has an obvious serious side, make CX fun for them too.

7 A CX economist – you don’t want to have a reputation for wanting to love your customers without the hard commercial justification. Know how the business makes its money, know where it’s hurting with unnecessary costs, know how many customers you have, gain or lose. Know the difference in behaviours and value between customers who are engaged and like what you do and those who feel ignored or frustrated. Buddy up to the Finance and strategy teams and learn to talk their language.

8 A curious investigative journalist obsessed with understanding “Why..?”. Play detective to find out why certain things happen, both good and bad. Is it down to an individual’s own personality or is the performance management framework unintentionally creating attitudes and ways of working that tick boxes but tick off customers.

9 A party gate-crasher and door knocker downer – get invited to others’ team meetings to understand their world better. Offer value upfront such as running journey mapping workshops for them. As they say, stay close to your enemies. Find out the sub-culture of each function, how they are rewarded and motivated. If a key part of the business is impenetrable from the inside you have to wonder what its impact on customers is.

10 A simplifier – a three or five year plan to thrive and differentiate on Customer Experience can appear overwhelming. It’s about an organisational mindset and that doesn’t change overnight. Break it down into steps, practical actions and be proud to share the successes along the way, however small.

11 A champion of perseverance and resilience – to keep going when everyone around you defends poor experiences because “It’s just what we do” or “Everyone else in the market does it”. They may well have very pressing challenges of their own to deal with but don’t give up. At the heart of CX is a culture, a mindset and that takes time to change. Be patient. If you make progress in leaps and bounds that’s great but all you need is small steps in the right direction and you’ll get there.

12 An Agent Provocateur – poke a stick at the culture by asking the right but searching questions, dare to challenge things that have always been done a particular way, keep nudging in the right direction. How many companies create a poster with some variation of “We put customers at the heart of everything we do” and believe it’s job done? Hold them to account.

13 A cheerleader (or Complacency stamper-outer) – get people fired up about it so they share your passion for what CX can do for the company. Showcase your wins and progress, get them all involved by asking everyone for their ideas and input and keep communicating. Yours won’t be the only strategic project the organisation is working on but keep your CX programme alive and engaging, not just another piece of content in the depths of the shared-drive. Be conscious though that the boundless positivity and optimism may need to be dialled back a peg if you’re dealing with people and teams who are having a tough time.

14 A manager of indirect reports – find your advocates wherever they are and use them to help prioritise activities, to spread the word and open doors. You might start with just a couple of you but the squad can grow into something more structured, effectively giving you access all areas.

15 A battle-chooser – you can’t do everything, just make what you do count. Have a long-list, a strategy but also choose your moments carefully. It’s not a race. Some small sacrifices mean those who were uncooperative to start with begin to see the value and will come round.

16 A healthy cynic – don’t believe everything you see. Is the data really that good or that bad? How is it created, does anyone have a motivation for a little creativity to flatter the numbers? Can you cross-validate it with other data from other sources. Don’t leave any of your assumptions open to challenge.

17 A bar-raiser – keep pushing to improve, whether that’s incrementally or starting afresh. Remind those you work with that customer expectations, set by other companies they deal with, are rising relentlessly. Doing little or nothing is, effectively drifting backwards as the market and customers move steadily (or rapidly) forwards.

18 A fierce protector – don’t let CX become just a project as it’s more about a mindset and a cultural shift. A CX programme can be necessary to put the building blocks in place but eventually the programme should let go and CX is just the way the business does business. Don’t let people think CX now does everything to do with customers otherwise you’ll pick up complaints, compliance and the contact centre to manage. And don’t let your CX surveys get hijacked by others who just want data for data’s sake when they hear you’re talking to customers.

19 A compelling storyteller – bring to life what it’s like to be on the receiving end of what the business does. It describes how it makes customers feel and – as a consequence – what they do next time and say to others. Get creative in the way you collect and share the stories. A score or a metric is useful but add in the context and the impact and people will sit up and take notice. A metric that moves by one decimal place each month won’t set the world alight. A story about why a customer had tears of joy or frustration begins to get traction.

20 An empathiser – it’s worth repeating; make time to understand your colleagues’ world and help them understand how they can champion yours. They have to feel you’re on their side and that you’re prepared to acknowledge their challenges if they are going to help you. Become a strategic ally to them, not just someone who’s always asking for help.

 

That’s enough to be going on with (the makings of my next book?). There will be more and of course, there’s the core competencies around employee engagement, ROI, strategy, innovation etc. Please feel free to add your own though!

Driving the CX agenda and helping everyone see the benefits is not a short-term or a straightforward role. It has many angles to cover and reaches right across the organisation and beyond. It can be tough but it’s also hugely exciting and rewarding.

Thanks for reading this far! If I can help build and develop your own CX programme, strategy or professional development plans do get in touch – always happy to chat about it!

 

 

Jerry Angrave is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and a former inhouse practitioner. In 2012 he founded Empathyce and now helps leadership teams and managers around the world to build effective CX programmes. More details are here

The Journey Mapping Playbook is available from Amazon at this link

[email protected]

+44 (0) 7917 718 072

 

Customer Experience and Sustainability

A few thoughts on CX doing our bit…

Customer Experience and Sustainability. Two very topical, heavyweight agendas for companies looking to prosper in future.

Each is rooted in different issues but succeeding at both requires the right culture and organisational mindset. To treat them simply as ‘of-the-moment’ PR opportunities, projects and workflows will not create the lasting outcomes we need.

So in the same way that CX teams help a business find economic and commercial gains, is it fair to say that, increasingly, the role of anyone in a CX position should absolutely be to find ways to support the Sustainability ambitions too?

 

Many companies should be applauded for the genuine efforts being made in terms of their own contributions to the climate crisis and environmental challenges. But, it seems we also still have some way to go in changing a critical mass of customer behaviours – especially when adding in a Sustainability ‘benefit’ has an awkward impact on a customer’s  perception of convenience, reliability and value.

We may not be in the same reporting line as those pursuing a cleaner, less wasteful purpose but we do have access to how our customers think, feel and behave.  We necessarily work across functions to galvanise the organisation behind common goals. We also know it’s easy to think that others will take care of it.

It’s not a new opportunity, far from it. Right now though it feels like a significant moment for any CX professional. If we’ve not done so already, be proactive, put our hands up to work alongside the brand communication teams, service designers, programme offices and process improvement teams.

By sharing the empathy, the understanding of what it’s really like to be a customer in today’s world with their hopes, worries and expectations, the CX community can and should do our bit to help edge towards the wider goals being set.

Would love to hear about the practical support your CX team is giving the sustainability agenda!

#customerexperience   #sustainability

Jerry Angrave 

+44 (0) 7917 718 072

[email protected]

 

 

Customer Journey Mapping – as relevant and as possible as ever

The headline act of a Customer Journey Mapping programme was always the workshop.

A very visible, tangible demonstration of how an organisation is edging towards its customer-led goals. A group of colleagues coming together to share their views and ideas, learn more about their own business and going on to be active supporters of what you’re doing.

In today’s world though, booking a meeting room and having everyone turn up in person seems so “2019”. Two people in the last week have told me their journey mapping programme is on hold because of necessary restrictions and access to offices.

It’s not easy for anyone right now, I get that. Time, people and focus let alone budgets may not be on your side at the moment. Survival, resizing and restructuring may well be more at the front of your mind.

 

Customer Journey Mapping

 

But, if there’s any way your attention can turn to your customers, if you do nothing else in the name of Customer Experience give journey mapping a go and see where it takes you. Even half an hour with a couple of colleagues on Zoom, a notepad and a healthy dose of imagination is better than nothing.

You’ll leave with a better idea than when you started about your customers’ issues and what to do about them. And that, after all, is the purpose behind journey mapping and customer understanding.

To anyone who’s hesitant about running their first or next session, have faith that it can be done remotely. Believe me. Over the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of running several journey mapping workshops with a variety of companies, all online. Yes, we have to adapt but they’re just as productive as when we were all swapping anecdotes and thoughts in a glassy training room.

Our customers’ behaviours, what they’re thinking and how they feel have all been tested in recent months. So even if you did a journey map last year, while parts of it will be unchanged, some elements – the critical nuances for now – might well be different.

Not surprisingly, using a combination of conferencing platforms like Zoom and collaboration tools such as Mural (other, equally good ones are available), means the facilitation of the workshop itself needs modifying. The framework you use and questions you ask will be impacted by the number of people attending and how long each session lasts. Some may be watching Netflix on a tablet tucked behind their laptop. Keeping everyone involved will draw even further on your facilitation skills if you are to keep their attention.

But journey mapping has never been just about a ‘workshop’. While that session may now look and feel different, the process to prepare beforehand and then unlock the value afterwards remains largely unchanged and every bit as important.

That value is measured not just in terms of prioritising actions to fix things but in changing the culture to have a better balance of a customer-led, commercial focus. It shifts mindsets to always think about and discuss what it’s like to be a customer. It drives better cross-functional cooperation. It creates excitement and involvement in what you’re doing. It challenges the wrong behaviours and complacency. It moves people away from chasing the scores and implementing new tech for new-tech’s sake.

And it gives clarity about how to deliver your CX vision so more customers come back more often, they spend more and share the stories you want them to share.

It’s important stuff.

Just because we can’t all be together physically doesn’t mean journey mapping can’t still be effective, strategic and influential.

When customers’ expectations, needs, fears and hopes are changing as they have done in recent months, it’s as important now as it ever was.

Give it a go if it’s at all possible. Your boss as well as your customers will thank you for it.

I’d love to hear how you get on and please get in touch if you’ve any questions.

 

Jerry Angrave is Customer & Passenger Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company.

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping? Why not?

Customer journey mapping.  It’s probably the easiest starting point for anyone looking to improve the right customer experiences.

Why do customer journey mapping

That said, I still encounter business leaders who see customer journey mapping as a waste of time.  They don’t see it as a means to a very commercial end;  to them it’s about employees pretending to be customers and having fun with post-it notes.  At best, they won’t release any of their people from doing their day-job to go on a ‘jolly’.  At worst, the journeys get mapped to tick a box, after which they simply gather dust.

So, this is the first in a short series of three posts on why journey mapping is important, how to make it effective and what to do with it.

First, let’s deal with the “Why?”. Customer experience professionals need the tenacity and resilience to win everyone over, whether it’s buy-in to the very concept of CX or asking for cross-functional representation in workshops.  It’s not easy when those leaders want instant gratification for any activity.

Showcasing how journey mapping leads to better experiences, which in turn improve sales, revenue and retention is acutely important.  But that alone sometimes isn’t enough to shake cynics out of the complacency tree.  They’ll say the business is making money, they have satisfied customers and employees know what they’re doing;  why change, why spend time doing what we call “journey mapping”?

One approach to get them to sit up and take notice is looking at the flipside;  ask “Why not?”.  What if we don’t do journey mapping, will we miss out on anything?  What happens if we don’t try and understand what it’s really like today and should be like tomorrow to be a customer?  Well, here are just a few things that will happen…

No meaningful purpose

The mission statement and vision, the guiding principles, should be about customers not the organisation.  Absent a real understanding of customers’ needs, hopes and expectations a business can only operate in a vacuum.  There’s no consensus around what should be done so everyone will carry on doing their own thing, preserving the corrosive effect of silos.

We waste money on the brand

Advertising expenditure in the UK this year is expected to be over £20bn.  Yet such investments will be wasted if the promises made by the brand are not backed up by the reality of the experience.  After all, the brand is what people tell each other it is, based on what they remember – not what the strapline says.  And we all know what impact the presence of broken promises has on a relationship.

customer journey mapping

That’s the customer experience team. They do what they call customer ‘journeys’…

We measure the wrong thing

It’s easy to measure the most obvious things but is that simply a process audit of what the business thinks should happen? Journey mapping will highlight the things customers value the most; we need to know how well do we do what’s most important.  It also avoids employees feeling pressured to chase a number rather than feel empowered to give the right experience.

We waste effort

Money, time and resource are all finite but one of the great things about journey mapping is that it is very helpful at prioritising what to do next.  With a deep empathetic view of customers it becomes a lot easier to challenge personal agendas, inwardly-focused projects or new products that fit in the “technology for technology sake” basket.  It’s easy to work out what things are really important to customers but we’re rubbish at doing, as well as preserving the things we’re good at.

Complacency eats away

The gap between customer expectations and reality is one of the key drivers of a sustainable business.  A company may feel secure because there’s no obvious burning platform.  As consumers, we have exposure to many companies across a variety of sectors and so our expectations of better experiences are rising as quickly as our tolerance of poor ones are falling.

We miss a big trick

An essential component of effective journey mapping is to see it from the employees’ perspectives, otherwise we have no idea how easy or difficult it is for our people to deliver the right experiences.  They know about fragile processes, about broken hand-offs, about a lack of risk-free empowerment and inflexible policies.  Their ability to deliver the experience is a link in the chain that can’t be kinked or broken.

We hand over an advantage to competitors

Chances are, your competitors are mapping their customer journeys too, meaning they will be in a better position to take customers away from you. They are de-risking the sustainability of their business by understanding what their – and your – customers will respond to positivelyyour-brand-1

 

CJM does many things, not least it informs the customer strategy, it gets employees behind a common purpose and it focuses effort in the right place. More than that though, it gives a business confidence and context for what it does, organising the thinking that will start to change things for the better.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool but it must also be disciplined and structured.  Therefore next in the series I’ll look at the ‘rules’ for how we can map journeys effectively and finally we’ll look at what to do next once the journey is mapped.

Thanks for reading the post, I’d love to hear what you think about journey mapping.

Jerry


Jerry Angrave is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), a CX consultant with an extensive corporate background ‘doing the doing’ and specialises in professional development for those in customer experience roles.  Feel free to contact him with any questions – by email to [email protected] or by phone on +44 (0)7917 718072. More details at the website www.empathyce.com.

 

John Lewis, npower and Ford – in very different places with customer experience

 

Depending on the way you look at it, complacency is either the arch-enemy of customer experience or the reason it exists.  I’ve seen many a sceptical director shrug and say “Why bother? We’re making money so we must be doing it right”.

Yet while the heart of customer experience might be more a way of thinking than functional, the warning signs of where it’s going wrong can be very obvious and very tangible.

Take John Lewis.  Over the years it’s been one of our most celebrated brands, synonymous with straightforward, easy and helpful customer experiences.  And the partnership has seen the benefits in its commercial performance as a result.

So here’s a question:  out of 10, where 0 is rubbish and 10 is brilliant, what would you say JohnLewis.com scores on Trustpilot at the moment?  I know there have been a few issues of late but I’d have said 7s and 8s at worst.  Time to think again.

Based on over 2,000 customer reviews the average score as of this week is …..  1.4 out of 10.

 

john lewis 1.4

 

How and why did that happen?  Only those inside John Lewis know the answers but one suggestion is the outsourcing of its customer experiences.  Handing over your brand to a third party is no excuse, only a reason.  Outsourcing may promise hand-offs that are invisible to customers and a lower per-transaction cost.  However, without the controls to ensure consistency of the intended experiences the number of unnecessary contacts increase, the costs go up and customers’ loyalty goes down.  Years of goodwill being unravelled for all to see.

As with any customer measurement system, there are caveats and foibles.  But I wonder how many organisations would act differently if public metrics such as the Trustpilot score or Tripadvisor rating were more visible internally and part of the voice-of-the-customer mix.

Ironically, over in the energy sector, npower maybe further along the organisational self-awareness curve.  It’s often in the news for the wrong reasons;  scrapping its dividend payment, being fined £26m by Ofgem for failing to treat customers fairly and being told if things don’t improve they will be barred from selling their services.   And on the back of its results this week came the announcement that there will be a significant human cost with 20% of its workforce to be laid off.

With that news though came a plan, a two-year recovery programme.  So for npower, at least the reasons for its difficulties are known and it is trying to do something about them.  Lower wholesale energy prices, government obligations and a quicker than expected shift to renewables are to blame in part.  However, it is the self-inflicted broken processes and billing infrastructure that are driving many customers away.

I’m a customer of npower and of John Lewis.  For the people who work there and for my own sanity I really want them to come right.  Npower has plans but the signs are that things have a way to go.  For example, I recently received three identical envelopes in the same post.  Inside, three identical annual statements with identical supporting information notes – tripling the cost at a stroke and leaving me playing the spot-the difference, wondering if I’ve missed something subtle but vitally important.

npower statement

 

Do they know that’s happening? If not, why not?  But if they do know, wouldn’t a quick letter or email to explain that I don’t have to worry about missing something help?  It’s about knowing what the experience is like today and how it feels compared with what it should be like and having the appetite to do something about it.  Making things worse, the main call-to-action appears to be to switch suppliers so exactly what the statements mean and what I’m supposed to do next will have to be the subject of a call to their helplines…  I hope the recovery plan will be using lower customer effort as a measurement of success.

In contrast, the organisational self-awareness that Ryanair had prompted it to launch the ‘Always Getting Better’ programme.  The about-turn in being customer focused is bearing fruit in its forward bookings, load factors and customer feedback.   Meantime, motoring giant Ford meantime is also setting about the way it does things.ford wheel logo

Speaking earlier this year, Ford’s President and CEO Mark Fields talked openly about changing the culture to be more empathetic to its customers.  The mindset was no longer one of being a manufacturer or even a technology company but an innovative, user-experience company.   Ford employees are encouraged to challenge the status quo, to question tradition and to not take anything for granted.  They won’t get penalised in their performance reviews for trying something new;  the view is that succeed or fail, you learn.  And on digitalisation and data, Ford aims to identify the right experiences first then seeks the technology to deliver it.  Not, trip over itself to install latest IT systems just because it’s the latest IT system.

 

Very familiar brand names with varying degrees of organisational self-awareness.  It’s what shapes their customer experiences and as a direct consequence they will see very different results.

 


Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it interesting and thought-provoking.  I’d love to hear what you think about the subject so please feel free to add your comments below.

I’m Jerry Angrave, founder of Empathyce and an ex-corporate customer experience practitioner.  I’m now a  CX consultant and an official trainer for the CXPA’s professional qualification to be a CCXP. If you’ve any questions about improving customer experiences or CX professional development do please get in touch.  I’m on +44 (0) 7917 718 072 or on email I’m [email protected].

To subscribe for future posts please send an email to [email protected]

ccxp and art

 

 

 

 

Making technology relevant to the passenger experience

(This post was created as a guest blog for Total BlueSky in August 2015)

The speed and breadth of technological change not just in the aviation world presents fantastic opportunities.  The challenge however, is to take advantage of the right opportunities not just the latest opportunity. Understanding the things that passengers value most helps prioritise where investment and resource is best focused.

“We need to think like retailers, we need to be more digital” is the rallying cry in many away-day strategic planning session. After all, the retail sector is often the first roll-out new technology and in stores, online and bridging the divide between the two. Passenger experience

On the flip side however, why not use technology to create an airline that retailers aspire to be like?

As passengers we are all also consumers in other markets.  It is those interactions when buying a coffee, returning an item bought online or getting our telecoms provider to explain the latest bill that set our expectations.  Replicating best practice creates nothing new and is soon overtaken.  Even mobile, Apple and contactless payment methods quickly become established. Applying the right technology to the right problems on the other hand is a winning strategy.

That however, raises a few questions, not least in the debate about using the latest tech because we can, or using the most relevant tech.

Should our planning horizon be months rather than three or 5 years? If mobile, beacons and wearables are the answer, exactly what is the question? And if technology is so good, why do airlines automate check-in for passengers in economy yet retain the personal touch for those in business class.

It might make processing more cost-efficient but if I’m using it for the first time or it’s not working properly I’ll still expect someone there to help me. It feels very transactional, all about barcodes and processing with no apparent desire for any kind of relationship.  If I fly business class one week and economy the next, I’ll be paying less but I’ll also remember how the different approach made me feel when I’m booking my next business-class flight.

So another question might be “Who is benefiting most from the technology?”.  Is it the airline or airport who can leverage the benefits of data, measure processes more efficiently and drive down operating costs?

Or is it the passenger, for whom technology makes it easier to do business than with a competitor and so they return more often, spend more and tell everyone else to do the same?

At an aviation conference recently I asked a fellow speaker for their views on where technology and passenger experiences meet. Will there be a time in the not too distant future, I wondered, when I won’t be able to fly if I don’t have a smartphone?  The immediate and enthusiastic response was an unequivocal “Absolutely!”.

Nothing wrong with ambition, but there’s a real risk of making the assumption that owning a smartphone means being willing and able to use it in the way that airlines want passengers to.

A large US carrier launched its lost baggage app with a big fanfare and indeed, it did shows where a bag was and how that compared with where it should be.  That’s not an inconsiderable amount of time, money and opportunity cost to develop technology that is unlikely to be at the top of a passenger’s wish-list.

As a passenger, I expect my bag to make the same trip as me.  I accept that problems happen and that bags do go missing or not make onto the flight.  BA’s recent problems at LHR Terminal 5 highlighted that all too well. But would I download an app and keep checking it when the chances of it going missing are slim anyway and I’ve got a hundred other things to do?

On a trip to Poland recently, my bag didn’t make it.  I went to the information desk and got things sorted. Having just landed in a foreign country late at night, the baggage reclaim area was not where I would have expected to try and connect to a new mobile network and rely on an app to know more than the people in the room.  I would still have gone to the information desk anyway.

I put it to the airline who had developed the app that its usefulness was there, but limited.  The response was that passengers always want to know where their bags are. Personally, I assume they’re where they are supposed to be but if you go to the effort of producing an app, I’m inclined to feel less confident and believe now that’s a frequent occurrence.

And, I was told, as people in transit can run through an airport quicker than bags can be processed, it’s good to check if your bag is going to make it or not.  We then fell into a debate about designing (unintentional) experiences where people have to run, whether they’re fit, have just had a hip replacement, have amplified anxiety and so on.

The point is relevance.

We hear headlines that people are “always connected”. They will be connected to the things that are most relevant to them and help them do what they want to do.  In the case of lost bags, I know the airline has my cellphone number – they’ve reminded me to check-in early and stock up on duty-free goods ­- and I know they can link the bag to its owner.  So if there is an issue why can’t they get in touch with me before I even know there is a problem and solve it.

The slightly introspective approach also manifests itself in the green, orange and red “How was it for you?” buttons that greet us after security, by the gate or exiting customs.

They give a score, an indication of satisfaction at the point of interaction and add to the wealth or metrics and data. What they don’t yield is a qualitative element; why did someone tap the green button with a smile or punch the red button in frustration?

Without that, how do we know what to change?  And as a customer, if I’ve already told you what I think, why should I bother telling you again when I get an email the day after travelling back?

Thinking like a retailer might be a step in the right direction and there is obviously a place for technology.  But what makes the technology a good investment is the mindset and culture that it’s nurtured and developed in.  For example, where everyone in the project team understands and can keep on top of how and why passengers and therefore the business will benefit.

London City Airport has a huge focus on technology but for the primary reason of making the travelling experience better.  From that, they know, will flow more passengers and more revenue.  And the results are testimony to that approach; passenger numbers are expected to exceed 4 million this year.  Customer reviews suggest it’s the kind of airport you hope your airline will fly to.  And commercially, the owners have just put the airport up for sale with an estimated price tag of £2bn.

Technology plays a huge part but I recall LCY’s chief executive Declan Collier keeping things in perspective about how it’s used in an interview with Forrester in 2013. He said “Customer experience is nothing without delivery, and in our business, our propositions stand or fall on the ability of our people to deliver them”.

Adding to the sentiment from New Zealand is Andy Lester, Chief Operating Officer of Christchurch airport.  Such was the devastation of the tragic 2011 earthquake that much of the city is yet to be rebuilt.  However, speaking in Barcelona about how the airport has got back on its feet, he said “We have a great opportunity … but if we think like an airport or think like an airline we won’t see things the way our customers do”.

Airlines have access to some amazing technology. Passengers have a choice about who they fly with. Understanding the two sides and bringing them together in the right way will create a winning combination.


 

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it interesting and thought-provoking.  I’d love to hear what you think so please feel free to add your comments below.

I’m Jerry Angrave, founder of Empathyce and an ex-corporate customer experience practitioner.  Since 2012 I’ve been a consultant helping others understand how best to improve their customer experiences.  If you’ve any questions about this or any other CX issue do please get in touch.  I’m on +44 (0) 7917 718 072 or on email I’m [email protected].

Thank you Jerry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jerry Angrave

CCXP LogoCustomer Experience awards judge

Little things versus Wow customer experiences

Having real coat hangers in the wardrobe of a hotel-room might not make a Wow customer experience or a Moment of Magic.  But, it’s a great illustration of how small things can make a big impact.Wow customer experiences

Stakeholders often baulk at the idea of improving customer experiences for fear that it will cost more, it will force employees to do jobs they are not targetted on or it will require new, complex processes.  But those customer experience sceptics would be reassured by an example set by Marriott’s Renaissance Monarch Hotel in Moscow.

I’d been invited there to speak at a conference about customer experience.  Always keen to observe and learn, I developed a real liking for the hotel and its people but at first couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.  Yes, it was very nice but there was no fanfare, no obvious “Tad-dah!”, nothing forced. It just worked.

It became apparent that there was simply a series of little things that were personal and relevant when they needed to be.  None of them are costly, none of them distracting for the employees and no complex systems involved.  They could be done just as well by a 7-star hotel in the sun or a draughty backpackers in the rain.   Here’s what I mean:

  • It goes without saying that the people had the right attitude.  They were attentive, engaging and helpful. They could spot this Brit a mile away and had their English reply to my awful attempts at Russian ready.  A smile costs nothing yet its absence (we won’t go into the airport experience here…) can be so costly.
  • Whatever training they have, it is effective.  Everyone who worked there had a genuine desire to help their guests, something that was epitomised in the name badges of the front-line team – they were all called “Navigators”.  Maybe a bit cheesy but whatever the label, the intent was authentic.
  • I was joined at the event by Customer Experience Specialist and fellow CCXP Ian Golding.  After our speaking sessions, Ian and I had the opportunity to jump on the metro for a couple of stops to visit Red Square and the Kremlin, places I never thought I’d be.  The guy behind the hotel check-in desk was very helpful in giving me instructions and directions.  In that, there was nothing special but just as we headed off, he produced a business card and said – in English – “Here. If you get any problems or have any questions, here is my number. Call me and I will help you”.  In an unfamiliar city and with limited time to get back and catch a flight home, that was reassuring. I wondered how many hotel staff in the UK would afford a foreign guest the same level of respect.

    Our experience, made better by the hotel

    A gratuitous selfie experience, made easier by the hotel’s people

  • For too long, wi-fi connections in hotels have been used as an income generator and treated as a cost centre for which customers must pay.  At this hotel though, not only was the wi-fi free (again, nothing particularly special there) but what was very helpful was that the connection remained valid for the full 24-hour period even after checking out.  They know that many guests will continue to remain in the hotel and it actually encourages them to do so in order to have breakfast, hire meeting rooms or take lunch.
  • It’s often said that a company’s true approach to its customers and employees is revealed by the state of the toilets.  These were spotlessly clean as you’d expect but what I didn’t expect was that the urinals were filled with ice to reduce odours and maintain the cleanliness.
  • And those coat hangers?  Actually, it’s not about the coat hangers themselves; its about what it says.  To me, it says “Welcome, we trust you, have a nice stay”. Compare that with the message you feel you’re getting with those hangers that can be removed but have no hook and are therefore useless anywhere but that (often just as expensive) hotel room. To me, that shouts out “Ha! Gotcha! Thought about nicking it did ya? Well we don’t trust you so we’re not going to risk losing the cost of one hanger every now and then just so you can feel at home”.

These little things make a big difference and for little cost.  I have no connection with Marriott Hotels Group other than I am occasionally fortunate enough to be put up in one.  But the point here is not about the hotel;  it’s the food for thought that it gives about how other companies across very different markets might take the same approach. Forget searching for that contrived “Wow!” moment and understand the little things that are really important to your customers.

The ironic reality, of course, is that the combination of getting simple things right and executing the basics well every time gets close to being a “Wow” experience anyway.  They are the things that make us feel like someone understands us and is on our side.  It’s not much to ask but means such a lot.  We’ll be a lot more forgiving if something does go wrong but the real commercial benefit is that we’ll tell everyone else about it and when we can, we’ll come back.  I hope I do.

Let me know what you think.


 

If you have a customer experience issue – strategic, cultural or tactical – that you need a hand with, or if you’ve any questions about this blog post do let me know.

I’m on +44 (0) 7917 718 072 or email [email protected].  ja speaking

Thank you, I hope you found the post interesting and please feel free to add your own views below.

Jerry Angrave, CCXP

 


 

Gaming the customer experience measurement system: why?

The credibility of customer experience is at risk from employees who game the measurement system.  They are motivated to play the system because their performance management reviews depend on it. We can dismiss it as a by-product of the organisation’s ‘culture’ but cultures are made up of people and people allow it to happen –  especially when everything is about the number and not why the number is what it is.

Where employees feel compelled to make things look better than they really are, bad commercial decisions will be made or good ones will be deferred, based on what is effectively false evidence.give us a 10

It’s a crucial issue but one that is often hidden behind the internal rhetoric that proclaims “We put customers first”.  Unfortunately there are many examples of gaming the customer measurement system and here are just some of those I’ve come across in recent times.  They show that if the focus is on a headline number and not the qualitative insight, the competitive advantage and lower costs the measurement is supposed to generate will never materialise:

  • The leadership team believed they had good employee engagement because the scores in the survey said so. However, in one-to-one conversations with the team on on the floor, employees said it was a dreadful place to work.  Some would rather tell friends they were unemployed than say who they worked for.  But when the survey came round, they ticked the top box because they thought (incorrectly as it turned out) that a high score for the company was a key metric in determining whether or not they had a bonus at the end of the year.
  • Contact centre agents asked customers for a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on the basis that “A score of between zero and three is atrocious, between four and eight is not very good and a nine or a ten is good”.
  • A car retailer couldn’t work out why revenues were down but advocacy scores were high. Because they were incentivised to have high NPS results, franchises followed up purchases with a courtesy call and request for a net promoter score. Customers were actively encouraged to give a top score, in return for which they would get a discount off a service or tyres.  And when customers booked a car in for subsequent services, they took the initiative and demanded the lower price in return for giving higher scores.
  • A large multi-brand, multi-channel organisation announced internally that any salary rise at the end of the year was conditional on a increase in customer scores. Immediately, behaviours changed.  There were requests to the reporting team to remove scores from certain journeys because they weren’t good, to change the weighting of different elements making up the overall score and complaints were received from customers who were put under pressure to increase the scores they had already given.
  • Stressed and insecure managers, looking to give their bosses what they want to see, tell their team “This is the story I want to tell, go and find the evidence”.  Meanwhile, the reality of what is happening to customers conveniently goes unreported.

There will be more, but I would urge you to reflect on your measurement system – if it could be manipulated, how might that be and how can I find out?  Are your findings and influencing skills exposed to a challenge from the board about their credibility? And so on.  But the bigger question has to be “Why?”.  What is it about the way the company treats and rewards its people that is effectively weakening decision-making, costing more and handing the advantage to competitors?

I spend my working life advising organisations that they should not chase the number.  It’s important but it’s not the end-game.  Measure the right things, understand what it’s telling you and change what needs changing; but never chase the number for the sake of it. It drives all the wrong behaviours and causes more harm than good.  My mantra : Get the experiences right and the number will look after itself.

If you’ve heard about examples of how the numbers can be manipulated and how that then affects decision-making, please share your thoughts!

 

If you’d like to know more about measuring the right customer experiences or how I might be able to help with any other aspect of customer experience do please get in touch – I’m on +44 (0) 7917 718 072 or email [email protected].  ja speaking

Thank you, I hope you found the post interesting and thought-provoking, and please feel free to add your own views below.

Jerry Angrave