by Mike Wittenstein, Chief Experience Officer, Storyminers, Inc.
In this article, you will learn:
1. That focusing on customer experience can help you differentiate your business;
2. That today's empowered consumer threatens many brands with commoditization;
3. That implementing a Customer Experience Design program can help you grow revenues and profits.
There’s certainly nothing new about focusing on the customer experience to differentiate a business. Over the past decades, brands have rocketed to iconic status by doing just that. Think Starbucks, Neiman Marcus, Southwest Airlines.
The difference today is that empowered consumers are increasingly “flexing their muscles”, threatening more and more brands with rapid commoditization. As corporate leaders consider their options, they realize that virtually any product or service enhancements they make can readily be matched or bettered by competitors – and that competing on price is often a fast path to disaster. The only differentiated ‘space’ businesses can truly own is the experience they deliver to customers. But great customer experiences don’t just happen. They occur when all functions of the operation are designed to align with one another to achieve the outcomes your customers seek. Recognizing this, companies have turned to Customer Experience Design.
This author believes that there’s no more positive and long lasting ROI than a body of raving customers telling their friends about your business. Good experiences breed good stories. And good stories – from the mouths of your customers – propel business growth.
The benefits of Customer Experience Design are far-reaching. By understanding which ‘promises’ are most important to your customers, then aligning your organization to make and to keep them, you get a more responsive and less-costly design overall with a number of quantifiable rewards:
• Increased customer loyalty and referrals
• The ability to sustain higher margin pricing
• Reduced employee turnover and training costs from an employee base that understand and is gratified by the key role they play in delighting customers
• Frequently, cost savings from discovering and correcting costly and customer-alienating operational dysfunctions
Your company could probably benefit from Customer Experience Design if you answer “yes” to three or more of these questions:
• Am I in an industry that’s trending toward commoditization?
• Am I concerned that I’ll have to resort to competing on price?
• Does my business involve a large degree of customer service, either face to face, over the phone, or on the web?
• Have my competitors introduced positive changes that my customers are noticing? Am I in a highly competitive space?
• When my company introduces a new product, service, or idea, is it quickly matched by the competition?
• Has recruiting, retaining, and motivating employees become more difficult?
• Am I spending too much trying to attract new customers to keep my business afloat?
• Are your customers, prospects, or employees confused about how your brand’s promises are different from any of your competitors? Were the policies and procedures that my business follows established for the convenience of the business (rather than the delight of customers?)
• Do different departments and functional areas within my business often seem unsynchronized resulting in disappointed customers?
Creating a new set of experiences during the design phase can be quite uplifting for your employees. They may take an interest in designing their own future and feel empowered by it. Creative types will show you opportunities to please customers on the front lines you never knew you had. Process-oriented folks will help you make delivering an experience better, smarter, faster, cheaper, and more enjoyable on both sides of the transaction. You WILL have to spend more time on this issue and make it a priority. Fortunately, Customer Experience Design is a good Trojan horse for making other positive changes in the business. Figure about 3-4 months for your first experience designs and 2-3 months thereafter.
While the earliest recognition of a need for Customer Experience Design often comes from Marketing, the process may touch every part of the organization, making CEO support imperative. Once explained, Customer Experience Design has the sort of business-defining potential that ignites the executive suite with its promise. Often, the CEO champions the business context and marketing/operations co-sponsor the experience.
Customer Experience Design works best when the employee and customer experiences are designed together. Internal salesmanship is a vital and sometimes overlooked aspect of Customer Experience Design. Employees who may be asked to change their behavior are, of course, often fearful and resistant. Stories are one powerful vehicle to let them discover that the future is actually exciting and full of promise, to assuage fears, and to win internal resilience for the upcoming changes. Ongoing internal communications with authentic content and genuine feedback opportunities are just as important as the communications we create for your customers.
Mike Wittenstein is a seasoned marketing and branding veteran with over 20 years of experience at both large and small firms. Mike has influenced key decisions at Air Canada, Apple, AT&T, Carlson/Wagonlit, CarMax, Delta Air Lines, Diversakore, Goodwill Games, Holiday Inns, IBM and others. Mike is the Founder and Chief Experience Officer for Storyminers, Inc.
COMMENTS:
Customer Experience Design reflects a passion, or maybe an obsession, with something that is essentially not the business you are in. A recent striking example of this is Starbucks. They invested in and developed customer experience to the point where the coffee didn't much matter any more. And what happened? Customers are flocking to Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's for their brew, and Starbucks is scampering back to basics with its tail between its waxed legs.
Need I remind you that Dunkin' Donuts has NO designed customer experience? Just long lines, caffeine, sugar and a frightful color palette. I have studied Gilmore and Pine, who followed the money from "customer experience" to "authenticity." And Berndt Schmidt, whose impassioned advocacy for aesthetics rendered all the business world a stage:
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players
Bull! Your business is not a stage. It's a destination where people work, and other people shop, and where your job is to make something valuable and beautiful that customers want and need. Got that? The greatest customer experience comes with buying where the sellers are sincerely trying to be and do their best. Period."
-- Bob Becker, President, Becker MultiMedia
"Bob, your comments are well-thought-out and well-written. That said, might you agree that the proper approach is to 1) get the fundamentals of your business to an A+ level, then 2) use Customer Experience Design as a differentiator?
-- Jamie Turner, Publisher/Editor, The 60 Second Marketer
© 2008 The 60 Second Marketer
