The Clear Brick: Customer Experience Domination #1

Lesson #1: Create a Sense of Urgency

NOTE: You’ve heard me rant about the value that Customer Experience Management can generate for any business. I truly believe that Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the next competitive battleground where businesses will commit vast resources to capture the hearts, minds, and wallets of the ever-elusive customer. Those companies that get it right can establish an emotional connection with their customers that can boost their revenues and profits – even when the economy gets soft. Those that don’t, will languish.

Over my 20-year career, I’ve seen too many businesses miss the mark. I want to see all businesses be wildly successful; especially businesses that may not be able to afford or access world-class consulting services. That’s why I’m providing these courses for free. If you follow everything outlined here, you too can see your business soar.

Before you begin, you must be 100% committed. If you’re not absolutely serious about improving your customer experience, then go back to surfing the Internet or watching YouTube. Only read on if you plan to utilize the valuable information that I am about to provide to you. If you do, you too can capture the incredible power of customer experience management for your business.

Now, on to lesson #1…

If you are involved in a business in any capacity, then you know that in order to get things done – there has to be focus and commitment. Getting that focus and commitment is often easier said than done. Other commitments can distract executives and team members aren’t motivated to go the extra mile. This is the main reason that projects never get started, fall behind schedule, get off track, or fail altogether.

To get your customer experience project off the ground, you must create a compelling sense of urgency.

“Fail to create a compelling sense of urgency
and your project will languish”

Step 1: Identify the Common Customer Experience Management Pitfalls

This year thousands of companies will take on a customer experience project. But with CRM project failure rates reaching as high as 75%, some might ask ‘why bother’? The answer is simple; the benefits of doing it right are significant.

Companies that successfully develop and maintain a unique customer experience are far more likely to have significantly higher customer loyalty and advocacy than their counterparts. Products and services can be replicated, but a unique customer experience can establish a competitive advantage that is difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. As a result, the stakes are high and companies will seek to gain a first mover advantage in customer experience regardless of the potential for failure.

Smart companies can improve their chances for success by identifying and overcoming the common pitfalls that besiege many customer experience projects.

My experience has shown that most companies fall victim to five common pitfalls that can spell doom for your customer experience project if not properly managed. They are:

Maintaining Inside-Out Thinking: Sticking to the build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy can be a dangerous habit. Learn to overcome this habit and improve your chances for customer experience success.
Lack of Ownership: As with any major project, effective leadership can mean the difference between success and failure. Overcome this deadly pitfall by getting the right leaders on board.
Losing Touch: Companies can sometimes lose touch with their customers’ wants and needs. Smart companies dig deep, continuously, to understand why and how people buy and use their products and services.
Lack of Clarity: Too often, companies define the lifecycle and customer touch points too narrowly – leaving critical elements of the customer experience to chance. . If you can’t develop consensus around what customer experience means to your company, your project will likely languish.
Losing Sight of Profitability: Many companies lose site of customer profitability and financial results. If your company doesn’t have a handle on individual customer profitability, your customer experience project will have only mediocre results.

You can learn more about each of these potential pitfalls – and how to overcome them – in our report titled “How to Overcome the Top 5 Customer Experience Project Pitfalls.”

You can purchase this report online by clicking here.

Identifying the common pitfalls is an important first step in creating a sense of urgency for your customer experience project. Presenting business leaders with the grim picture of what can happen with a lack of customer focus can be a powerful motivator.

Step 2: Develop and End-to-End Perspective

If your business is like most, you probably jumped on board the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) bandwagon at the height of its 'hype' in the late 1990's and early 2000's. During that time, I often asked companies if they had implemented CRM in their business and they almost unanimously answered 'yes!' But when I dug deeper, I found that it was often only a partial solution.

"We implemented a new call center solution!" one company would say.

"We optimized our loyalty program!" another would say.

What became painfully clear was that most companies implemented only a point solution to address one finite touch point in their organization. If the project was even remotely successful, which more times than not it wasn't, the company would declare CRM victory and quickly focus their attention to other areas of the business.

They failed to grasp the bigger picture; customer experience is an end-to-end process that begins with customer attraction, flows through interaction, and ends with cultivation – where the process starts over.

A critical first step for any customer experience project should be to map out the entire customer experience lifecycle. By doing so, you and your company can develop a deeper appreciation for how your business appears to, and interacts with, your customer. This exercise is also an important step in identifying the multitude of break points that can detract from the customer experience.

One best practice that I would recommend is to develop two end-to-end processes; 1) a current state (or as-is) process model, and 2) a future state (or to-be) process model. The current state process is a powerful tool to help clearly demonstrate just how bad the customer experience can be today. I’ve seen this tool used effectively to send business executives clamoring for a quick fix. Likewise, the future state process model can be a powerful tool to create a sense of urgency. It can paint the picture of what the customer experience should be like, if everything and everybody worked perfectly together to fulfill the customers’ needs. Together, these process models can quickly demonstrate the missed opportunities in the customer experience lifecycle.

I would highly recommend that you be creative during this process. There are very few people in the world that actually get excited about flowcharts or generic use-case diagrams. Most people need to visualize the process in order to effectively understand it. I’ve found that one of the best ways to do this is to use storyboarding to bring the customer experience process to life.

We have created a set of fully illustrated customer experience process maps for this very reason. Our process maps are colorful and illustrate the path that a customer takes as they progress through the customer experience lifecycle. This modeling concept, also referred to as ‘A Day In The Life’ model, is designed to facilitate meaningful diagnosis and discussion in order to establish consensus about what is, or is not, working.

You can purchase ClearBrick’s fully illustrated process maps here.

You can use these process modeling and diagnostic methods to create a compelling case for changing your customer experience capabilities.

Step 3: Identify a Compelling Strategy

Getting your business motivated and aligned on a customer experience management initiative is perhaps best achieved by identifying a compelling idea or strategy. You need an idea that can differentiate your business in the market. Otherwise, you may find your business being viewed as a simple commodity in the marketplace; an uncomfortable position for nearly any business.

The antidote: be different.

Michael E. Porter defined the differentation strategy as “creating something that is perceived industrywide as being unique.” More importantly, it means creating something that is perceived different in your customer’s mind.

Don’t just jump on the ‘me too’ bandwagon. Work to identify compelling differentiation strategies that will make your customer experience truly unique in the marketplace. Not only will you stand out in your customer’s mind, you’ll be more likely to get your executives on board to commit to the effort.

To get the ball rolling, I recommend that you facilitate brainstorming sessions to identify potential strategies that can help to break your business out of the pack. Coming up with unique ideas can be difficult at times. That’s why we created a series of strategy booklets that serve as thought-starters. Not only do they help to provide a framework for customer experience management, they offer several strategies to help get the thought process rolling.

A few strategies, for example, include:

Stretch the Box: Look at what your company does for a customer in the context of their total needs network. Then determine if there are areas where you can expand your products and services to fulfill a larger portion of the customers’ needs.
Be Different: You can differentiate your product or service, your customer experience, or both. Differentiate only one of these dimensions and any gain you experience may be fleeting. Differentiate both and enjoy a lasting and enviable market leadership position.
Show You Care: Poor customer service is the leading cause of customer defection. Keep more customers for longer by showing them you care. Don’t let policy or procedures get in the way of truly meeting the customers needs.
Do the Dance: Every customer experience is made up of a series of touch points. The customer scenario represents the unique path that a customer may take while navigating your touch points. Becoming a master at customer scenario management can make all the difference between customer experience success and failure.
Be An Exterminator: Take a Six Sigma approach to customer experience management. Six Sigma is a measure of quality that represents near perfection. A Six Sigma approach focuses on identifying and eliminating customer experience ‘defects’ in an ongoing effort to achieve customer experience perfection.

Identifying which customer experience strategy is most appropriate for your business is entirely up to you. However, I recommend that you look around to see what other best practices might fit in your business. Gathering ideas from other industries can often provide an interesting perspective.

We offer a number of potential strategy thought-starters in our strategy booklets that can be purchased online and downloaded immediately.

You can get started with your own customer experience strategy by downloading them here:

Step 4: Identify Compelling Results

By now, you should have developed your end-to-end customer experience process and identified your unique customer experience strategy. Now, it’s time to demonstrate the tangible value that your business can achieve by implementing on that strategy by creating your customer experience business case.

Certainly, by now you realize that customer experience is important: Good experiences can increase customer loyalty, profitability, and share of the wallet. Unfortunately, many companies treat the customer experience as more art than science – and art can be difficult to quantify and measure. As a result, companies tend to rely on customer satisfaction, opinion and perspective as a surrogate for measuring the quality or effectiveness of the customer experience. However, demonstrating the return on customer satisfaction can be difficult – leaving many projects to conclude with few – if any – tangible results.

Companies can yield better results from their customer experience projects by linking the art and science of customer experience in a formal business case.

Companies can yield better results from their customer experience projects by linking the art and science of customer experience in a formal business case. An effective customer experience business case must link the art of customer experience with the science of traditional financial metrics such as revenues, profit, and cash flow.

To assist companies with this linkage, we developed the Customer Value Compass; a tool that links customer experience activities and initiatives to tangible value drivers. By doing so, the art and science of the customer experience can be more readily modeled in a formal business case.

Companies often recognize that customers are their most valuable assets. Maximizing the value of those assets, however, requires a keen understanding of what the customer values and how specific actions by the company can improve total customer returns. Companies with the discipline to identify and improve their specific customer value levers will realize a higher return on investment for their customer experience projects.

Identifying which customer value lever to improve can be unique to each customer, company, industry and marketplace situation. ClearBrick developed the Customer Value Compass to help companies to navigate their way to customer value. You can use the value compass to create the framework for your own business case.

You can get our complete guide on how to build your customer experience business case here.

I think it goes without saying that numbers can often speak louder than words. A business case that outlines specific attainable results can be the most compelling argument for improving your business case. Business leaders often speak the language of money and speaking their language can quickly get the ball rolling.

If you missed my earlier article on the compelling value of customer experience management, you can read it here.

Go ahead, make your case. Your business leaders would be fools to ignore the cold hard facts; customer experience can yield significant results.

That wraps up lesson #1. To recap our lesson, the four steps we covered included:

Step 1: Identify the Common Customer Experience Management Pitfalls
Step 2: Establish an End-to-End Perspective
Step 3: Develop a Compelling Strategy.
Step 4: Identify Compelling Results.

Stay tuned for Lesson #2, which will provide you with the next step in the customer experience journey, is titled “Define the Customer Experience Vision”

Labels: 7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination, customer experience