Inspire the Creation of Great Experiences

13 May, 2012 in Culture, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Leadership, Quotes by

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come her to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Welcome to Apple.

This is written on the wall at Apple. This is how Apple inspires its employee to dream and bring their very best to work everyday. To take chance – calculated risks – to do something wonderful.

If you want your company to create great experiences for your customers then takes a page from Apple and inspire.

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Customer Experience is a Journey – Not a Destination

6 May, 2012 in Brand, Culture, Customer Experience by

Too few companies are even managing their customer experiences. Customers are having experiences with their brand, message, and business – but they are not listening.

A few companies understand the importance of purposely determining, developing and delivering a great experience for their customers. They also understand that this is a continuous process that requires dedication.

Markets change, technology change and peoples’ needs and desires change. To consistently deliver a great experience for your customers, you need to understand your changing market, technology and customers’ desires. You need to continuously monitor your market and technology and consistently communicate with your customers about what they like and don’t like and what they want next.

Companies that consistently deliver a great customer experience know this is a journey and not a destination.

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Great Leaders have a Fundamentally Different Understanding of the Company Experience

29 Apr, 2012 in Culture, Leadership by

On April 23, 2012, Geoffrey James posted 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses. In this post, Geoff shares that the best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. Geoff interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. In this post, Geoff shares that the “best of the best” tend to share the following eight core beliefs:

1. Business is an ecosystem – see business as a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. Create teams that adapt easily to new markets and can quickly form partnerships with customers, other companies … and even competitors.

2. A company is a community – see your company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. Inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community–and company–at large.

3. Management is service – set a general direction and then commit yourself to obtaining the resources that their employees need to get the job done. Push decision making downward, allowing teams form their own rules and intervening only in emergencies.

4. My employees are my peers – treat every employee as if he or she were the most important person in the firm. Excellence is expected everywhere, from the loading dock to the boardroom. As a result, employees at all levels take charge of their own destinies.

5. Motivation comes from vision – inspire people to see a better future and how they’ll be a part of it.  As a result, employees work harder because they believe in the organization’s goals, truly enjoy what they’re doing and (of course) know they’ll share in the rewards.

6. Change equals growth – see change as an inevitable part of life. Don’t value change for its own sake but know that success is only possible if employees and organization embrace new ideas and new ways of doing business.

7. Technology offers empowerment – see technology as a way to free human beings to be creative and to build better relationships. Adapt your back-office systems to the tools, like smartphones and tablets, that people actually want to use.

8. Work should be fun – see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.

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Five Design Principles to Make a Great Customer Experience from Citrix

22 Apr, 2012 in Brand, Customer Experience, Emotional Design by

Citrix Design team put out this great video, Why Design Matters to Me – Using Design to Make a Difference, where they explain five design principles to craft the total experience that your customer has with your company:

Make it Simple by reducing the amount of information that people have to deal with and create content that is clear, meaningful and jargon free.

Focus on Human Goals by understanding what your customers’ need and want – their primary goal, preference and biases.

Inspire Delight – make it fun and create personal touches that make it memorable.

Exhibit Craftsmanship with exceptional quality in every detail with skill and artistry.

Deliver Unique Value by understanding what makes your company better and different and ensures that it is reflected in the experiences you design.

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From Customer to User Experience

15 Apr, 2012 in Customer Experience by

When our experience design team is creating solutions – and that is exactly what great experience designs do – we ask ourselves three questions:

  • What market problem are we solving?
  • What customer pain are we relieving?
  • What user goal are we achieving?

It all starts with the marketplace. What is going on in the market that you are looking at? What does this market need to be successful and advance itself? What is the problem that is in need of the solution that you are going to provide? Step back and get to know your market in context of all markets then look inside the market and across it. In many cases the solution that you will bring to this market already exist – maybe in a different form – in another market.

Markets are made up of customers. Understand your customers in context of the market. As part of your solution, what is the customer pain that you are relieving? You need to know your target audience – you need to define them and differentiate them from the other customer profile in this marketplace. Break down your understanding of your target customers’ business goals and workflows to diagnose the pain that your prescription will relieve.

Customers are made up of end-users. I hate the term “user” by the way – these are people who have objectives and goals that they need met. Get a deep understanding of the activities that these people are doing, break down the tasks and design efficient, effective and delightful experiences for them.

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A Modest Increase in Customer Experience can Result in Significant Gains

8 Apr, 2012 in Analytics, Customer Experience by

“Customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend.”

- The Temkin Group  ROI of Customer Experience report

This March of 2012 report provides analysis of 10,000 US consumers and 3,000 UK consumers, identifying the financial benefit of improving customer experience. According to the report, a modest increase in customer experience can result in a gain over three years of up to $382 million for US companies and up to £263 million for UK firms.

Companies that want to see these gains need to start by determine the business impact that customer experience has on their specific business.

“Willingness to buy more” is an indicator of customer satisfaction and “reluctance to switch” is an indicator of loyalty. But it is the “likelihood to recommend” that indicates a true advocate for your business.

Only by creating a customer experience strategy with a program embed with metrics and measurments can a business achieve a great customer experience.

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How Do You Make Your Employees Customer-Centric?

1 Apr, 2012 in Customer Experience by

If you want a customer-centric company then you need to create a customer-centric culture. You need to create an environment in which your employees are empowered to be customer advocates – where they know they can make crucial customer decisions on their own that the company will support.

This culture does not happen by chance. Companies have to build this trust with their employees. Companies have to establish a high level of employee satisfaction, loyalty, and company advocacy to energize the employees to be an engaging customer advocate.

How do you know if your company has created an environment for customer centricity? Ask them. According to  Priceless Professional Development, through research, Gallup determined that high performance teams and the strength of the workplace can be assessed with these twelve questions:

The 12 Best Employee Engagement Survey Questions

  1. Do I know what is expected of me from work?
  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel important?
  9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do I have a best friend at work?
  11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
  12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

This Simple 7-Point Employee Engagement Survey ‘Moving Fast and Strong’ Plan

  1. Ask your employees to rank the 12 questions, 1 – 5, with 5 being Strongly Agree.
  2. Rank employee responses. Make the two lowest scored answers your top priorities.
  3. Enroll a cross-section of employees and managers to develop an action plan.
  4. Implement the action plan.
  5. Survey your employees’ responses to the twelve questions each year.
  6. Review the results and go back to step 2.
  7. Keep working until you get ‘Strongly Agree’ answers to all twelve questions.

 

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Customer Experience is Critical to the Long Term Success of Business Today

25 Mar, 2012 in Books, Customer Experience by

“Creating an exceptional customer experience is critical to the long term success of business today. The Customer Experience Revolution contains a treasure trove of vignettes highlighting companies that really understand what it takes to improve customer relationships via a stellar experience. Gems and nuggets abound for the savvy business that wants to focus on their customers.”

—Becky Carroll, Author of The Hidden Power of Your Customers and President and Founder, Petra Consulting Group

The experiences you create for your customers can either draw them towards your products and services or away from it. An exceptional customer experience builds relationships that give your brand a long-term value. A consistently great customer experience establishes a unique trust with your audience.

Smart companies are building relationships with their customers to create long-term value. They are developing endur­ing connections to secure their brand and trust. In The Customer Experience Revolution, Gary Tucker, Senior Vice President at J.D. Power and Associates, says that in terms of brand and developing trust, “customer experience, by definition, is a sustainable advantage.”

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A Superior Customer Experience beats the Vortex of Commoditization

18 Mar, 2012 in Books, Customer Experience by

“Across industries we’re approaching the ‘Vortex,’ a feature horizon whereby winning customers and growing business is no longer a function of new features but something else entirely. Filled with accessible and thought-provoking examples, The Customer Experience Revolution demonstrates how organizations both large and small must engage with their customers to prevent commoditization and sustain a healthy bottom line.”

—Darryl Kuhn, Chief Technology Officer, Skinit

The Vortex is the strong current in a market that demands that competitors add more features and capabili­ties while profit margins shrink. The Vortex is efficient at making commodities of anything it can pull in. The strong current of the Vortex demands that changes in products or services occur more often and in smaller time periods. The distinctions between competitors’ prod­ucts in the minds of customers are rapidly erased along with the participating com­panies’ profitability. Frequently, compa­nies see no other way to compete and pre­serve value than to out-feature the com­petition. They may call it an “upgrade,” but often the profits from the product go everywhere except up.

Developing and delivering a superior customer experience is a key way for a company to stay out of the Vortex. In their 1999 book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore predicted the importance of customer experience to today’s economy:

“In an age of commoditization where most products and services are undifferentiated, consumers shift their focus from prod­uct and service attributes to the experience obtained while using the product or service. The more relevant and memorable the experience, the higher the value, the higher the worth, the higher the price that can be charged.”

When a product becomes commoditized, re-thinking the customer experience with the product will be far more valuable for retaining and building new customers than adding expensive new features.

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Customer Experience Leaders are raising the bar for Everyone

11 Mar, 2012 in Uncategorized by

“Amazon fundamentally changed the way that people interact and expect to interact with all online providers… When you have a company that sets the new bar on expectations, it sets the bar for every company.”

- Gina Pingitore, J.D. Power’s Chief Research Officer, The Customer Experience Revolution

Consumers are no longer comparing companies by markets. They are measuring their experiences across industries and markets and they are asking themselves “Why can’t the payment device at the grocery store be as easy to use as my iPhone” or “Why is it easier to order a book on Amazon.com then picking up my prescription at the pharmacy?”

Leading Experience Makers are not just changing lives is their markets but creating experiences that are becoming the measure for everyone else – regardless of marketplace.

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