Great Customer Experience = Cultural Alignment + Proactive Design

Customer experience is not really a set of feedback forms and derived charts and measures. Being the worst abused performance metric compounded with being thoroughly misunderstood by most ‘experts’ and ‘leaders’ trying their own various means of measuring something as abstract, has taken a steep toll on the approach towards customer experience across the board. Only a handful actually get it right and even when they do, the structure is short lived and fall into bad habits of endless charts and measures post the tenure of the visionaries who are at the focus of getting it right.

 

The first step to getting customer experience right is to be able to come around to understanding that it cannot be numerically or objectively quantified accurately, no matter how sophisticated the technology or how complex the statistical methodologies. The key is to be able to cast yourself in the shoes of the customer and asking oneself, what would one want out of any particular interaction. And given that every customer, and their needs thereof, being unique in some respect, the quality of experience is a function of unique expectations crafted as a derivative of individual backgrounds, situations and contexts.

 

Say this to any expert and the first reaction will be one of statistical smugness. Yes, no matter how diverse people behavior, all of these can be cast into a scatter-plot and statistically defined based on demographics and nature of the interaction. One of my biggest realizations from life is this – my expectations (and I suspect this as true for most customers) when I am facing a computer issue an hour before a critical presentation and my expectations in the similar situation when watching the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy will be very different from whoever owns my experience at said time. I am demographically the same person in both the situations and the statistics of people from my past and present state will say with 95% confidence that I will be happy with a computer issue resolution that does not take more than 20 minutes of my time and failing a working computer, have someone come over to my house in 2 days to replace the motherboard on my computer. I am not questioning the statistical methods of arriving at this conclusion, but I do not agree with it. A score of 8 on 10 out of a preset questionnaire that asks me whether my computer issue was addressed does not make for a happy me! Because, in reality my problem is not a bad computer! My problem is a computer that failed to deliver its purpose when I needed it to most.

 

No hardware troubleshooter over the phone, online or any other medium, without a magic wand, will make me happy if I do not have a working computer before the critical presentation. The ability to back up the entire contents of my computer that I can access over my mobile device and project in the event of a bad computer is what will make me really happy – a 10/10. And that makes for good customer experience. A proactive design driven by a culture to ensure that the customer who has been sold a served a promise, be served that promise under extreme situations.

 

This brings us to discussing what makes for great customer experience – cultural alignment and proactive design.

 

Cultural alignment is not a script and posters with smiling faces reaffirming that the customer comes first. I have met employees of different companies who smile and sell the customer first countenance but in the safety of their homes, swear by the competitors promise. ‘Customer First’ as a philosophy has run out of shelf life sometime back and the era is of putting the customer at the very center. While, in fancy representations of a smiling customer at the center, the philosophy is easily expressed, the adoption of an organizational thought process that act starts, collaborates and circles back to the customer is one of the toughest things to do. And this is the weakest link in the chain to great customer experience. While most people will agree that great customer experience means empathizing with the customer, the hurdle is that very few are actually aligned to that fact. Alignment is very different from accepting the broad principles. The reason for this is that empathizing is often done wrong. The trick is to place yourself in the customers shoes and not becoming “I” in the shoes of another person.

 

Most of us are, literally, so full of ourselves that we, most often, make the customer fit into our shoes and go from there. Going back to my earlier example, a computer savvy computer hardware and software specialist would, 9 times out of 10, assume that that the next step is obvious – restart the computer. 60 minutes before a presentation that may make or break my career, the most obvious does not always strike a chord – irrespective of how sweetly it is said. And if I am as tech savvy as the person trying to solve my worries over a phone call, the obvious is not why I would have called in the first place. What might therefore work other than designing a pitch that holds true for a statistically significant sample?

 

The answer is the ability to be imaginative in applying Murphy while thinking about the customer. What can go wrong will go wrong and the only assumption that holds true that status quo is the only thing the customer will be happy with. Everything else is just the subject of hours of intellectual wrestling. So a bad computer ahead of a TV show and a bad computer ahead of a critical presentation are just two of a million combinations possible between me, my computer and my average day in life. Culturally, an organization aligned towards providing good customer experience, must be able to expect and plan for the worst, and treat the context and situation of the customer as their own self in that situation. And then think through and deliver the interaction as one would expect in for themselves. And the interaction may be at any stage of the value chain with or without any actual contact with the customer. A product designer must think as fondly of the customer as the person who calls the customer to collect on an outstanding payment.

 

Is this holistically always possible in a world of economic and other resource constraints? Yes and no! No, you cannot do everything that has to be done right. But then if I start with a list of practices (best practices as we have heard every so often) we are going back down the path of scripts, tools and statistics. And therefore, yes, it is possible to achieve the nirvana state of customer experience orientation with a bit of contextualization and, coming to the next critical item, with some proactive design.

 

I have been a customer of Progressive and Geico. And I had an accident each in their company. When I called into the Progressive helpline to report the accident, the first thing they asked me was if I was okay. Geico asked me if my car was in driving condition. This is the difference in culture. Progressive had a rental car and the towing vehicle reach my accident spot at the same time. Geico sent me a towing van and then I took a cab back to the nearest hotel. Progressive kept me updated on the status of repairs and my claims through the process, even at stages that I did not quite care about – somewhere in the process they informed me only once, almost apologetically, of the deductible. Geico’s first update was an estimate of repair expenses and deductible and asked me to go online and approve. The next time they sent me an update, proactively, only when my car was ready to pick up.

 

Who do you think gave me a better customer experience? The answer, and the solution therefore, are obvious - proactive design with the customer’s woes and expectations in mind. Organizationally, once a decision has been made to differentiate a service or a product (without that, what’s the point of being in business?), design is a continuous process that starts with the customer, continuously collaborates with the customer and ends with the customer.

 

Once upon a time a couple of guys independently thought of making bottled beverages. One of them decided that the best way to do this was to drop the drink to a receiving bay in free fall for about 23 feet. The other decided after taking an aerated drink from the free fall machine, to create a built in conveyor belt to carry the beverage from its slot to the customer. Every time a customer took the free fall route, a shirt was stained and the second guy created the conveyor belt to prevent the fizz caused by the jolt of the free fall. This hypothetical example shows how a customer woe was converted into proactive solution that improved customer experience eliminating the anguish of a stained shirt.

The combination of a cultural inclination of giving the best possible experience to the customer by creating a great consumption context and a process that focuses on proactively designing for the best possible outcome for the customer in normal and adverse situation forms the founding blocks of creating great customer experience. No product, in today’s environment, is consumed in isolation and that is the key. A car is not an engine, interiors on 4 wheels. A car also includes connectivity, great roadside service, innovative financing, great mileage and cheap & accessible maintenance. Because the owner of a car is no longer a guy who just needs to go from point A to point B quickly in a good seat and listening to a radio!