redesign your organisation around excellent customer experience

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CX is bigger than your organisation

Clive began by looking at the example of ordering on Amazon.

The experience is fantastic on the Amazon website, with its well-known slick UX and experiences such as look-through for book purchases. Similarly, tracking a delivery once the order is made is lovely experience.

UPS gives updates on the location of one’s parcel and it’s pretty transparent and joyous for the customer. Even the delivery vans themselves are lovely hybrid electric ones.

However, when the parcel gets to your door and it doesn’t fit through the letter box, Clive ends up in Wimbledon Post Office if he’s not in to receive it.

That’s an experience for the customer and it demonstrates that CX is bigger than your organisation. It’s a lot of work to change the whole experience.

A model for the customer experience

Here’s a slide showing Clive’s representation of the customer experience, from choosing to joining, using to growing and hopefully staying.

Of course, parts of this experience differ wildly depending on the indsutry or company in question. A mobile telecoms company’s definition of staying might be preventing churn, whereas a charity might want to promote advocacy.

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The problem with CX is people

..in that they differ so much.

In a financial context, let’s look at customers. Clive described the figure of Charles, an affluent young man that execs at the bank may think of as a younger version of themselves. However, look a little deeper and that might not be true.

Charles runs a workspace in Shoreditch, his service level expectations are more Soho House than Starbucks. He always flies Virgin Atlantic for the lounge service and he uses an iPhone and is heavily mobile centric.

If he’s happy to talk to his relationship manager at the bank, it’s over Skype, not having to go to a branch which he doesn’t like the look of.

So, Charles is one customer and there are many opportunities to serve him. The only problem is there are many other people, too, such as the Roberts family.

They order from Ocado, they like the experience of the Riverford veg box company, they are starting to use click and collect at their favourite shop, John Lewis, because they realise the advantages of making sure they pick up an item. Perhaps the Roberts’ are Samsung users and they probably use a tablet, too.

Lastly, there’s Bob and Marge. High level service to them is the local golf club, they read the telegraph, they still write letters and they go into their bank branch.

What’s the point here? Well, here’s that customer experience journey again, with channels and marketing tools mapped against it.

And below is how these respective customers might choose to experience Barclays. They will pick the touchpoints that bring them the most joy and this might be hard to predict.

Here are those choices mapped on to the same framework.

Internal departments can be disruptive

Organisations have departments, but mapping these on the customer experience framework, it isn’t immediately obvious how these departments can work together to engineer a great CX

Clive proposes a different model

And here it is. Four departments that span the experience. Let’s have a look in more detail.

What is the proposition?

‘Just working’ is a goal for some company’s services, perhaps mobile phone companies. But others aim higher, such as first direct who implemented 24 hour banking.

Setting this proposition is the first step. With customer service increasingly being delivered digitally, the question might be ‘what’s the digital equivalent of a smiling person?’

Sometimes people don’t know what they want

So you have to innovate. Barclays developed PingIt in eight months, looking at the success of mobile payments in Africa.

Researching, prototyping and co-creating is of course important and we’ll look at those shortly.

Touchpoints and brand

How do we deliver across touchpoints? How do they relate to each other? What context are they used in?

The brand is the toolset that links all together and allows all decisions to be made.

Research is invaluable..

Research is invaluable, though it must be done properly in the right context to avoid obfuscatory results. Clive gave the example of Phillips designing a new stereo and conducting a focus group to find out it big and brash colours were preferred or muted blacks and such.

The focus group said they loved the colour version, but when given an option to take one home with them they took the black one because the context (at home) dictated something less brash.

..Prototyping, too

The old Tube ticket machine had a button for every single station and it was eight years before the next development cycle could get rid of them. Without prototyping, disasters of customer experience will happen.

Listening to customers is key, as shown by Orange customers who set up their own website to help themselves solve broadband problems. Orange noticed in the end and began to answer questions via social media.

Co-creation can help achieve the vision

Customers now expect to be part of the design process, which is now a dialogue. This isn’t the same as having everyone design your product for you.

Clive’s advice is ‘shut up and hold the vision’ to avoid too many people sticking their oar in on the design process and ruining the resultant customer experience.

A great cx can be doing something just as it should be, or innovating afresh.

Everyone is a designer, so make sure that your customer experience doesn’t happen by mistake.

Marketing, redesign your organisation around excellent customer experienceBusiness, Marketing
redesign your organisation around excellent customer experience