Want To Improve Your Customer Experience? Start With The End In Mind

Photo: Anne (Flickr)

As we’ve written before, companies are jumping at opportunities to improve their customer experiences. But how do you get results as quickly as possible?

According to research by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, people’s perception of their experiences is largely based on what happens between the peak level of pain or pleasure (e.g. the moment of truth) and the end of the experience. As a result, companies can drastically improve their customer experiences by focusing first on the touchpoints at the end of the journey, rather than those towards the beginning.

Businesses seem to support this conclusion. Many supermarkets, for example, are now using military-grade infrared cameras above the cash register to determine the number of lanes that should be open, reducing average wait times from 4 minutes to under 30 seconds. The same goes for flying. All the hassles related to going through security, having to wait a long time to board the plane, or having a middle seat, can be negated by arriving just a few minutes prior than scheduled (perhaps this is why airlines now pad their schedules). When looking at the customer experience that you aim to provide, it is therefore important to put extra scrutiny on the end of the journey.

Of course, as the saying goes, “the best laid plans…often go astray.” No organization is perfect. It’s for this reason that companies should be prepared for that touchpoint that doesn’t exist until something goes awry: customer service.

Think of the airline agent who provides you with a flight voucher after your flight has been delayed; the customer service representative who offers an additional discount on your phone bill because of a service glitch; the waiter who takes an item off your restaurant bill because it wasn’t to your liking. By empowering employees to provide delight at the end of an experience, companies can create a disproportionately positive impact on a customer’s perception of that experience. Perhaps Will Rogers had it backwards; you never get a second chance to make a last impression.

Innovation Quick Tip #8: A prototype is worth a thousand pictures

Sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of organizational elements.

Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation. See the full series here.

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Challenge:  Innovation teams in corporate settings often spend an inordinate amount of time at the concept level. Although endlessly refining PowerPoint presentations about the proposed product/service may help satisfy risk management types, it consumes valuable time without necessarily advancing the project.

Quick Tip:  Drive for a working prototype of the innovation within the first couple weeks of the project.

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Innovation Quick Tip #7: Hire for innovation

Sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of organizational elements.

Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation. See the full series here.

Challenge:  Organizational culture can be hard to change when it is comprised of the same people always behaving in the same ways.

Quick Tip:  Look for innovation competence in every new hire.

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Brand Promise Vs. Customer Experience Vision

I was speaking with a client recently when this question came up:

“What’s the difference between a brand promise and a customer experience vision?”

I thought it was an interesting question that deserves discussion.

The brand promise is a key input to the cX vision that informs the vision of what the brand explicitly stands for through a concise set of statements (much of which is also used in advertising).

The cX vision suggests how those brand value statements will be interpreted by the organization as it goes about intentionally building out the activities within a certain touch point or its system as a whole. The cX vision can also help the organization distinguish how it plans to optimize the business (type of customer, use of technology, cost structure, etc.), so it provides those who need to produce the experience an idea of what the organization expects (and visa versa), especially for situations where you have a system at scale.

Think Disney. They do a good job to embody their brand values in every experience they produce, especially when their employees are interacting with the public in places like Disney World. You would know immediately if something was “off brand” because their values are so carefully and consistently applied.

In my opinion, a company cannot do a good job on customer experience without a solid set of brand values because the brand values serve as the “north star,” the primary reference point in bringing differentiated experiences to life. But brand values serve a different purpose in the equation than a vision does.

Innovation Quick Tip #6: Leverage past innovation successes for instant momentum

Challenge:  Innovation initiatives can come across as “something completely different” (to borrow a phrase from innovative comedy troupe Monty Python), which leaves people feeling like they don’t know what to do.

Quick Tip:  Leverage past successes—big, historical successes as well as more recent accomplishments—to convey that innovation is an extension of things that are already occurring.

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Innovation Quick Tip #5: Every innovation team needs an executive-level sponsor

Sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of organizational elements.

Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation. See the full series here.

Challenge:  For a variety of reasons, innovation teams can flounder without strong support from management.

Quick Tip:  Every innovation team needs an executive-level sponsor.

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Innovation Quick Tip #4: What We Have Here Is A Failure To Fail

Open any business publication to the article on innovation and you are likely to learn about the glitzy “front end of innovation” – idea generation, crowd sourcing, and problem solving.  While these practices continue to capture interest, sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of more mundane organizational elements: leadership, culture, communication, process, structure, roles, skills, incentives, commercialization, etc.

Although these topics can be ponderous, there are plenty of good approaches that can be adopted quickly.  Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation.

Challenge:  Innovation requires risk, but this term has been confused with “failure”, one of the most toxic words in all of business.

Quick Tip:  To communicate effectively about innovation, you need to choose terminology that carries the meaning you intend to convey.

Words like “failure”, “risk”, and “learning” are often loaded terms for executives who deal with innovation. Here are some ideas to help you get your messaging right.

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Being More Efficient Improves Your Bottom Line—And Your Customer Experience

As you probably know, mapping a customer journey helps identify both the points at which a company interacts with its customers and the customer emotions at each of those touchpoints.

While marketing and customer service teams typically use this tool to identify areas for improving the customer experience, operations teams can use customer journey mapping to simultaneously create happier customers and improve a company’s bottom line. Keep reading »