Secrets To Success In A Soft Economy

Businesses finding it difficult to compete on product, price, placement, or promotion can turn to customer experience management for differentiation.

Lenexa, Kansas – May 1, 2008… With a continuing bleak economic outlook and weakening consumer sentiment, business are looking for an edge anywhere they can get one. Businesses that are finding it difficult to compete on product, price, placement, or promotion in this environment can now turn to customer experience management for differentiation.

Robert G. Howard and ClearBrick LLC introduced today 7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination; a step-by-step guide to help any company to develop and implement a compelling customer experience differentiation strategy. The newly released business solution outlines seven clear steps that can help any business to develop a compelling customer experience strategy, identify opportunities, and translate ideas into actionable results.

In today’s economy, businesses are competing hard to gain any competitive advantage. “By establishing an emotional connection with the customer, businesses can improve loyalty, increase wallet share, improve advocacy, and grow revenue and profits,” said Robert G. Howard, Founder & Chief Executive of ClearBrick LLC. With so much at stake, customer experience management is quickly becoming the new competitive battleground for businesses seeking an edge.

Without a compelling and differentiated customer experience, consumers tend to revert to commodity buying behaviors; the consumer will tend to wait for the next sale or promotion and buy from the lowest bidder with little or no loyalty to any single business. Conversely, customers are willing to pay a premium for goods and services that are emotionally important to them; a phenomenon that was covered in depth in the best selling book Trading Up by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske. To compete in a soft economy, businesses are turning to customer experience management to create that increasingly important emotional connection with their customers.

ClearBrick’s latest business solution helps companies to navigate the complexities associated with customer experience management. 7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination incorporates proven methods into clear and pragmatic recommendations to help businesses to succeed with customer experience management. The solution is highly adaptable and configurable to meet the unique needs of any business. “ClearBrick has the perfect solution for the do-it-yourself project manager trying to resolve a company’s Customer Experience dilemma,” said Jack Bowerman of Bowerman Consulting LLC.

Robert G. Howard is the Founder and Chief Executive of ClearBrick LLC. ClearBrick blends field-proven business experience with timely and relevant market research to create pragmatic solutions that are packaged for execution. ClearBrick can be found online at www.clearbrick.com.

About ClearBrick LLC: ClearBrick was founded by Robert G. Howard in 2006. Mr. Howard is an experienced business advisor and management consultant with over 20 years of experience. ClearBrick is committed to providing quality products and services for the do-it-yourself business professional. ClearBrick is headquartered in Lenexa, Kansas and is supported by business professionals across the United States.

Customer Experience Domination #7

Lesson #7: Measure, Measure, Measure.

1. In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.
2. In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into a customer experience action plan.
3. In lesson #3, we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business.
4. In lesson #4, we showed you how to develop the customer experience business case.
5. In lesson #5, we taught you the basics of customer experience project management.
6. In lesson #6, we described some of the specific methods that you can use to improve your own customer experience.
7. In this lesson, we’ll discuss how to measure the results of your customer experience efforts.
   

In business, you get what you measure. That mantra is true for customer experience management as well; if you want to achieve customer experience domination – you need to know what to measure. In this lesson, we’ll cover some of the most common customer experience performance metrics such as customer satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty.

These customer-centric metrics should be an important part of any business’s key performance indicators. However, for those businesses that want to dig deeper, there are additional performance metrics that you should consider. In this lesson, we’ll discuss some additional metrics and factors that you should consider to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer experience process.

The ability to measure your progress and results is the single most important tool for your customer experience efforts. Discover the fundamentals of measuring your customer experience in our latest lesson.

So let's get started...

You’ve heard me rant about the strategic importance of customer experience management. Those companies that get it right will find themselves in the driver’s seat of the new economy. Those that don’t will languish.

Since I began publishing reports, podcasts, and solutions on the subject of customer experience management, I’ve seen a groundswell of interest from businesses around the globe. More and more businesses get it; winning with customer experience can yield significant results! In case you’ve missed some of my earlier rants, here’s just a short list of benefits that your business can achieve by making ecstatic customers by delivering an emotionally engaging customer experience:

• Revenue Enhancement: Satisfied customers will return more often and spend more money with your business. Simply put, happy customers will put more money in your pocket.
• Growth: Emotionally connected customers will tell others about your business, which can help your business to reach new customers and potentially new markets. Happy customers will also give you a better opportunity to try new products and services to expand you potential business offerings. In short, emotionally connected customers can ignite growth.
• Cost Reduction: Very satisfied customers continue to come back and spend their money. They don’t need much prodding – they simply love doing business with you. As a result, your business benefits by getting a greater return on your marketing dollar; less prodding and less reliance on profit-draining promotions means more contributions to your bottom line.
• Customer Retention (Churn): It's a competitive world out there. Chances are, your competition is trying to woo your customers as you read this. Truly happy customers are more likely to stay, thus reducing their potential departure from your business to your competition (aka churn). It costs a lot of money to attract customers. Keeping them happy just makes business sense.
  

With so much at stake, why doesn’t every business commit to a customer-centric business strategy? The answer is simple; most companies don’t know how to measure the attributes of the customer experience in order to make it a tangible asset. As a result, processes that can’t be effectively measured fail to gain strategic importance. Learning to measure the right metrics of your customer experience process can make all the difference.

Step 1: Know What to Measure

Let us start at the highest level. Most often companies will tend to measure the overall customer experience with a handful of overarching metrics. The most common metrics that you should become intimately familiar with include satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty:

• Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is the degree to which your customers enjoyed their overall customer experience. This measure will often encompass the degree to which your customers were pleased by their perception of, or interaction with, your product, service, value, quality, brand, innovation, support, and overall business relationship. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate customer experience metric, but using just this one overarching metric can mask the individual attributes of the customer experience that dramatically add or detract from an outstanding customer experience.
• Customer Advocacy: Customer advocacy is the degree to which your customers are willing to recommend your business to a friend or colleague. Customer advocacy is often an indication of how willing your customers are to say something positive about your business. As with any business, there will be both supporters and detractors, but the goal should always be to push the overall advocacy scores into increasingly higher territory.
• Customer Loyalty: Customer loyalty is the degree to which your customers will continue to come back to your business on a regular basis. Customer loyalty can be difficult to measure because it can often be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, loyalty can be measured as the total duration that a customer sticks with your business. However, total duration won’t always tell you when or how often your customers may continue to shop your competition. For example, a florist may fill 50% of a customer’s annual flower orders every year. The customer’s loyalty may not be 100% since 50% of their annual floral spend is going somewhere else.
  

If you are just getting started with customer experience management, measuring customer satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty is a great place to start. These customer-centric metrics should be an important part of any business’s key performance indicators. However, for those businesses that want to dig deeper, there are additional performance metrics that you should consider.

To fine-tune your customer experience process, you must dig deeper into each phase of your process to measure what is working well and what needs improving.

Step 2: Dig Deeper into the Key Metrics of Customer Experience

Measuring customer experience doesn't have to be as complicated as a scientific experiment on quantum physics. The trick is to develop an understanding of the key metrics at each point in the customer experience lifecycle:

Attraction: Attraction is the first phase of the customer experience lifecycle. This phase can represent the first time a prospective customer hears about your company. It can also represent the immediate recognition of a physical storefront or product as they pass by. Attraction is that first set of impressions that trigger an emotion in the customer. How do you measure your business' attraction effectiveness? Here are just a few performance metrics that you should consider:

• Impressions: Did your marketing efforts reach the intended audience? With this metric, you should measure the total number of times that your brand or ad messages were presented to prospective customers.
  
  
• Action Rate: The rate at which your prospects actually took action in response to your marketing efforts. Often, you can measure this as the ration of action to impressions. For example, a highway billboard may be seen by 10,000 people each day and yields 100 walk-in customers, representing an action rate of 1%. In the on-line world, this metric is often called the click-through-rate (CTR).
• Conversion Rate: The rate ate which your prospects actually reached a desired goal in your sales process. This may be conversion to a lead, or ultimately conversion to a sale.

Interaction: The interaction phase is you and your customers 'time in the box' together. This is the time when the customer browses your products & services, asks questions, selects products, and checks out. It is your best opportunity to make a great impression. Here are a few performance metrics that you should consider:

• Transaction Amount: This metric is the measure of how much revenue that you realized from each customer.
• Transaction Frequency: The rate at which customers bought from you over a given time period. A coffee shop, for example, would strive to see their customers visit them daily.
• Transaction Efficiency: The overall efficiency of the transaction process as measured in process steps, touch points, and overall duration. In simple terms, this is the measure of how easy it is to do business with you.
  

Cultivation: The cultivation phase is time after your customers experience you and your business. It is the time that they reflect on their experience, tell their friends and family about it, and hopefully, come back again and again. Here are a few performance metrics that you should consider:

• Service Rate: The rate at which your entire customer base utilized your customer service capabilities during a given time frame. For example, if 1 out of every 100 customers contacted customer service, your service rate would be 1%. An increasing service rate would indicate that there is some issue with your customer experience process.
• Resolution Closure Rate: The rate at which any customer question, inquiry, or problem is resolved. For example, if 8 out of every 10 new customer service calls is resolved immediately, the closure rate would be 80%.
• Resolution Efficiency: A measure of the overall efficiency of the problem resolution process. The efficiency rate can be measured in terms of steps, touch points, and duration. For example, a customer question that is answered immediately online is very efficient, whereas, a customer issue that requires multiple phone calls, emails, or service calls would receive a low efficiency rating.
  

Step 3: Look at the Big Picture

So far, we’ve discussed the overall customer experience metrics to consider, as well as additional metrics to measure customer attraction, interaction, and cultivation performance attributes. To get a complete picture of your customer experience landscape, you should also consider digging deeper into your customer’s background, needs, and individual behaviors:

• Customers (who): Dig into your customer base by developing a better understanding of their basic demographic and socio-economic attributes. Not all segments of your customer population may react to your customer experience in the same way. For example, a mother visiting your business with kids in tow will have a different experience than your working professional.
• Wants and Needs (why): Develop a deeper understanding of why your customer came to your business in the first place. For businesses with a broad product or service offering, each individual customer want or need can vary widely. For example, each customer visiting a hardware store may have a unique want or need.
• Channels (where): If your business operates in multiple markets or channels, make sure that you establish metrics to measure how well your customer experience performs across multiple locations or channels. For example, your customer experience may be very different from one location to the next.
• Behaviors (how): Each customer may navigate your touch points in a different manner. Make sure that you establish a mechanism for measuring how well your customer experience rates given different customer scenarios.
  

Now that we’ve discussed a variety of customer experience metrics that you should consider for your business, it’s time to put them to work. In order to be able to measure your progress, we recommend that you benchmark your performance metrics before you begin your customer experience project. This will provide you with a baseline from which you can show improvement.

Once you implement any new customer experience processes or capabilities, you should re-measure and compare the results to the original benchmarks. Make this a habit. The practice of continually measuring where you are and where you’ve been will instill the every-important desire for continual improvement.

There is an old saying in business that you get what you measure. I’ve found this saying to hold true in nearly every instance. If you want customer experience improvement; measure it. If you want to find out where your current process is breaking down, measure it. If you want to achieve customer experience domination, measure it!

That wraps up Lesson #7. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Know What to Measure
2. Dig Deeper into the Key Metrics of Customer Experience
3. Look at the Big Picture
   

Congratulations, you’ve now completed our 7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination!

In our 7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination, we covered a lot of ground. We walked through the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experiences strategy. We showed you how to translate those ideas into an action plan and we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business. We discussed some of the methods for improving your own customer experience capabilities and we’ve taught you about the key metrics from measuring the results of your customer experience efforts.

If you followed each step carefully, then you and your business are well on your way to customer experience domination in your respective industry or market.

If you’ve had success by following our program, we’d love to hear about it!

You can get more ideas, methods, and advice to support your customer experience improvement efforts in our Customer Experience Solution Kit. In our comprehensive solution kit, we provide you with everything you need to get started with your customer experience project. The Customer Experience Solution Kit can help you to:

• Identify key customer experience strategies
• Establish a foundation for your customer experience process
• Identify key touch points
• Diagnose overall customer experience capabilities
• Identify key improvement projects
• Determine project scope and approach
• Plan your customer experience project
• Develop a customer experience business case
• Manage your customer experience improvement project
• Establish a methodology for customer experience management

Learn more about our comprehensive Customer Experience Solution Kit now!

Customer Experience Domination #6

Lesson #6: Improve Your Customer Experience

1. In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.
2. In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into a customer experience action plan.
3. In lesson #3, we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business.
4. In lesson #4, we showed you how to develop the customer experience business case.
5. In lesson #5, we taught you the basics of customer experience project management.
6. In this lesson, we’ll describe some of the specific methods that you can use to improve your own customer experience.

Customer experience management can mean different things to different businesses. How you achieve customer experience domination will likely be different than your peers or competitors. Ultimately, you will have to decide the right strategy and methods that fits your business. In this lesson, we’ll describe some of the specific methods that you can use to achieve customer experience domination.

We discuss dozens of customer experience tips and strategies in our Customer Experience Solution Kit. However, for the purposes of this lesson, we will discuss four critical steps that can help you to achieve customer experience domination for your business.

Step 1: Create and Reinforce Your Unique Value Proposition

In today’s economy, there seems to be an oversupply of everything. Regardless of your industry or marketplace, you will undoubtedly face multiple competitors that are offering a similar product or service. Within a few miles of the ClearBrick offices, for example, there are at least 4 coffee shops, 4 convenience stores, two grocery stores, and three elementary schools. Needless to say, we have a lot of options when shopping for any of these products or services. In this environment of ultra competition, being average just won’t cut it. You need to be able to clearly stand out from the crowd.

Improving your customer experience should begin by identifying your unique value proposition; a position in the marketplace that can make you the obvious choice when the customer is seeking your product or service.

“Your customer experience should reinforce
your unique value proposition.”

Don’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of confidence. Many companies may poll their customers and find that overall customer satisfaction is good. The problem, however, is the next time that customer is in the market for your product or service, ‘good’ may not be good enough to keep them from shopping your competitors. Customers may have a positive image of your business, but if your customer experience isn’t clearly better, the competition stands a good chance of stealing them from you sooner or later.

That’s why it’s important to clearly identify the value proposition that makes you unique. Let me give you a simple example. As consumers, we are all very concerned about the ever-increasing price of gasoline. In the area where I work and live, there are at least 4 convenience stores that I could visit to get gas for my car. One store, however, has a unique value proposition that stands out from the rest; they always have the best price. After visiting many of the other stations, I’ve found their stores to be clean and the service to be impeccable. But in a crowded market, a ‘me-too’ approach just isn’t good enough. One convenience store has established themselves as clearly different by establishing a reputation as the price leader in the market, something that has benefited them well; the pumps always seem to be two-cars deep!

I would add, however, that competing on price alone can be a tenuous strategy. The next competitor that makes a better offer will often steal customers away. To keep your customers loyal, it is also important to establish an emotional connection with your customer that is meaningful and long lasting. A strong emotional connection will often result in higher loyalty – even when there are lower-cost alternatives in the market.

“If your value proposition doesn’t clearly explain why you are better than the competition, you have work to do.”

For your business, make sure that you define a value proposition that is clear and unique in your marketplace. This is the time to use words that define the extremes: ‘best’, ‘fastest’, ‘cheapest’, ‘highest quality’, or ‘the-one-and-only’. This is not time to be shy or introverted. Your business should establish a clear and differentiated position in the marketplace and in the consumer’s mind. Your customer experience should then reinforce that value proposition at every step of the customer experience process.

Step 2: Re-engineer the Customer Experience Process

Take a process-centric approach to improving your customer experience. As we covered in earlier lessons, customer experience is a process and it is critical that you take an end-to-end perspective when undertaking any customer experience improvement effort.

By taking a process-centric approach, you will be able to model, simulate, optimize, and measure the performance of your process. You will also be able to take advantage of proven process re-engineering methods to diagnose, refine, and optimize the process for efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are some examples of how you can improve your customer experience process:

1. Model and Simulate the Customer Experience Process: There are two approaches that you should consider for your customer experience re-engineering effort. The first approach entails ‘Clean-Sheet’ re-engineering. This approach implies that you design an entirely new process from the ground up. This approach is the equivalent of starting your process design with a blank sheet of paper.
   
   The second approach involves developing a deep understanding of the current process to understand key issues. Any re-engineering efforts are then focused on those areas could benefit from re-engineering.
   
   Regardless of which approach you take, you will learn a tremendous amount about your customer experience by simply modeling the process from beginning to end. By doing so, you will be able to identify the potential bottlenecks, conflicts, or disconnects that may occur. Knowing where your potential problems lie is an important first step towards improving your customer experience process. For example, a hospital may take basic customer information at a registration desk (touch point) and then take basic vital signs at another station. This process can be re-engineered so that the steps can be combined (by taking some vital signs at check-in) which streamlines the overall customer experience process.
   
   
2. Simplify or Optimize Touch Points: Your customer experience process will undoubtedly be comprised of multiple discrete touch points along the way. While process re-engineering may focus on the flow or hand-offs between touch points, don’t forget to re-evaluate each touch point. For example, a tire repair shop learns that they are losing customers because they don’t clearly list prices or service packages on their web site. By identifying and resolving this deficiency, they could realize immediate results. In short, optimizing or refining the attributes of certain touch points can have dramatic results.
   
   
3. Scenario Management Optimization: While there may be a baseline customer experience process for your business, don’t forget to optimize the process for different customer scenarios that may occur. Once you have a baseline customer experience process defined, it can be helpful to conduct a ‘what-if’ analysis to determine what might happen given different customer scenarios or circumstances. What happens if the customer has to leave in the middle of checking out online? How should you respond if a customer has a unique product customization request? What should your employees do if the customer returns a product? Thinking through these scenarios will make you and your company better prepared for the unique situations that inevitably arise in nearly every customer experience situation.
   
   
4. Eliminate Handoffs: Perhaps the biggest issue facing any customer experience is the dreaded hand-off. Typically, a discrete individual, team, or system performs each touch point. At some point, the customer and their information must be handed-off to the next touch point in the process. Sometimes, this is where customer experience breakdowns occur. For example, a home improvement store may provide a price quote to a customer for new carpeting. But when the customer never returns – the handoff to the ordering and purchasing process has obviously broken down. Think about how to eliminate these handoffs, or establish controls to ensure that the handoffs occur without issue on a consistent basis.
   
   
5. Integrate Channels: In today’s business world, every business must operate across multiple channels in a seamless manner. Often, businesses treat each channel as a discrete entity that can cause problems when customers try to switch channels. For example, a customer may be browsing your web site when they pick up the phone and call the customer service center or drop by your brick-and-mortar store. Make sure that you have optimized your customer experience process to work seamlessly and consistently across your various channels.
   
   
6. Manage the Customer Experience as your Top End-to-End Process: No business process should be left alone to run itself. Customer experience is no different. In order to achieve customer experience domination, you must manage the customer experience as your most important end-to-end process. By defining the customer experience as a core end-to-end process, the customer experience process can be studied, measured, monitored, refined, reengineered, optimized, and improved. By doing so, the customer experience process will become much more disciplined and receive the attention it deserves in your organization.
   

Step 3: Fix your product or service

Your sales representatives always smile. Your account executives are professional and knowledgeable. Your cashiers, tellers, doctors, nurses or consultants are polite and professional. Despite excelling at the basics of good customer service, your customer experience can still fall flat if your product or service doesn’t deliver as promised. On your quest for customer experience domination, don’t overlook your product or service.

Customers are often lured to your company by provocative ad campaigns or word-of-mouth referrals. Their interaction with your employees can be extremely positive. But after the party, the real customer experience test begins; did the product or service deliver on its promise?

• If you sell automobiles with an extended warranty, make sure that your customer experience process will take care of any problems quickly and efficiently.
• If you are a hospital that promises a personal touch, make sure that your customer experience process reinforces that promise by providing a deep level of caring and compassion.
• If you are a consulting firm that promises experienced professionals, make sure that your consulting engagements incorporate best practices or lessons learned throughout the process.
• If you are a home improvement contractor that prides itself on quality workmanship, make sure that your finished product is always perfect.
• If you are a restaurant that prides itself on great food, make sure that you always deliver your food hot and fresh.

When you are improving your customer experience, it can be extremely helpful and insightful to step back and review the product or service that you are providing. This is a time to be brutally honest; does your product or service really live up to the hype? If there is reason for concern, this is the time to take steps to fix your product or service. After all, the finished product or service often creates a lasting impression that extends well beyond the initial customer experience process.

Get it right, and you are well on your way to customer experience domination.

Step 4: Cultivate Your Relationships

Too often businesses will spend a lot of time and effort to acquire a customer, but then ignore them completely once the transaction is complete. Businesses that understand the power of customer cultivation, however, can reap real rewards by keeping their customers coming back from more.

It’s simple math really. The cost of acquiring new customers is often the most costly activity for any business. Let’s say a dentist office spends $10,000 on a new advertising campaign that yields only 100 new customers. That equates to an acquisition cost of $1,000 per customer. Obviously, the office will need to generate at least $1,000 per customer to turn a profit. Let’s say that each visit yields $500 in revenue for this dental practice. It is obviously of paramount importance to keep those customers coming back. At two visits, the dentist breaks even. Any visits beyond that can mean real profit for the practice since no further acquisition costs are required. Simply put, customer cultivation pays.

Unfortunately, not enough businesses practice customer cultivation. I’ve worked with numerous businesses over the years that have never followed up with me after the work is complete or the product was sold. Even though I may have additional wants and needs, I hear nothing from them – leaving me with the impression that they don’t care. As a result, I may shop elsewhere the next time I need that product or service.

Improve your customer experience by adding or enhancing how you cultivate your customer relationships after acquisition. Doing so can mean real results for your business.

You can get more tips and advice on how to improve your customer cultivation capabilities in our strategy booklet titled ‘Cultivate What You Sow.’

That wraps up Lesson #6. You are now one step closer to customer experience domination. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Create and Reinforce your unique value proposition
2. Re-Engineer Your Customer Experience Process
3. Fix Your Product or Service
4. Cultivate Your Relationships

Stay tuned for Lesson #7, where we’ll discuss how to measure your results.

Customer Experience Domination #5

Lesson #5: Managing Your Customer Experience Project

• In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.
• In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into a customer experience action plan.
• In lesson #3, we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business.
• In lesson #4, we showed you how to develop the customer experience business case.
• In this lesson, we’ll teach you the basics of customer experience project management.

As a business professional, you know that getting results requires vision, discipline, and paying attention to details. Improving your customer experience is no different. Realizing the significant benefits associated with customer experience domination requires sound project management fundamentals.

Project management may not be sexy, exciting, or inspirational, but it is a discipline that when executed effectively can make all the difference between success and failure. I’ve seen far too many companies throw millions of dollars down the drain due to the lack of project management discipline. Customer experience projects are no different; to get the results you desire you will need to master the fundamentals of project management.

In this lesson, I will share with you the basic elements of project management discipline. Incorporate these elements into your customer experience project and you will be well on your way to achieving customer experience domination.

Step 1: Create the Project Workplan

The key management tool for any project is the project workplan. The workplan is a comprehensive plan that identifies the activities that will be conducted over the course of the project and identifies the sequence, timing, interdependencies, and individuals responsible for each activity or task. The workplan should represent the scope of work to be conducted as part of the project.

A common tool for defining, modeling and managing the project workplan is the Gantt chart, which is a graphical representation of the tasks, interdependencies, responsible parties, and progress over time. Additional methods include the PERT chart (Program Evolution Review Technique) and the Critical Path Method (CPM), both of which depict the tasks and interdependencies as a network model.

There are numerous commercially available workplan tools that support the various planning methods. We recommend using one of the available tools to create and manage your project workplan. Perhaps the mostly widely used workplan tool is Microsoft Project. However, an initial project workplan can also be created using simple spreadsheet or flowcharting tools, although they will not provide the built-in project reporting and analysis capabilities that come with most tools.

Get started on your workplan by creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) for your project. The work breakdown structure represents a hierarchical structure for the phases, steps, activities and tasks that make up the project. If you’d like more information on project management techniques, you can get additional resources at the Project Management Institute.

How to Avoid the Top 5 Customer Experience Project Pitfalls

Customer Experience differentiation can generate significant benefits for any company. Unfortunately, many companies fall victim to a common set of customer experience pitfalls and fail to capitalize on their customer experience potential. Successful companies overcome these project pitfalls and are far more likely to realize meaningful and lasting results from their customer experience projects. In our report, 'How to Overcome the Top 5 Customer Experience Project Pifalls', we've assembled the top 5 mistakes that companies make when taking on a customer experience project. We clearly explain each potential pitfall and provide pragmatic advice that will help you to overcome these customer experience project pitfalls. Get your copy today and take a step closer to customer experience domination

Once you define the basic phases, steps, and activities of your workplan, you will need to estimate how long each element will take to complete. Estimating an appropriate timeline for your project can be the most vexing part of the process; despite the best intentions and a heavy dose of scientific forecasting, it seems that often the intangibles will ultimately dictate the project timeline. As a result, it’s often best to define the timeline as a range, rather than an absolute number of weeks or months.

There are numerous methods for trying to evaluate how long you should expect your project to take. A top-down estimation makes an ‘educated guess’ as to how long the project should take. The underlying steps, activities, and tasks are then scheduled to fit into the timeline. If the activities won’t fit the timeline either the scope or timeline is modified and the process is repeated. This forecast accuracy of this method can be poor, but the ability to quickly generate a high-level timeline estimate makes it a good method for preliminary planning.

A bottom-up estimation looks at the individual underlying tasks, resources and interdependencies that, when taken together, add-up to the total estimated project duration. The bottoms-up method requires that the vast majority of project attributes are well defined and understood. Developing the bottoms up method can be tedious and often results in a timeline estimate that far exceeds original estimates. This method, however, results in a more detailed and fact based forecast that is more accurate than the top-down method. However, developing the bottom-up model can be time consuming and difficult.

Both methods have their flaws. In fact, some professional project managers have adopted an informal rule to double any original project timeline estimate to account for the various intangible factors that inevitably affect any project. Needless to say, take your timeline estimate for what it is – an estimate.

In any case, your own project scope, approach and team culture will determine the timeline that is right for you. As a general rule you should try to avoid estimating a project timeline longer than 12 months in duration. Projects that span longer than a year are prone to changes in scope, goals, requirements, personnel, and funding. In short, the longer your project horizon, the less likely it is that you will realize your original project goals and objects.

A preferred approach is to break your overall project into digestible phases that can be completed within three to six months. By doing so, you will have interim project successes and realize potential benefits along the way, if appropriate. Each subsequent phase can then be defined with the most current information. As a result, project phases are more likely to be completed on time and on budget, which makes everyone happy.

Step 2: Plan for Change

Improving your customer experience capabilities will undoubtedly require a fair amount of things to change in your company: responsibility changes, process changes, technology changes, and behavioral changes. Getting there won’t happen by accident. It also won’t happen if you wait until after your project is nearly complete to try and force the new capabilities onto your unknowing, and potentially unwilling, employees. That’s where change leadership comes into play.

Change Leadership is a discipline that focuses on managing the impacts that new business capabilities may have on your organization, and doing it in a manner to ensure that the change takes place in an orderly, yet effective, fashion. We use the term ‘change leadership’ rather than ‘change management’ because effective change occurs when someone is leading, not pushing. Leading means getting people to buy-in to the new concept, it means making it personal for each individual, and it means motivating and/or creating incentives for people to adopt the new capabilities or roles.

Change leadership is not about buying t-shirts or coffee mugs with the project name on them. Change leadership is a combination of effective communications, education & training, and organizational alignment. Before you start your project, make sure that you have a comprehensive plan to address each of these important aspects of change leadership:

1. Assess Change Readiness. Conduct an assessment of your company’s culture and appetite for change. Typically, an organization’s change readiness can be assessed through a formal survey that measures the pace of historical change, the stakeholder’s willingness of change, and the rate of adoption of change. These factors are then evaluated to determine the overall complexity of the change management effort and provide an important input into the communication, training, and organizational alignment planning efforts.
2. Develop a Communication Plan: Develop a communication plan that will identify the method, style and timing of how you will communicate key project messages and accomplishments. This will include identifying the different audiences and potentially different communication plans for each audience. For example, how and when you communicate to your employees will be different than how you communicate to your executive sponsors.
3. Develop a Training Plan: Develop an initial plan up-front for how you will formally train and support your employees. This may include a combination of classroom, hands-on, and self-service models depending on the nature of change you are planning.
4. Develop an Organizational Alignment Plan: Develop a plan to make sure that your entire organization is aligned with the project. That includes the top executives and executive sponsors, as well as the individuals on the project team.
   

Step 3: Assemble the Project Team

It seems that you can’t pick up a business book today without finding a common piece of advice: Get good people. Assembling the right people for your project team should follow that sage advice. Getting the right people will improve your project’s efficiency, effectiveness, and overall chances for success.

But before you can assemble your team, you should define the team structure, roles, and responsibilities that will be required for your project. These elements will help to guide you in finding the right person for the right role on your project team.

Project team structures can come in just about any shape or size. The trick is to create a structure that will work most effectively for your company and project.

The roles and associated responsibilities for your project team should be well defined and understood. Although not every role will be required for every project, consider each one carefully to determine how well it fits your situation. We’ve provided a few of the more critical roles & responsibilities to help you to get started:

• Steering Committee: The role of the steering committee is to provide guidance and advice to the project and serve as a conduit for communicating project status to executive stakeholders. Effective steering committees are actively, not passively, involved in the project and often take on the ultimate responsibility of the project’s funding, scope, and results. The steering committee should be comprised of individuals with the authority and responsibility to make critical decisions for the project. Its members should be cross-functional in nature that includes the executive sponsor, subject matter experts (customer relationship management, customer service, account management), functional representatives (finance, operations, human resources, marketing, information technology, research & development), and stakeholder representatives (customer liaisons, field personnel, vendors, employees).
• Executive Sponsor: The role of the executive sponsor is to serve as the primary individual that is responsible for the project’s outcome. This individual should have enough authority in the company to help resolve key issues and influence key stakeholders. The executive sponsor is responsible for organizing and leading the steering committee meetings.
• Stakeholders: The role of the stakeholders is to effectively represent the interests and insights of their respective area of responsibility. Stakeholders should represent the area of the business that is affected by the project. For example, a call center consolidation project should include stakeholders that represent the customer service agents that will be affected. The stakeholders should be involved throughout the project to take them on the journey rather than simply surprising them with the final solution at the end of the project.
• Project Manager: The role of the project manager is to provide the day-to-day direction and management of the project. This includes the day-to-day coordination and collaboration with the project team, as well as the status reporting and communication that is required to keep the steering committee, executive sponsor, and advisors up to date with the project. The project manager is responsible for establishing and managing the project management governance including risk, issue, workplan, team, and business case management procedures.
  

You can get a comprehensive list of customer experience project roles & responsibilities in our Customer Experience Field Guide titled ‘How to Make your Customers Sing!’

As you create your project team structure and begin to assign individuals to specific roles, there are several factors that you should consider:

• Full time versus part time: Consider whether each role requires full or part time participation. In most cases, full time participation is preferred. If full time participation is not feasible or possible, make sure that you plan for the potential productivity drain that may result of only part time participation. Some project managers use a rule of 50% for part time resources; plan for part time resource to be productive for only half of their participation rate. For example, a resource that participates only 60% of their time realizes 30% productivity over the course of the project.
• Cross-functional representation: If your project will affect multiple functions and/or stakeholders in your company, make sure that your project team reflects the cross-functional nature of the project.
• Double-Hatting: In some cases, a single individual may be able to take responsibility for multiple roles. This practice is called double-hatting; an individual wears a different ‘hat’ for each role they are filling. For example, one individual may serve in the role of both training and communication specialist.
• Authority: As you assemble your project team, make sure that the collective team possesses the appropriate level of authority to resolve issues and make important project decisions. A project team without the appropriate authority often gets bogged down while waiting for key decisions to be made by outside parties.
• Co-location: If your project team members come from multiple locations or departments, it is important to create a single, common project team environment where they can work together. Despite advances in e-mail, messaging, and audio and video conferencing, the value of having your team co-located in the same room can be significant; issues are identified and resolved more quickly, project communication is more effective, and key design considerations can be discussed, debated, and resolved more efficiently.
• Collaborate with Vendors: If your project team consists of external consultants or contractors, make sure that you develop a healthy relationship with them. Make sure that their goals and incentives are aligned with the project and that they blend seamlessly into the project team environment. Avoid the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset that can creep into a mixed team environment; a situation that can breed mistrust and other bad behaviors.
• Time Keeping: Keeping track of what each project team member is working on requires an effective time keeping mechanism. In an environment where project hours count against the project budget, effective timekeeping is critical. Establish your project’s clear time keeping policies and procedures up front.
  

Step 4: Assemble the Project Management Plan

Effective project management requires a lot of discipline to track activities, manage budget expenditures, resolve issues, mitigate risks, and keep everyone informed and happy. But don’t let the tools manage you.

Too often, project managers get inundated with the administrative aspects of project management to the point that the project goals get lost in the flurry of paperwork. Don’t over administer. Instead, find a balance that maintains enough discipline for your situation while letting the project team to move forward with the task at hand – delivering the project.

The most effective project managers find a way to balance the administrative nature of project management with the creative energy that is generated by the project team. That balance can be achieved by following some project management best practices:

1. Make the Destination Clear: The destination for any project should be clearly defined, measurable, and easily understood. At project inception, clearly define the factors that prompted you to take the journey, the tangible results you seek to achieve and how you will measure them, and the course and methods that you plan to use to get you there.
2. Be Persistent: Stay focused on the destination and eliminate any unnecessary distractions by being relentless on achieving the project goals, measuring progress against key performance indicators, and resolving issues quickly.
3. Have a Plan: Winging it rarely works – so have a work plan. A work plan is a detailed representation of the overall project approach and should be defined with enough detail to provide any team member with a clear understanding of the project, where things stand, and who’s doing what.
4. Assemble a Great Team: The value of having great people around you in business has been a proven success factor. Assemble a great team of people for your project, get them committed to the project, and empower the team to collaborate to achieve dramatic results.
5. Measure Progress & Results: You get what you measure. So make sure that you measure the important attributes of your project such as cost and benefits, status, and quality.
6. Kill Issues Dead: Project issues can be a pesky thing. Make sure that you have a mechanism in place to identify and resolve issues quickly and completely.
7. Manage the Change: Change won’t happen by itself. Have a plan and pay close attention to who, how and when change will occur.
   

Take these tips into consideration as you assemble the major project management deliverables into a comprehensive Project Management Plan. The Project Management Plan (PMP) will serve as the master plan for your customer experience project.

Step 5: Kick Off Your Project

You are now ready to start your project. In order to do so, you need to make sure that you have your entire team on board with where you are going (goal), how you are going to get there (approach), and why you’re doing it (business case).

Start by having a project kick-off meeting to communicate and discuss all aspects of the projects with all project stakeholders: Executive sponsors, project team members, contractors, vendors, employees, and customers, as appropriate.

The project kick-off not only serves as an important management meeting to mobilize the troops, it also can serve as the initial change leadership communication to set expectations for the journey. Although the project is just beginning, the kick-off meeting can be a critical event that sets the stage and demonstrates management’s commitment to the effort. It’s a time to rally the team, generate excitement, and answer any questions:

1. Paint the Big Picture: When you kick-off your project, you need to provide an overview of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to get there. The Customer Experience 'Made Clear' Process Maps are excellent tools for helping get everyone to understand the business issues being addressed and to explain the expected outcome. The Customer Experience Roadmap serves as a visual representation of the project approach including the sequence and timing of when certain activities will occur. Both documents should be used during the project kick-off, and displayed as a reminder throughout the project of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to get there.
2. Get Dirty: The kick-off meeting should also be about getting into the details. Discuss the specific elements of the project work plan, business case, and status reporting processes. The kick-off meeting should provide the appropriate details to make everyone comfortable with how the project will be managed going forward.
3. Create Excitement: Perhaps most importantly, create some excitement. In many cases, the project team is taking on additional responsibilities over and above their day-to-day jobs. So make it worth their while. Generate an excitement and make sure that everyone is on board. If appropriate, establish team or individual incentives for participating and completing the project so people can translate what’s in it for them.
   

That wraps up Lesson #5. You are now one step closer to customer experience domination. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Create the Project Workplan
2. Plan for Change
3. Assemble the Project Team
4. Assemble the Project Management Plan
5. Kick Off Your Project

Stay tuned for Lesson #6, where we’ll discuss specific examples of how to improve your customer experience.

Customer Experience Domination #4

Lesson #4: Develop the Customer Experience Business Case

• In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.

• In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into an action plan.

• In lesson #3, we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business.

• In this lesson, we’ll show you how to develop that all important customer experience business case.

If you are reading this, then you know that customer experience is important: Good experiences can increase customer loyalty, profitability, and share of the wallet. However, many companies find that quantifying the customer experience business case can be difficult. As a result, their customer experience projects can fail to get funded, be unpredictable, or fail to realize adequate results.

We recommend that you develop a formal customer experience business case that links the project activities to specific value drivers. Then, use the business case as a management tool, not as another pretty document that collects dust on the shelf.

Step 1: Identify Your Value Levers

Before you begin your customer experience project, establish a clear path for how you plan to improve your customer value. Then, align all related stakeholders and other projects to achieving this common goal. By doing so, you can get your organization moving in the same direction.

A clear understanding of customer value can be a powerful motivator and can spur people to contribute to the goal – even if it may not be in their own best short-term interest. In the end, aligning your customer experience project to tangible customer value metrics can help you find your way to customer experience domination.

Finding your customer value involves identifying which direction that you want to take and what results you want to achieve. Sometimes choosing the right direction can be difficult. The tool that we’ve found to be very helpful in connecting the dots between customer experience strategies and business returns is the ClearBrick Customer Value Compass. This tool provides a clear representation of the customer centric revenue-generating and cost-reduction levers that can contribute to total business returns.

Although we’ll cover the basics here, you can get the complete step-by-step explanation of ClearBrick Customer Value Compass in our report called ‘How to Find Your Customer Value’, which you can get here.

Here’s how the value compass can help you to identify your customer value levers. At the center of any customer experience project should be total returns, which represents the net benefit that is realized by your customer experience project. How you achieve those results is accomplished by pulling (or pushing) on one or more of your customer value levers.

Value levers can represent multiple dimension of business value, but for simplicity purposes we have defined two categories of value levers; revenue-generating levers, and cost-reduction levers. For this lesson, we’ll focus on the revenue-generating levers.

For example, there are three major customer value levers that can influence top-line revenue in your business:

1. Increase DEPTH of Relationships: Increasing the depth of your customer relationships equates to increasing your share of the customer’s wallet. That means that the customer will visit you more often, avoid competitive offers, and go out of their way to work with your company. Establishing deeper relationships with your company can be accomplished by improving customer loyalty and by working more closely with your customer to better serve their needs.
2. Increase BREADTH of Relationships: Increasing the breadth of the customer relationship means expanding your customer base or expanding the portfolio of products or services that you sell to your current customers.
3. Increase DURATION of Relationships: Increasing the duration of the customer relationship equates to retaining your existing customers for a longer period of time, resulting in an increase of total transactions over the lifetime of the customer relationship. This can be accomplished by either enhancing customer care or improving overall retention factors.

Clearly identifying your customer value levers and choosing which ones to target is an important step for any customer experience project. Too often, companies miss the mark with their customer experience projects because their customer value goals aren’t clearly defined, well understood, or aligned with other business initiatives. You can avoid this common pitfall by clearly identifying the value levers that will form the foundation of your customer experience project.

Identify which value drivers make the most sense for your business and take one step closer to customer experience domination.

Step 2: Assemble the Business Case

You should now begin to assemble your customer experience business case. The business case is a cash flow model that reflects the project costs and benefits over time. The business case is often used as a litmus test to determine if the project’s return on investment (ROI) is acceptable in light of the potential risks.

The business case should include both tangible and intangible costs and benefits to be achieved by the project. Remember the value levers that we identified in step 1 – they will be used to create the foundation of your business case.

Often, the more details that you can incorporate into the business case, the more accurate the model will be. Value levers can get you started. Value levers can be defined in more detail by outlining the value ‘drivers’ that influence each lever. Value drivers can also be defined in more detail by identifying value activities, and so on, until you get to the lowest level metric that contributes to customer value. Also consider creating business case scenarios such as best case, expected case, and worst case to model potential variances in both cost and benefit factors.

To learn more, get our complete report titled ‘How to Build Your Customer Experience Business Case' now.

As you develop your business case, take into consideration the core factors that will impact the overall value potential for your project:

• Time & Approach: Your project approach will often determine the pace at which resources and funding are consumed. For example, a more aggressive approach may require more resources and funding.
• Resources: Executing projects require resources to get the job done. The primary and most critical resource is often people, but resources may also include the utilization and availability of property, equipment, and systems. Often, but not always, the more resources deployed on the project, the quicker that it can be completed. More resources, however, also equates to more funding.
• Funding: Funding is a key to the other factors of the business case. Funding can determine how many resources can be utilized on the project.

Establishing your business case typically means finding an acceptable balance between time, resources, funding, and scope. It is important to identify up front which of these factors can be flexed, if necessary, once the project is underway. For example, a project that has a hard and fixed timeline must be willing to flex funding and resources to get the job done. Conversely, a project with fixed funding will most likely need to flex the timeline and resources to fit within the budget.

The business case should identify the specific costs and benefits associated with your customer experience project. All estimated costs and benefits should be updated with actual amounts once they are realized. As such, the business case should become a living model that is updated throughout the project.

The purpose of the business case is to weigh the project costs against the anticipated project benefits. Ideally, you want the cumulative project benefits to exceed the costs. Obviously, your goal should be to deliver a profitable project.

A simple and proven method for evaluating the value of your project is to model the cost and benefit cash flows over time. Then calculate the net present value of the net cash flows to determine the Net Present Value (NPV). A higher NPV represents a more profitable project. If the NPV is close to zero, or negative, then you should go back to step 1 to identify additional value levers that could potentially yield better benefits.

Step 3: Use the Business Case as a Management Tool

Many companies realize that the business case is a critical tool to help identify, model, and measure the results of any project. However, many companies fall into a fatal trap; they develop the business case only for project approval – then set it on the shelf to collect dust during the project. Along the way, they may make management decisions that are inconsistent with the business case – and the results are either not measured, or vary significantly from what was planned.

ClearBrick recommends that companies use the business case as a management tool. Keep the business case up to date and review the status of costs and benefits at every project status meeting. By doing so, you can review and gauge your progress against the business case and make the proper adjustments along the way. After all, achieving the results of your business case is a clear way to measure whether or not you’ve reached your goal.

Using the business case as a management tool should be a common practice for all customer experience projects. Companies can use the business case as a management tool by following a few simple tips:

• Align your stakeholders to a common measurable goal. Without a common goal, seemingly unrelated efforts can dilute the potential results of your efforts. Make sure that everyone is aligned to achieving the same goal.
• Modify or expand on the customer value drivers provided. Use the list of customer value drivers provided in the Customer Value Compass to get started. Then expand or customize them to fit your own company’s unique needs and opportunities.
• Create a detailed business case that incorporates tangible customer value benefits. Use the customer value drivers as the foundation of a detailed business case, then measure progress against your business case as a key management tool.

As simple as it sounds, too often customer experience projects miss the mark on improving customer value. If customer value goals either aren’t clearly defined, well understood, or aligned with other business initiatives, customer experience projects can get off track and fail to fully realize their intended results. Improve your results by establishing a clear and common understanding of how you plan to improve your customer value.

That wraps up Lesson #4. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Identify Your Value Levers
2. Assemble the Business Case
3. Use the Business Case as a Management Tool

Stay tuned for Lesson #5, where we’ll cover the basics of effective customer experience project management.

Customer Experience Domination #3

Lesson #3: Identify Customer Experience Opportunities

In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.

In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into an action plan.

In this lesson, we’ll show you how to look for specific customer experience opportunities in your business. After all, it’s hard to fix it if you don’t know what’s broken.

Step 1: Give Your Customers Some Personality

Whether you’ve just started your company or have been in business for a while, you know that establishing and maintaining a clear value proposition is critical. When your company launched its products and services, there was probably a very clear value proposition that matched the product or service with a specific customer want or need.

Unfortunately, things can change; competing products are introduced, competitors reposition, and customer perceptions shift. Over time, these changes can blur your company’s value proposition to the point that there is no clear value proposition at all. If you ignore these changes, you can find yourself chasing the competitor’s tail or wondering why your sales are flat or declining.

Staying abreast of the ever-changing conditions of the market requires continuous exploration. That means creating a capability to identify and anticipate emerging customer needs more accurately and more quickly than your competitors. Your company will benefit by having more profitable products and services. Your customers will love you for anticipating their wants and needs and being a market leader.

The best way to identify potential opportunities is to develop a more meaningful definition of your ideal customer. A proven and effective way of doing this is to create a detailed set of customer profiles for your business.

Customer profiling can be a powerful tool to help your company better understand and anticipate the needs, actions and preferences of your target customers. This begins by creating a customer profile with enough details to provide your company with the information and insight necessary to become more empathetic with what your customer really wants. Customer profiling is a method for putting a personal touch to major customer segments that you are targeting.

An effective customer profile contains several elements: a) key customer demographic attributes, b) socio-economic attributes, and c) a description of the customer’s perceptions and behaviors. It is also useful to name each profile and attach a representative image, as appropriate, to give each profile a more personal identity. These profiles can then be used to tailor specific products, services, and marketing messages for the unique needs of each profile.

Each customer profile should represent a unique customer dynamic. Evaluate how well your products or services deliver on your brand promise and fulfill their want or need. This is the time to be honest; any gaps that you identify are important to close.
Developing your own customer profiles doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Here’s what I recommend if you are new to customer segmentation:

1. Assemble a master list of customers. Begin by assembling a master list of customers from the appropriate sources in your company. If possible, include transaction or revenue information by customer.
2. Sort your customers into logical groups. Sort your customers into discrete groups based on logical attributes for your business. To keep it manageable, seek to identify 3-5 major groups that represent the majority of your target customer base. For example, you may group by sex, age group, income level, ethnicity, and/or basic needs.
3. Give your segments a personality. For each discrete group, assign a name and short description that describes their typical perceptions and behaviors. This will give each segment a unique personality that will help you to focus specific product & service attributes and marketing messages.

By identifying key segments and assigning a more personal profile to each one, the segments begin to take on their own personality. For example, Segment A may consist of elderly women in the middle income bracket who have an average of 3.5 grandchildren. Not very personal is it? Now, let’s give this segment a personality. We’ll call her Elsie, and describe her as a conservative grandmother who is on a fixed budget but is willing to spend money on unique toys and gifts for her grandchildren.

Now you can begin to incorporate these personalities into your business. How well does your marketing material speak to Elsie? Are your products and services tailored to Elsie? What else can you do to improve Elsie’s customer experience? What is the best channel and medium to stay in contact with Elsie? Answering these questions for each discrete customer profile can be a powerful tool for identifying customer experience improvement opportunities.

Step 2: Identify Where It Hurts

In the software industry, a defect or problem in the software is called a ‘bug’. The quality of any software solution is often judged by the total number of ‘bugs’ encountered by the customer.

The same is true for customer experience quality. Customer experience is adversely affected when things don’t go as planned; when the process doesn’t work as planned, customers get frustrated, confused, or simply give up altogether.

The answer: Apply six sigma principles to your customer experience process.

What is a Six Sigma Customer Experience? Six Sigma is a measure of quality that represents near perfection. Statistically speaking, it means that your customer experience process encounters no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Practically speaking, it means that your customer experience works (nearly) perfectly. Things just work, problems rarely happen, and your customers are very, very happy.

Let’s face it: All too often, we have bad customer experiences. With touch points scattered across channels, new or untrained employees, and geographic separation, too many things can go horribly wrong. It doesn’t have to be that way. The customer experience is a process, so treat it like one.

Great customer experiences don’t happen by accident. Make it intentional. Model it. Redesign it. Optimize it. Measure it. Minimize unexpected variations. Continually improve its quality. By taking a process-centric approach to customer experience, you can be in control of your customer experience process and eliminate the root cause of problems.

You can begin to identify your own customer experience issues and opportunities by clearly defining and analyzing the touch points and scenarios that make up your customer experience:

1. For each stage in the customer experience process, identify the distinct customer facing events or interactions that occur with your customers. Each descrete point of encounter is a touch point.
2. Describe each touch point in detail (who, what, how, where, when).
3. Identify the key stakeholders that may participate in each touch point.
4. Define the touch point characteristics including attributes such as quality, relevance, timeliness, performance, and convenience.
5. Analyze the touch point portfolio to evaluate quality, complexity, and performance. Do certain touch points meet their objective better than others? Which touch points contribute, or detract, from the customer experience?
6. Review or research the target customer group’s buying behaviors, criteria and touch point navigation preferences. Do different customer segments prefer to navigate your touch points differently? Think about the profiles that we developed in Step 1 of this lesson.
7. Define each distinct touch point path as a unique scenario. Does each scenario pose different challenges for your company?
8. Describe the scenario’s characteristics including attributes such as efficiency, convenience, timeliness, consistency, transitions, and simplicity. Are there points in the scenario that break down or are bottlenecks?

Discretely defining your customer touch points and customer scenarios will enable you to take an important step towards becoming more disciplined in customer experience management. Think about which touch points are causing problems; which ones can be eliminated to streamline the process; and which ones are duplicated across multiple locations. Consider which scenarios are preferred most by you customers; and which scenarios often result in lower customer satisfaction. By analyzing the various customer touch points and scenarios, you should begin to identify a laundry list of potential improvement opportunities.

Take what you’ve learned about your customer experience process and begin to think like an exterminator: eliminate the bugs.

Step 3: Listen to Your Customers

So far, what we’ve covered has been somewhat academic. We’ve covered the blocking and tackling aspects of customer experience management. But don’t underestimate the voice of your customer. Make sure that you reach out to your customers and listen to what they have to say. Ideally, getting customer feedback should be a habit, not just a one-time affair. Here a just a few of the proven methods for collecting customer feedback:

1. Focus Groups
2. Direct Mail Surveys
3. Web-Based Dialog (blogs, webinars, emails)
4. Interactive Surveys (in person interviews with the customer)
5. Customer observation
6. Telephone Surveys

What should you ask them? There are literally hundreds of resources available to help you design and conduct customer satisfaction surveys.
Here is a short list of some tried and true questions for your customers:

1. How did you hear about us? (Identify which attraction method worked)
2. How long have you been a customer? (Indicates customer longevity and loyalty)
3. What was the best thing about your customer experience? (Identify the good)
4. What was the worst thing about your customer experience? (Identify the bad)
5. Would you shop with us again? (Gauge ongoing loyalty)
6. Would you recommend us to other people? (Determine degree of advocacy)
7. Why did you choose us over the competition? (Identify your differentiation)
8. How well did the product/service meet your needs? (Determine product/service quality)
9. What one thing should we do differently? (Identify opportunities for improvement)
10. Do you get the value that you expected? (Determine if expectations were met or exceeded)

The feedback that you receive from your customers is invaluable. Incorporate what you learn from your customers into your customer experience into your list of improvement opportunities.

By now, you should have a list of improvement areas from a) your identification of customer profile gaps, b) your assessment of touch points and scenarios, and c) customer feedback.

That wraps up Lesson #3. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Give Your Customers Some Personality
2. Identify Where It Hurts
3. Listen To Your Customers

Stay tuned for Lesson #4, where we will help you to develop that all important customer experience business case.

Customer Experience Domination #2

Lesson #2: Define the Customer Experience Vision

In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results. In this lesson, we’ll begin to translate those ideas into action. At the end of the day, we all know that actions speak louder than words. In order to get results, you must put your ideas into action.

As business professionals, most of us are good at coming up with new ideas. The problem, however, is that an idea is just a dream, a wishful thought, or a passing fancy without putting it into action. Even a mediocre strategy can generate real results if it is implemented properly. A great strategy that sits on the shelf, however, will undoubtedly do nothing more than collect dust and die. That is why we turn our attention now to getting the ball rolling.

In this lesson, we cover the basics of defining the customer experience vision; a vision that is specific, measurable, and actionable. We begin by defining a specific and common goal. Then, we discuss how to define the specific key metrics that will help you measure the results. And finally, we discuss how to get your executive team on board to support the initiative going forward.

Step 1: Develop a Common Customer Experience Goal

We’ll begin by defining a common goal for your customer experience project. At ClearBrick, our approach to customer experience is process-centric. We believe that the underlying goal of any customer experience initiative should be to optimize your overall customer experience process; not just one element or touch point, but the entire end-to-end process. The specific details of what that means for your business may depend on your industry or specific marketplace. But make no mistake, establishing a common goal for your project is critical.

Let me explain; even if you’re not a fan of international soccer, you’ve probably heard the emphatic cry from the Univision sports announcer when a football club scores a ‘gooooooaaaaaal.’ You see, setting and achieving goals (pun intended) is just plain exciting. Everyone gets into it. Everyone is focused on the goal and contributes in any way possible to achieve it.

That’s the power of a good goal. It can get your organization focused and moving in the right direction. More importantly, it can get your organization moving in the same direction. A clear goal can be a powerful motivator that gets people to contribute to the goal – even if it may not be in their own best short-term interest. Being part of a group or organization that has a clear goal can also contribute to employee satisfaction – because they feel like a member of a team that is out to achieve great things. Nobody wants to let his or her teammates down. Ultimately, achieving the goal is celebrated and rewarded, it re-enforces good behavior, and provides the team with a sense of accomplishment.

“You can’t expect your business to get on board unless you can tell them where you are going.”
There have been countless business discussions and books on goal setting. Let’s review a few of the basics of good goal setting:

1. Goals need to be measurable: A broad or generic goal just won’t rally the troops. Make your goal something that is measurable or tangible. For example, the goal of ‘Improving the Customer Experience’ is not a measurable goal. Whereas, increasing your customer retention rates by 10% or more is measurable.
2. Goals should make them stretch: Goals should be inspirational. They should challenge your team and they should perceive it as worth the effort. Simply put, cutting office supply expenses by 5% is not inspiring. Whereas, providing the best value in the industry is inspirational because it represents a goal to be the undisputed leader. That is something the team can rally around – no matter how large the gap.
3. Goals should be achievable: Goals should also be achievable. A stretch goal that is not perceived to be achievable by the team won’t be adopted wholly. Too many people may have the tendency to give up
4. Goals should clearly connect the dots: Goals should clearly identify the cause and effect relationships necessary to achieve the goal. For example, delivering the fastest service in the industry may mean streamlining the order entry, order fulfillment, and order delivery processes. Go ahead and connect the dots. Don’t assume that the team will figure it out.
   

For your customer experience project, make sure that you establish a clear goal. Communicate and test the goal with your team. Make sure that the goal is in line with your overall corporate strategy and align your entire organization to the goal. It’s also ok to set a generic goal up front, as long as you define it in more detailed and measurable terms once the initial analysis and business case are complete.

Goal setting can be an important part of any business culture. There is a distinct difference, however, between good and bad goals. A bad goal is one that is vague, unclear, or not easily measured. A good goal follows the SMART principle; they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

Getting results with your customer experience project will rely heavily on your ability to set SMART goals for your business and your team. Setting SMART goals begins with focusing on the right key metric for your business.

Step 2: Focus on the Key Metric

Regardless of your business industry or marketplace, success or failure is defined by your results. Understandably, results can mean a lot of different things to different organizations, but often every business relies on a very short list of key metrics that define success or failure.

In my experience, I’ve found that many large organizations jump to the seemingly obvious conclusion that any customer experience project must measure customer satisfaction, advocacy, and/or loyalty. Those metrics are the ultimate measure of the success of your customer experience project. However, these metrics won’t reveal what aspects of the customer experience contribute or detract from customer satisfaction. To truly understand how to improve customer satisfaction, you will need to focus on a more telling metric:

Focus on your conversion rates.

Let me explain; for each phase of the customer experience lifecycle, we may deal with slightly different metrics. During the Customer Attraction phase, we may focus on the click-through-rate (CTR) of our on-line ads, the response rate of a direct marketing campaign, or the amount of exposure provided by one of our free articles. Those are all interesting metrics and may very well provide us with some insights where our customer experience may be breaking down. Perhaps the ad doesn’t resonate with our target customers, or the direct marketing campaign didn’t effectively fulfill the customer’s needs. Those are important aspects to consider but they are not the most important. The most important metric should be conversion.

In lesson #1 we taught you how to define the customer experience lifecycle as an end-to-end process. The end-to-end process will demonstrate how the customer traverses various touch points in your business. Each transition from touch point to touch point represents the potential for conversion – or defection. Successfully moving your customers from one touch point to the next is called conversion.

“You get what you measure.”

You may measure conversion at a number of different points in the customer lifecycle. From a pay-per-click standpoint, measure conversion as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (or click-through-rate). Once customers visit your landing page, then you must measure the rate at which they convert into a product purchase or download. If a customer downloads a free product, you want to measure the rate that you can convert them into a paying customer.

For example, you can measure the conversion rate as the number of product purchases (free or for a fee) divided by the number of total visitors for a given time frame. For example, if 2,000 people visit your site in a given month and 100 people obtained one of your products, then you achieved a conversion rate of 5%. As you might expect, the conversion rate will differ between free products and for-fee products.

Focusing on this key metric provides you with several benefits. First, it provides you with a benchmark from which you can improve. In our example, improving on a 5% conversion rate is an easy metric to focus on. Secondly, you can begin to identify the touch points of your customer experience process that may be contributing, or detracting, from this key metric. For example, you may determine that you do fine in getting customers to your web site, but if they flee at a high rate (also called the bounce rate), then you know that you are missing the mark with some aspect of the landing page. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you can calculate the per-customer acquisition cost and customer profitability. For example, in our example, only 10 out of every 2,000 visitors actually bought a product. If acquiring those 2,000 visitors cost us $1,000, then the average sale per customer must be $100 just to cover the acquisition costs. We may determine that we’re spending money to acquire the wrong customers; customers that aren’t serious buyers of our products and services.

Ultimately, focusing on customer conversion can provide a very real and tangible measure of your customer experience process efficiency and effectiveness. Streamlining your customer experience process to optimize customer conversion will directly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you can attract the right customers and deliver what they want and need in an efficient manner, customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics will soar.

Step 3: Get Executive Alignment

You can’t fix your customer experience in a vacuum. The customer experience process, by nature, will span nearly every department and function in your organization. To achieve meaningful and lasting results, it is paramount that you get the executive team, and your project team, on board and aligned with the customer experience vision. Without executive alignment, your customer experience efforts will lack the support, funding, and resources necessary to achieve meaningful results.

“Get the head moving in the right direction - and the body will follow.”

Getting executive alignment doesn’t have to be difficult. We’ve found that there are five key ingredients that can help to get your executives on board, many of which we covered in Lesson #1:

1. Identify and overcome the key customer experience pitfalls: Be prepared for your executive pitch by identifying and understanding how to overcome some of the most common customer experience project pitfalls.
2. Develop a common understanding of the customer experience process: Define a process model that demonstrates in clear terms what customer experience means to your company.
3. Identify a compelling strategy: Identify and define a compelling strategy and vision. When done right, a provocative strategy can sell itself.
4. Identify compelling results: Numbers can speak louder than words. Do the math to demonstrate the value of delivering a better customer experience.
5. Focus on key metrics: As we discussed earlier in this lesson, dig down to understand how conversion rates can tell the story of what people like, or dislike, about your customer experience process.
   

By using these five key ingredients, you should now have the attention of your executive team. Ideally, you should seek to identify an executive sponsor for your customer experience project; an individual that posesses the authority and responsibility to navigate the intricacies of any cross-functional project. The executive sponsor will serve as the primary customer experience advocate. Getting the commitment of the executive team is critical due to the nature and makeup of a typical customer experience project.

You can kick start the executive alignment process by getting the Customer Experience 101 on-demand seminar here.

Don’t take executive alignment for granted. This is not a one-time exercise. Rather, executive alignment requires a real and ongoing commitment on the part of executive and customer experience leaders to continually discuss, adapt, and reiterate their support throughout the project lifecycle. As with any project, issues will undoubtedly arise. Maintaining strong executive alignment and support is the only way to effectively navigate those issues and keep your customer experience efforts on track.

That wraps up Lesson #2. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Develop a Common Customer Experience Goal
2. Focus on the Key Metric
3. Get Executive Alignment (Value Proposition)
   

Stay tuned for Lesson #3, when we will dive into the details of how to identify your customer experience areas of opportunity.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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:

1. Five Customer Strategies That Can Work For Your Business (Free)
2. Make Your Customer Sing! Tips for Improving Your Customer Experience
3. Get Attractive: Tips for Improving Your Customer Attraction Capabilities
4. Get in Touch: Tips for Improving Your Customer Interaction Capabilities
5. Cultivate What You Sow: Tips for Improving Your Customer Cultivation Capabilities

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”