Ten On-Ramps to the Customer Experience Freeway
Good customer experience should just be the way
you do business.
—PATRICIA SEYBOLD, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP, AUTHOR OF MANY BOOKS ON
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer, and Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand
CREATING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EDGE is most definitely a journey, not a destination. In fact, you should think of the customer experience (CE) not as an end goal, but as a moving target, driven by changing customer behaviors and needs, constant technological improvements, and everimproving insights culled from analysis of information.
Particularly in today’s economy, however, time and money are short. In the North American Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services (BBRS) survey, the top concerns that respondents had regarding their company’s efforts to improve the customer experience were financial in nature. More than half rated “cost and resource requirements” (54 percent) and ROI (51 percent) at a level of 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “very high concern” (see Figure 6.1). Although your company may be looking for profitable new areas of investment as economic conditions improve, your senior managers also need to see rapid results.
The good news is, there are short-term actions that you can take now and see benefits in the near term. Not only can these quick hits move the customer satisfaction needle, but they can also motivate employees, who will see the swift improvements, and satisfy executives, who need to see results. It is important, however, to keep the long-term goal and bigger picture in mind; short-term fixes and purely tactical decisions can mean additional costs later on or be counterproductive in the long run.
Here are 10 “quick wins” that you can score early in your customer experience journey.
1. Kill a Stupid Rule
Most large companies have at least one process that they know hurts their customers (at least, the people in the trenches know that the rules hurt customers). Getting rid of one or more of these rules can quickly and costefficiently increase satisfaction immeasurably. “Usually there is no strong sense of customer input when rules are created, so rules or decisions often veer away from being good for customers,” says Temkin Group’s Bruce Temkin. “Stupid rules always exist.” The bigger the organization, the more stupid rules you can expect to see.
Missouri’s Commerce Bank of St. Louis killed a number of stupid rules a few years ago. It started with something as simple as getting rid of the annoying chains on the pens provided for customers, making it more convenient for them to fill out deposit and withdrawal slips. It continued by allowing customers to bring their dogs into its bank branches and then by not only removing the fee that most organizations charge for the use of their coin-counting machines, but also offering a reward for guessing correctly how much change you insert. Commerce, which has had a customer focus since opening its doors in 1973, strives to create a fun atmosphere, complete with free lollipops and dog biscuits in its branches. Customers seem to approve—Commerce has had the highest customer satisfaction ranking in retail banking in the Midwest region for three years in a row, according to J.D. Power & Associates.
2. Inject the Unexpected
Adding whimsy is a simple and inexpensive way to give your customer experience a positive vibe. Marketing guru Seth Godin made waves in 2003 with his seminal Purple Cow book and concept.1 The idea was that your product or service offering needs to be distinctive and remarkable in order to stand out in an ever-more-crowded marketplace. (Interesting side note: purple cow sightings are less unusual in Europe, as Kraft Foods markets its Milka brand of chocolate using this symbol in its advertising.) Godin’s message is that the era of selling average products to average people is over. Having an imaginatively differentiated product or service that people want to recommend to their friends is the way to success, and this in and of itself can be the basis of the customer experience if your offering fills the bill.
For example, Godin cites Ian Schrager’s quirky but luxurious boutique hotels as standing out in a very crowded market. The race to be the best hotel for business travelers had already been won by the likes of Hilton and Marriott, so the former owner of Studio 54 in New York did something different. He created buzz by placing his tiny, exclusive hotels in locations that were off the beaten path, without the benefit of signs signifying their existence—one has to be in the know to enter them. The interior of these hotels is dark and mysterious, more about assignations than about assignments, entirely divorced from the workaday world and family life. Flying in the face of much standard hotel doctrine, these hotels are nonetheless successful and sought after by celebrities and commoners alike.
You may have to go out on a limb to arrive at something delightful and different, according to Godin. His mantra is: in these times, avoiding risk is risky, and taking the safe path is unsafe, so don’t be afraid to be different.
It’s not necessary to look exclusively at your actual product offering to add whimsy, however; you can just as easily apply the concept of surprise to your business processes or other elements of the customer experience. In Bold, Shaun Smith’s new book, a key principle is to “dramatize the customer experience.” For example, computer support is not typically viewed as a glamorous business. But the Geek Squad jazzes things up by dressing its employees as “agents” and giving them Geek Squad cars that look like police vehicles, Smith points out on his blog.
3. Make a Connection
Nothing creates an emotional bond like a personal connection. This is true no matter which channel your customer is using. On the Web and in printed collateral, your tone should be welcoming and not off-putting; in direct customer and client interactions, sales staff should be knowledgeable and attentive without being pushy. “Get in the habit of asking yourself, ‘Would our target customers fully understand this?’” Temkin says.
An example of a company that does this is Sports Authority, which trained its employees to greet the customer within 15 seconds and, if the customer seems open to it, engage in a dialog about the customer’s area of interest. “I walked into Sports Authority and got into a conversation with the sales guy about sand consistency on the golf course,” says Andy Main, principal, customer transformation, for Deloitte Consulting. “He recommended a wedge based on the type of sand I am likely to encounter. This guy knew what he was talking about. He got the sale because he treated me like a serious buyer.”
TARP Worldwide’s John Goodman offers other examples. Procter & Gamble’s Iams brand of pet food, for instance, offers a toll-free number for customers to call a pet loss counselor when their beloved cat or dog dies. “They spend lots of time holding your hand over the phone,” he says. “That can form lifetime Iams customers.”
The human touch is also applicable in the business-to-business world, Goodman says. In his work with a chemical terminal company, he has advised terminal operators to strike up conversations with truck drivers who are waiting to load their tanks. In some cases, the same drivers would return a couple of times per week. “The drivers would likely provide feedback on the company to whomever they’re driving the chemical to,” Goodman says. “This is a heavy industrial environment, with guys in hard hats, but it’s still important to create an emotional connection.”
Another very simple way to reinforce an emotional connection is to have employees who interact on social media sites use their real names. When Marriott recently made some changes in its Rewards program, for instance, the senior vice president of Marriott Rewards, Ed French, responded to customer queries via video. Afterward, he noticed that participants on Marriott’s customer forums were referring to him by his first name, a sure sign of feeling connected.
We’ve already discussed Frank Eliason’s early experiences at Comcast, where he started the company’s Twitter-based customer service. Eliason says that he was hesitant at first to have his team members use their names to tweet with customers, although he himself used the Twitter identifier “@comcastfrank.”
Now senior vice president of social media at Citi, Eliason says that a personal experience during his time at Comcast changed his mind about the impact of employees using their real names on social media. After being available nearly every day and night on Twitter for seven days a week for four straight months, he told his followers that he was taking a day off, as it was his daughter’s birthday. “They ended up researching me and found my family website, where they learned that it was the anniversary of the death of another one of my daughters,” he says. At the end of the emotional day, he says, he was going through his Twitter messages and saw that people had decided among themselves to “give Frank a break” and try to help each other with their service problems. “They did that for me, not Comcast,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons I use my picture and my name—trust is developed by individuals.”
According to a recent Strativity Group survey, respondents said that the behavior of employees goes a long way in creating a superior customer experience (see Figure 10.1).
FIGURE 10.1: All in the Attitude
Respondents were asked to name employee attitudes that add up to a superior customer experience. Ratings were based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “low importance” and 10 being “high importance” (percent of respondents rating the attribute a 9 or 10).
Base: 930 consumers from North America, 2009.
Source: Strativity Group, 2009.
4. Monitor Online Sentiment—and Respond
Whether you know it or not, customers are talking about you on the Web, and you need to know what they’re saying. Employ a platform, tool, or service that enables you to monitor and analyze the reams of unstructured data on the Internet and in social media. These systems, called sentiment analysis tools, social media analysis platforms, or even “listening platforms,” mine online and social sources to deliver insights into how a company or brand is being perceived.
You’re going to need a system like this to harness all those data eventually anyway, and assigning people in the organization the task of doing this by hand can quickly become arduous, if not impossible. When you discover an unhappy customer (tweeting a less-than-stellar experience with your company, for example), help him as speedily as possible. This will go far toward staving off a groundswell of negative opinion.
Southwest Airlines is a great example. On a Saturday evening in February 2010, award-winning film director Kevin Smith complained to his more than one million followers on Twitter that he had been ejected from a Southwest flight for being too fat. The airline, which also has more than one million Twitter followers, responded within minutes and continued to tweet through the night, calling Smith on the phone, apologizing to him, offering to refund his airline ticket, and keeping the Twitter community aware of each action it was taking. By Sunday, it tweeted a link to its blog, where Linda Rutherford, Southwest’s vice president of communications and strategic outreach, explained the specifics of the occurrence.
Essentially, she explained, Smith was boarded as a standby passenger, and when employees realized that he might have needed more than one seat, they made the decision to remove him. Although Rutherford said that Southwest stood behind its policy of assisting passengers who need two seats on board an aircraft, she also acknowledged that the communication among Southwest employees “was not as sharp as it should have been, and it’s apparent that Southwest could have handled this situation differently,” she said on the blog post.
Although the incident went viral, it had all but completely died down by Monday, a testament to Southwest’s quick response.
There are many examples of companies that have had to respond to unflattering videos, tweets, and blog posts (some more successfully than others), and, unfortunately, there is no surefire way to defuse these situations. (Think United Breaks Guitars, Comcast Must Die, or Dell Hell.) The sooner a company reacts (in minutes, not hours), the better.
5. Think “Community”
In many industries, online community forums or groups have sprung up around a particular company or product. Companies are strengthening their customer experience by working with these community forums. A good example is The LEGO Group, for whom aficionados the world over maintain a myriad of websites—tributes to their devotion to the brand. (For a full report on The LEGO Group’s customer experience work, see the case study in "The New Customer Experience Recipe".)
When this happens, companies should not ignore these communities; instead, they should watch them and listen to them. Understand the tenor of the group. Then make a cautious foray into the community. Ask if you can help, especially if the group is providing useful peer-to-peer support that would otherwise fall to you. Be prepared to pull back if the group does not welcome corporate participation, which may be viewed as being commercially motivated. If your participation is not welcome (and it will be clear if that is the case), you can still lurk and gather insights.
Of course, companies are also starting up their own communities. While it does take time to form a community, some rewards, like quick insights, can be garnered right away. Dell engages with customers within every type of social online community possible, while also creating branded communities for its different customer groups. The company gains insights and handles support in any and all of these forums, according to Manish Mehta, vice president of social media and community for the computer maker. “Listen, trust, participate” is a slogan of Mehta’s group, he tells us. Dell has even gone so far as to create a Social Media and Community University for its employees. After an employee has successfully passed four courses, she is considered “certified” and may speak for Dell and engage with customers in any social Web forum. Currently, 8,000 out of 100,000 Dell employees worldwide have received this training; that number will increase exponentially in a rapid time frame, according to Mehta.
6. Source Passion Internally
Although customer experience initiatives are likely to result in business process transformation, this is not the time to seek the advice of an army of experts. Instead, mine the organization itself for customer champions rather than relying on outside experts.
The best data and the insights that you need to carry out customer experience activities are right within your own organization. Many employees in all business functions will have input into the full range of CE activities, including mapping the customer journey, identifying key moments that make or break loyalty, pinpointing gaps between expectations and current performance, and even creating innovative processes to fill these gaps.
To gather the needed insights and develop the processes to follow through on them, it is advisable that you choose a CE leader from within your organization and formally designate this person as the one who will form and lead a centralized CE team. According to Forrester, such a team can help enable cross-functional coordination, identify and share best practices, and support executives who need help understanding the role they play in CE.
Ultimately, becoming customer-centric is something that needs to be baked into the DNA of all employees in the organization; it is not something that can be bolted on as “yet another corporate initiative” or accomplished by throwing money at it. “Good customer experience should just be the way you do business,” says Patricia Seybold, president and CEO of the Patricia Seybold Group and author of many books on the customer experience, including her latest, Outside Innovation. “You should not have to add a lot of stuff to do this. Over time, it should become the way you operate,” she told us.
7. Venture outside Your Industry
Call it benchmarking for CE. When Mike Bidwell, president of the Arizona Cardinals Football Club, wanted to step up the experience offered to sports fans in the Arizona Cardinals’ new stadium, he and his executive team went to get an up-close-and-personal look at the organization that they considered the best in the world at entertainment park customer experience: they toured Disney World. “We toured their parks to get a better understanding of how they do things. The Disney customer experience is legendary,” he says.
The team members liked what they saw so much that they engaged the Disney Institute to help teach management Disney best practices concerning leadership. Bidwell and the other executives saw a lot of value in importing hospitality techniques and principles from the worldwide entertainment leader, as sporting events are a form of entertainment.
“We learned a lot from them,” says Bidwell. “It shouldn’t just be the people who interact with the fans on game day [who are trained on customer experience]. All of us represent the organization and the team, at all times.” To bring employees on board with the concept, all Arizona Cardinals employees are now called “team members,” in much the same way that all Disney employees are called “cast members.”
Some of the best innovations in one industry are inspired by ideas from completely different industries. CEMEX USA’s customer experience management director, Ven Bontha, believes in borrowing ideas about customer experience wherever he finds them. For example, when he and his wife applied for a loan at a local Bank of Texas branch in 2004, he was struck that just a short time after he had completed the application, he found the money sitting in his bank account. When he thanked the manager for the quick turnaround, he was told that it was because of his status as a Bank of Texas preferred customer, Bontha recalls. “On his screen was my history with the bank for the last 15 years,” Bontha says. “They knew everything about me. I’m so integrated with the bank, even if I get mad at them, I won’t change banks. The entanglement is for a lifetime.” Using that experience as a springboard, CEMEX USA decided to cast the net wider, looking at companies in other industries that were considered standouts in customer experience: Continental Airlines, Fidelity, and Mellon Bank.
“You need not just to stand out in your industry but to stand out as a company that is good at customer experience, period,” agrees Ginger Conlon, editor of 1to1 Magazine. (For a full report on CEMEX USA’s customer experience initiative, see the case study in "Adding Disruptive Technologies to Advance the Game".)
8. Conduct Frequent Customer Surveys
Customer service surveys are everywhere you turn, it seems, but a way to get more targeted feedback from customers is to survey them right when they have finished a transaction with you, according to Seybold. These are called transactional, or event, surveys. After a call center conversation, an online chat, an e-mail exchange, or some other interaction, a short, automated survey is sent using the same channel as the event. If the customer is on the Web, the question will pop up in a window following the transaction. If the transaction was face to face, the survey invitation could be on the receipt.
A great time to ask for customer feedback is when a customer has just bought something from your website, says Seybold. This more specifically timed survey acts as a quality-control device, highlighting broken processes, moments of truth, and “make or break” moments. Indeed, these surveys are a superb tool for discovering a failed transaction. Customers who are happy with the service provided are likely to decline to participate in a transactional survey. Not so if they are unhappy—they will seize the opportunity to tell you just what the problem was. If you have lots of responses, Seybold says, you will get statistically valid results.
These surveys need to be accompanied by a closed-loop process with the customer service organization, so that if there is a problem, you can open or reopen a trouble ticket or otherwise get back to the customer quickly and fix it, Seybold says. If you are not ready, willing, and able to help customers with specific problems in real time, you are not ready to use transactional surveys. Indeed, if your company isn’t ready to help customers with specific problems in real time, your company is on its way to oblivion.
For optimum results, transactional surveys should be short (no more than 12 questions) and not demand too much of respondents’ time, says Fred Van Bennekom, principal at Great Brook Consulting, a customer support and survey consultancy.
Synopsys uses online transactional surveys as a quality-control device, to make sure that its support operation is on track. If a customer gives negative feedback regarding a just-completed transaction, the support staff will receive an alert that something is amiss. The agent will contact the customer the same day to offer help. In some cases, that means reopening a trouble ticket that the company had considered closed. “We might think it’s closed, but this is the customer’s perception; we have to follow up on it,” says Vito Mazzarino, vice president of field support operations for Synopsys in Mountain View, California.
Starbucks, Home Depot, and others are also inviting customers to participate in transactional surveys at the bottom of their printed receipts in exchange for a discount. This extends the transactional survey from being a quality-control device to being a tool to gain deeper insights.
9. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
On the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” theme, companies are realizing that when it comes to the Web, social media, and mobile technologies, it’s better to go where customers already are (that is, Facebook, iPhone, YouTube, or Twitter) rather than creating a new site for them to visit or a new interface for them to learn. This is particularly true when you are creating a community site or a mobile application.
Reliant Energy is a good example of this. One of the largest retail electricity providers in Texas, the company established a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Going even further, Reliant anchored these efforts on a centralized, comprehensive site that adds company-generated content and user-generated discussions on topics like energy innovation and energy-saving tips.
This way, consumer discussions across multiple social networks are centralized in a single searchable space. In practice, this means that a usersubmitted comment or an article on Reliant’s Facebook page or Twitter feed becomes available to Reliant users on the energyinyourlife.com site as well.
10. Leverage Analytics and Reporting Tools
Most companies have stockpiled a wealth of information in their customer relationship management (CRM) and other customer-related databases. A quick way to gain a strong lead in customer experience is to use analytics and reporting tools to look at these data. An analytics initiative can be done in a matter of months at reasonably low cost, and can have a real business impact.
Best Buy, for example, made speedy use of analytics during the early days of the downturn. The retailer needed to understand why more customers were applying for financing on their purchases while the number of purchases over $1,000 was dropping. The company used an analytics tool to pinpoint the optimal level at which to offer financing—in this case, the magic number was $499. By deploying a rapid-results tool, Best Buy was able to glean insights that it could put to use right away.
Customer experience initiatives are truly an ongoing expedition. Along the way, the more CE “wins” you can score for a small amount of money in a short period of time, the more successful you will be. However, these tactical moves need to align with and be a planned part of an overall CE strategy, as we have discussed throughout this book. It is wasteful for individual business functions to approach customer experience in a siloed way; the positive impact on customer experience from one function can be offset by a negative experience from another touch point or function. Successful CE initiatives are synchronized, coordinated efforts that involve the entire organization.
The people in your organization will need to see and believe in the benefits of CE before they will be willing to change their thinking and behaviors in a big way. Working on these shorter-term initiatives and seeing the results is a good way to get them to do just that.
Notes
Quoted material that is not referenced is from personal interviews.
1. http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/books.asp.
2. Shaun Smith, “The Eight Brand Traits Separating the Best from the Rest,” MyCustomer.com,
http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customerintelligence/shaun-smith-eight-brand-traits-separating-bestrest/121029.
3. Linda Rutherford, “My Conversation with Kevin Smith,” Nuts About Southwest blog,
http://www.blogsouthwest.com/blog/my-conversationwith-kevin-smith-0.
4. Forrester Research, Inc., “Three Secrets of Success for Customer Experience Organizations,” April 29, 2010,
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/three_secrets_of_success_for_customer_experience/q/id/55871/t/2
5. Douglas MacMillan, “Best Buy, Other Retailers Tap Tech to Boost Sales,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 8, 2009,
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db200 9028_712098.htm.
Bibliography
1. Lior Arussy, Customer Experience Strategy: The Complete Guide from Innovation to Execution (Strativity Group, Inc., 2010).
Arussy provides a practical soup-to-nuts blueprint for understanding what the customer experience is, determining how to measure current experiences, and coming up with an action plan for developing greater customer experiences.
2. Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers into Advocates (London: FT Press, 2002).
The authors offer practical advice on how companies can build the power of the brand, not through advertising, but by the experience and value that they offer their customers. The book provides analysis and concrete methods for increasing loyalty and advocacy in customer experience in a targeted way.
3. Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan, Bold: How to Be Brave in Business and Win (Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2011).
This book highlights 14 businesses that illustrate what the authors say is necessary to stand out in business today: putting purpose before profit, going beyond what customers expect, and relentlessly differentiating.
4. John A. Goodman, Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty and Maximize Profits (New York: AMACOM, 2009).
This book focuses on the strategic alignment of customer service with overall corporate strategy. It draws on research from the author’s work with the likes of Chik-Fil-A, USAA, Coca-Cola, FedEx, GE, Cisco, Nieman Marcus, Toyota, and Cisco Systems. It includes both case studies and formal research. Many aspects of conventional wisdom are challenged with hard data that show how any company can increase loyalty, win customers, and improve the bottom line.
5. Patricia Seybold, Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Seybold explores how businesses can unleash innovation by
inviting customers to co-design what they do and make.
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Greenberg reveals best practices for a successful social CRM implementation and provides examples of the new strategies for customer engagement and collaboration being used by cutting-edge companies, along with expert guidance on how your organization can and should adopt these innovations.
8. Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (New York: Portfolio, 2009).
Run-of-the-mill TV commercials and newspaper ads are no longer effective for reaching consumers because consumers are tuning them out. So you have to toss everything and do something remarkable, the way a purple cow in a field of Guernseys would be remarkable, according to Godin. He uses examples of companies including HBO, Starbucks, and JetBlue to illustrate new ways of doing standard business with measurable results.
9. Frederick Reichheld, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
Reichheld argues that customer satisfaction is more important than any other business criterion except profits and that the best measurement of customer satisfaction is whether you would recommend a business to a friend—the foundation of the widely used net promoter score.
10. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Business Plus, 2010).
The CEO of online shoe giant Zappos, Hsieh details his rise from Harvard student entrepreneur to the creator of a hugely successful brand. Customer service became the focus of the start-up retailer, even when funding dried up. The book recounts how Zappos survived, eventually being acquired by Amazon for more than $1.2 billion in 2009.
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Joseph focuses on how to create “the experience effect,” which is a combination of marketing message, advertising, sales approach, website, interaction with company personnel, and more.
12. Brian Solis, Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, rev. & updated (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011).
Solis’s updated primer focuses on how to use social media to succeed in business. Learn about the psychology, behavior, and influence of the new social consumer, and define and measure the success of your social media campaigns. It features a foreword by actor Ashton Kutcher, who has more than five million followers on Twitter.
13. Bernd H. Schmitt, Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers, (New York: Wiley, 2003).
Schmitt examines how customer experience management increases growth and revenues and remakes companies’ image and brands. The book offers a five-step approach to customer experience to connect with customers at every touch point, and offers case studies in various B2B and consumer industries.
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Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, says that about 80 percent of all new products either fail within six months or fall short of their profit forecast. The reason? A disconnect between the customer experience and the way marketers collect information about how customers view their world. Analysis, success stories, and advice on rethinking marketing approaches are included.
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A comprehensive look at what it takes to keep customers in today’s market as well as gain new customers. The book provides real-world examples of how 12 brands create customer practices leading to “irrational loyalty,” and explains how these techniques work and how to implement them.
17. John R. DiJulius, What’s the Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008).
An inside look at world-class customer service strategies at top companies, such as Disney, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton. The book provides steps, best practices, and service standards needed to build a customer service machine that consistently delivers.
18. Jeanne Bliss, Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
The author offers advice to companies that think they’ve committed to customer experience but haven’t.
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