1

 

2

Introduction

This ebook is aimed at guiding leaders who are embarking upon a Customer

Experience transformation. For the true evangelists, it is a lonely world and a

bumpy road and sometimes one gets discourages and just damn tired of the

critics and the opposition.

This book is of you to guide you and lead you in the questions that you

should be asking yourself and the organisation.

This is a summary of the stones that you should not leave unturned.

3

Why customer experience transformation will grow your business?

Many businesses have forgotten why they exist. As Simon Sinek so eloquently

expresses, we all know what we do and how we do it but we don’t nearly

question enough why we do things.

Your business exists for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to

solve some problem in a customers life.

The key to success and transformation is first really understanding what

problems you solve and then aligning your whole team to really understand.

Leadership Questions to ponder on:

1. What problems do I solve for my customers?

2. Are those problems still relevant and worth solving?

3. Are there other unclaimed territory around the problem that I

could claim for my business, to solve a bigger set of problems for

my customer?

4

Ranjay Gulati says “Are well solving or are we selling”?

5

How customer centered inno-vation will drive differentiation

Anyone can copy your product or your store or your decor or your ideas.

What is much more difficult to copy is a richly embroidered experience. When

you have designed an experience and paid attention to a thousand details in

that experience, it is incredibly difficult to copy that.

The thing about innovation is

- It is not expensive

- Anyone can do it

- It can form the basis of a unifying team effort

Customers do not just compare you with companies in your category of ser-

vice, but with any brand experience they have.

If they spend time on their mobile phone using chat application and then

log onto their banking, they will question the banking interface being so

much more complicated than their chat applications or the games they play

on their mobile phone.

In terms of expectations settings, it has just become a lot more difficult for

brands with legacy applications to compete with the new entrants that have

the luxury to choose the latest technology and invest in apps. Consumers do

6

not value a 50 year legacy like they used to, security and trust has become hy-

giene factors.

Leadership Questions to ponder on:

1. What differentiates my brand today?

2. What mechanisms do we as a company use to actively encourage

innovation?

3. What innovation processes do we need to develop?

7

The drivers of customer loyal-ty (and what it mean for your business)

Loyalty has various dimensions to it that I would like to explore in more detail.

Attitudinal Loyalty This talks to my attitude towards a brand. So what I say about the brand may

be positive and how I relate to the brand may be positive but wether my be-

haviour aligns with my attitude is not necessarily guaranteed.

Behavioural Loyalty This talks to my actual behaviour towards the brand. I buy the brand, con-

sumer the brand. I may recommend the brand.

We very often get so fixated on measuring loyalty instead of really under-

standing what customers experience, what they do before they touched your

brand and what they do after they touched your brand. What they say about

the problems that your brand solves for them is as important as what they ac-

tually do. Chasing the loyalty scores and actually fixing stuff and seeing the

8

scores move can keep you on the hamster wheel of chasing scores instead of

focusing on real customer growth oriented transformation. Voice of customer

score fixation is like the cocaine of the customer experience world - you get

addicted to it quickly and struggle to get out of it.

Leadership Questions to ponder on:

1. Do you understand why your customers are loyal today?

2. Do you know what would make them stick with you tomorrow?

3. Do you understand their behaviour and not only listen to what

they say about your brand?

9

The business case for growing loyalty and providing friction-less experience

Set Godin did his famous first TED presentation about the purple cow in

2004. I have used this presentation in lots of workshops and sessions and in

2015, it is just as relevant as it was in 2004.

People have many more choices and a lot less time, and they will choose

the option that is easy and simple and makes them feel good.

The accountants require complex models that show the real connection

between income growth, retention and specific investments related to cus-

tomer experience, and you get those and you can invest months and month

in building those models. I am by no means saying that it is not important to

crunch the numbers, but what is more important that crunching the numbers

is the leaders agreeing that the reason they are in business is because they

have customers.

The metrics often used in business cases are

- New business generated

- Retention of client

- Increase in share of wallet

- Decrease in cost to serve

10

- Positive word of mouth to peers

Leadership Questions to ponder on:

1. What metrics can you use to form the basis of your business case?

2. What is the alternative if you don’t focus on customer oriented

growth?

11

What is a customer experi-ence transformation?

One of my favourite questions …

“Can you come and run a CX project for us?”

My problem with this question, is it is really asking wether you will be the

fix-it person that we can throw things at. It is also assuming that customer ex-

perience has a finite beginning and end and a defined scope - so you can put

it into a project management paradigm and measure activities. I am not slat-

ing project management. What I am saying is that becoming a customer cen-

tric organisation does not only require discipline and focus that you have

when managing a project, but it also requires a systemic change that would

touch every organisational silo in the way they make decisions, the way they

communicate, the way they recruit new people.

Customer Experience treated as a chocolate coating, will lead to failure

and disappointment.

A CX transformation will require a change across:

- Leadership

- Culture

- People practices

- Processes and

12

- Systems

Customer experience transformation requires time and focus and a team allo-

cated to the various efforts.

Often, I have worked on CX efforts where the CX ‘Project’ is a side project

to a few people’s day jobs instead of it being their day-job. You may argue

rather do something and get part of the customer experience right than do

nothing. What I would argue that pushing from below up the hierarchy may

have a short term benefit but I have seen CX professionals burn out and give

up and quit after months and month of pushing spaghetti up the hill.

Aligning leadership first around customer priorities until they get it,

would aid you in getting long term results and the correct allocation of re-

sources for these efforts.

13

The customer experience ecosystem

 

In order for a leader to truly influence and effect transformation, he needs to

understand the eco system that creates the customer experience.

Each component needs to be evaluated to determine it’s positive or neg-

ative effects on the end result - the customer experience.

14

I will step through each of the elements of the eco system illustrated in

the diagram and summarise the leadership questions that is relevant when

evaluating this eco system.

Customer Value Proposition This may include the product, price, locations, packaging, service and every-

thing that the customer perceives as value to him.

The questions to ask from a leadership perspective is:

- How differentiated is our value proposition?

- Who leads and sets the consumer expectations in this category of

goods/services? and also outside this category.

- Does this value proposition solve problems for the consumer?

- Is the value proposition relevant?

Customer Journey There are so many articles and literature about the customer journey an op-

posing views of how and where you use the customer journey. For me, in the

work I have done the last 8 years, the biggest change observed in doing the

customer journey as been awareness of what is actually happening when you

walk in the shoes of the customer. Wether you do journey maps with execu-

tive teams or front-line employees, the aha moment is similar in reaching a

15

deep understanding that the processes and systems don’t necessarily deliver

the desired experience.

Later in the ebook, I will include a separate section with more detailed in-

formation on Journey mapping.

Customer Interaction Channels This is such a integral part in the experience and very often where the incon-

sistency occur in how the experience is delivered. Or rather how the experi-

ence is left to occur by default.

Successful leaders and companies, have taken the time to really design

the experience across interaction channels to deliver the same results consis-

tently. You may ask me, “Do things never go wrong in organisations that pride

themselves on good customer experience?” The answer is yes, things to go

wrong. The difference in these organisations is that the processes and people

have been prepared to anticipate things going wrong, and people can cor-

rect the issues that arise, when it happens.

Typically the lovely case studies that we all love getting inspiration from

would talk about empowered employees that have the mandate to fix cus-

tomer problems and compensate customers for moments of misery on the

spot when they happen. This is great but again, we are looking for a systemic

design and management of the experience, not just bandaids to put on mat-

ters that will have much more serious consequences if left unchanged in the

long term.

16

The Employer Journey I have deliberately called this the employer journey and not the employee

journey, since it remains the responsibility of the employer to craft this jour-

ney in a way that makes them an adored brand, that leads to positive word of

mouth from employees as well as loyalty and retention.

In this employee engagement loop, I wanted to find words with energy

that speak for themselves:

- Attract the best people

- Infuse them with the brand DNA

- Inspire excellence

- Encourage curiosity and learning

- Innovate and co-create

- Reward

The Organisation Structure Very often the organisational structures that are supposed to streamline the

organisation and make it scalable and efficient, pose the biggest threat to the

customer experience. Often the departments operate in silo’s and determine

their own powerless. They also sent necessarily share the same view on what

customers are experiencing when they touch the brand. Each silo looks at the

customer experience from their view point and within their context makes a

judgement on what the experience is really like and how large the gap is to

the desired experience.

17

As an example, marketing may look at their campaigns that makes the

promise and then look at the call centre and decide that the experience they

are delivering is not up to standard. Similarly client service may not even be

aware of the current marketing campaigns and just deliver the service based

on the metrics they are given.

Who is connecting the dots for the organisation?

This is THE most important leadership function of a Chief Customer Expe-

rience Officer, unifying the organisation around what customers experience

today and what strategy is with regards to what the desired experience is.

Without this, customer experience efforts is bound to have short term results

without the systemic organisational change that is really required.

Customer Centric Leadership In all the previous components, I have referred to leadership aspects and

questions. In this section I want to focus on the most important skills I believe

a Chief Customer Officer needs in order to effect lasting change.

- Communication and story telling skills

- Negotiation skills

- Creating a compelling vision that people want to be a part of

- Inspiring & motivating people

- Innovation and design appetite (and skills)

18

Customer Experience Competencies The following competencies are required in an organisation to effect the sys-

temic change required and lead the organisation o a higher level of customer

experience maturity and customer centred growth.

Understand It is so important to not start a customer experience effort based on assump-

tions and gut feel only. Not that I am discounting those, since most of the

time, leaders have a pretty good idea what is wrong in an organisation, they

either don’t know how to fix it or they choose to rather not see it.

The following are important aspects to get a deep understanding of:

- Customer Insights - who are they? and what are they experiencing

today? What do they do before and after having a brand experi-

ence with your brand?

- The customer journey - what does that journey look like? Who is

my organisation touches a customer? What artefacts do I sent to a

customer? Does it create a consistent story? What is that story/

brand experience and emotions I want to evoke?

- Loyalty - do I understand what drives loyalty?

- What creates value for the customer?

Design The aspects of design that is essential for an organisation to pay attention to

is:

19

- Business strategy design and infusing customer centred principles

and growth strategies into the business strategy.

- Value proposition design - again revisiting the problems you solve

for customers, and asking if you do that in a differentiated way.

- Brand experience design - determining what experience the brand

will deliver.

Deliver Very often, this is the most difficult part for organisations, once they have un-

derstood and designed, turning that into a implementation plan.

The implementation needs to focus on various work-streams such as

- Culture

- Processes

- Systems and

- Capabilities

Measure With an initiative that stretches this wide in terms of organisational transfor-

mation, measurement and governance is essential.

Chunking the initiative into smaller pieces is often more successful in

terms of delivery, resource allocation and measuring success.

20

Customer Experience Design as a Craft

 

To an outsider that does not understand the work it may look like we draw

lots of pictures, talk too much, ask people invasive repeating questions and

then play back the answers. To the insiders who adore customer centred in-

novation and design, it is a craft that produces collaborative art.

So, how do I define Customer Experience Design?

21

Customer Experience Design is the craft of using real consumers and

their needs as the calibrating force to design customer value propositions

and interactions.

The essential steps in doing customer experience design is founded in

Design thinking that follows these steps:

1. Empathise – get a real understanding from customers about their

needs, wants and challenges

2. Define – Define the problem you are trying to solve or the need you are

trying to satisfy

3. Ideate – Come up with differentiates idea concepts to satisfy this need

or solve the customer problem

4. Prototype – Give life to the idea through physical prototyping. This may

also take on the form of role-play when it comes to interaction design. But

when dealing with intangible services, it actually makes it a lot more tangible

to build physical prototypes.

5. Test – The ability to test the concept with your consumer very early on,

gives you the ability to adapt before too much in invested in processes and

systems.

So at the intersection where Journey Mapping meets Design Thinking is

where collaborative innovation and disruption happens.

If we look at a typical Journey Mapping session, we following and agenda

that looks like this:

1. Create a persona for a typical customer (or target segment)

2. Create a story for that customer that elaborates on their needs, wants

and life events

22

3. Discuss the triggers that would start this customer’s engagement with

your brand, the typical journey that they would follow and interaction chan-

nels that they would choose.

4. Explore the expectations they would have in every moment of this jour-

ney. What are there emotional needs in this moment of the journey? How can

you as a brand could exceed or fail these expectations. How can you evoke

the positive emotions that we want consumers to feel in this moment?

5. Discover the artefacts that we as a brand provide at each moment in

this journey, be it a short mobile message, an email, a letter, a form that we re-

quire the customer to fill in, a receipt, a link to a website that we require them

to log onto.

6. Critically review the artefacts and see if it ‘feels’ like the brand. Does it

have a distinctive experience that it is aiming to create?

7. If we engage with a person at any moment in the journey, what brand

experience does that interaction leave me with? Was it functional? Was it fric-

tionless? Did I feel good about myself during that interaction? Did the person

connect with me? Did they care?

Once the journey is mapped on paper, the dilemma often is how to illus-

trate that in a way that communicates the real customer needs as well as the

collaborative ideas that have been developed.

In my early days, I used Microsoft excel a lot, just because in gives you an

infinite horizontal plane to capture all the information that came out of the

session. These days, I am lucky that I have a team working with me that cap-

ture the sessions on video so we can ensure that we do not miss any of the in-

formation. The team also captures the journey mapping session content in a

tool called Journey’s that was developed by Universal Minds. I just absolutely

23

love the simplicity of this tool and it’s ability to represent the information so

easily and quickly with it’s neat export function that sends the content to a

PDF.

Ultimately journey maps can be turned into beautiful art that communi-

cates emotions, evokes empathy and can become a crucial training tool for

years to come.

The process changes that are identified in the journey sessions, usually

end up being amendments to existing process diagrams and those enhance-

ments being escalated to ensure that it is supported at the systems level.

24

The impact of emotions on consumer behaviour

I refer again to the work of Simon Sinek that talks to the fact that the why, how.

What model corresponds to the development of the brain. The part of your

brain that makes decisions, is the size of an almond, it has no capacity for lan-

guage and responds purely to emotions. The part of your brain that is respon-

sible for rational thinking is much slower than the primitive brain.

We are really designing for the almond size reptile brain when we design

emotion into customer experience.

Leadership questions to ponder on...

1. What are the emotions that I want consumers to associate with our

brand?

2. How did I get to this set of emotions?

3. Who are the best people to assist with the design of emotion into

our brand experience?

Great authors that have written about the subject of emotions in customer ex-

perience:

- Colin Shaw

- Lou Carbone

25

How do we lead this outside-in transformation?

The most important aspect is to unite the company leadership on customer

driven growth priorities. It is not a single person's job but rather a shared re-

sponsibility and collaborative effort.

Instead of taking a silo view and chasing individual key performance mea-

surements, departments need to collaboratively look at how their contribu-

tion to the experience can be measured.

The need to unite on brining together a cohesive customer listening path

and each making sure that the information and insights around customer ex-

perience is available and acted upon.

The lone evangelist in organisations need to surround themselves with

people that 'get' it and want to join the cause. They need to create and find

success stories that they can tell to the organisation to inspire and engage

colleagues in having conversations about customer centred growth.

Jeanne Bliss talks about understanding the power basis in organisations

that drive how they make decisions. This will greatly help the CX professional

in their approach to the transformation.

26

The typical work streams in a transformation program and their outcomes

As discussed earlier, 'eating the elephant one bite at a time' is very important

when embarking upon a cx transformation.

The typical work streams include:

- Customer experience definition - brand definition and emotions

clarified and agreed

- Customer vision for the future agreed

- Customer journey mapping of various touchpoints

- Implementation workstreams including:

- People

- Process

- Technology

It is also important to acknowledge that once the discovery process starts,

there are just blatantly broken parts of the experience that needs to be fixed.

A CX leader should not get stuck in a perpetual fix it loop, since this can

happen very easily. The CX leader often becomes the dumping area for spe-

cial projects and broken processes. This will have short term benefits but will

27

not reposition the company for sustainable longer term customer centred

growth.

28

How to continuously measure that we are making progress

Remain connected to your people and your clients and you will know if you

are making progress.

Also track the things that you are able to.

As mentioned before: Why are people joining? Why are they leaving you?

Find easy ways to quantify this.

Very often the tracking can be automated, but that is not where client de-

light lies. Automated MIS reports and dashboards bring them no joy… that is

more to satisfy the critics, the forgetful and the wet blankets that we are

spending the Customer Experience budget responsively and we are making

a difference.

In addition to finding quantifiable metrics and adding those to the dash-

board is finding the stories that touch ones heart. Telling those stories will be

remembered much longer than moving Net Promoter Score (NPS) by a few

points.

Find the stories and let them do the talking.

29

About the Author

I am a brand and business innovator who focuses on how customers connect

with brands. I find meaning in designing engaging customer experiences that

creates value for brands and their patrons.

I guide brands on how to design their distinctive tone and emotions they

want to evoke in spoken, written and web communication. I help both corpo-

rations and people find their purpose. I find fulfillment in solving lots of small

problems that make a big difference.

My wish is to combine my skills and experience to grow my client's busi-

nesses through showing them what problems to solve for their customers.

I completed a degree in business economics and computer science and

completed a leadership development program that inspired me to found

BrandLove.

30

About BrandLove

BrandLove is not a wise-ass tell-you-what-to-do brand agency, neither are we

a kiss-ass tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear consultancy.

BrandLove is a, connecting-the-dots with you agency, a facilitator of au-

thentic discovery of your brand essence. We create safe space for design

thinking, collaboration and innovation incubation.

We help leaders shape their strategy to become outside-in thinkers and

view everything from the customers eyes. We counsel brands whose cus-

tomers have fallen out of love with them. We help infuse brand dna and ignite

passion in the hearts and minds of your people who serve your customers

through transformative culture programs.

We help brands find what they have lost, and facilitate a discovery for

those who may have not ever had clarity around their essence.

We find the best and the worst in your current brand experiences and

show you how to make it better. We teach you how to achieve competitive

differentiation through deliberate design rather than leaving brand experi-

ences to chance.

We are not rocket-scientists but rather behavioral-anthropologists who

love bringing together people, process and technology and' being a catalyst

for sustainable transformation.

31

We challenge the status quo, we ask you to see things as if you are look-

ing at it for the first time... We ask "why?" over and over again, until we get to

the naked truth.

We love pictures that communicate really profound messages and we

find meaning in helping people discover their authentic service ambassador

voice.

We find joy in igniting a love affair between customers and brands!

Website: www.brandlove.co.za

Email: hello@brandlove.co.za