Make customer-centricity happen

Being customer centric is a way of thinking. It’s a commitment we all made, that’s why we are here at the International Customer Experience Conference. But your corporation may have a few hundred or even few thousand employees, all of whom affect the experience you provide to your customers. In order to have CX influence their every day decisions, they have to be committed as well. You have to change the way they think and reach a tipping point so that CX focus becomes part of your company culture. This not an easy task. Its like when you tell people to quit smoking. They know its unhealthy, still, they stick to this habit.

But great changes start with small steps. Not long ago, I talked with James Clear in a conference, who identifies himself as a habit maniac. And sure he is. You know he is the kind of guy, who hides the Facebook icon on his phone into a folder on the third screen to prevent himself from checking it all day. He is an expert in changing people’s habits. He told me, that to change a bad habit, you need a replacement and a trigger. I believe you can be the trigger in your corporation to make customer-centricity a reality.

I would like to show you hands-on tools you can try tomorrow. If you’ve already used some of them, even better. Make no mistake, I’m not an HR professional. I’m a service designer. Together with my team we are designing services for the people and for impact. But along the way we use tools, that prove to nudge client representatives toward customer-centricity. In the last 2 years we were helping our clients from diverse industries in this transformation. We tested all tools on them and I will show you only the things that work. I promise.

The first challenge is to show people what customer experience really is. I believe customer experiences are real life moments people remember and share.

Fancy sentence, right? On a simple and clean slide. You may say, yes that’s true. Ok, go on. Does it trigger you in any way? I don’t think so.But what if we look what is behind this statement. (Video with real customers telling their stories)

Now that’s a little bit different, right?

First and foremost we have to let colleagues experience the customer experience to influence their decisions. You will be surprised how effective this is. I remember when we first took some clients to the field to try their own service, their were shocked. They told us, that before they had been proud of the service they created and told all of their friends about it. After the field they only wanted one thing, but in urgent. Get back to the office and start working on improving the whole thing based on what customers told them.

Field visits are even better than focus groups. Because for the same money and effort, you get real life situations and you miss the fairy tales people share with 6 strangers and a huuge mirror.

Going to the field is a great tool, but unfortunately we don’t always have the time to do so. In these cases we bring the field to the office. We either try the services ourselves beforehand and record the experience with a GoPro or a spycam. Or we ask some customers to do so, and we invite them to talk about it with the people responsible for the service. It’s pretty affective too.Just imagine when we forced around 8 people to watch a 2 hour long video without cut. The video was about an online savvy customer who tried to buy a tablet in their webshop. You could literally see the pain on their faces and it was a dream working with them afterwards.

Certainly it is really important with whom you are working with and on what. We believe every experience is omni-channel for customers, and channels become interconnected only if we develop them together. So we design only omni-channel solutions.

For example in one of our projects our client wanted to increase the use of online bills. We went out and accompanied customers to see how they pay their bills now and talk with them about their preconceptions about online bill presentment and payment. Based on our insights we developed in-store solutions, mobile solutions and certainly online solutions that collaborate across channels to divert customers to online. And this is the usual case. Digital transformation is on the plate of several companies. To accomplish this successfully they have to understand what people need and what they are afraid of and they have to create effective triggers to change old habits.

Customer journeys are great tools to get an overview of needs and know where to put triggers. I’m sure you all use them, I actually used it to plan my wedding too.

I just want to point out that I think it will only be valid and show us the right direction if we involve customers in creating them. And by involvement I mean talking with them beforehand or being in the same room with them while creating the journey or at least validating it with them afterwards. It is funny to see when we create a journey based on research summaries, instincts or even family examples and then we ask 2 or 3 customers to go through it and validate it from their perspective. I can tell you, we don’t do these sessions at the end of workshops, because nobody would go home with a feeling of accomplishing something.

We have to let customers influence us and the way we do our business.

Another great source of inspiration is front-line staff. They are the biggest asset in a company. They have daily connection with customers, they experienced all kinds of situations. They have great ideas and they are happy to share them. We never miss to involve them in ideating about new products or services or even improving existing ones.

Besides if we work with them, they share insights on how to motivate their colleagues to strive for a better customer experience.For example we just launched a motivational scheme with immaterial incentives for sales personnel at one of our clients. Yes you heard it right, immaterial incentives like free weekends, longer lunch brakes and so on for sales personnel…

And not only the involvement of front-line staff can boost our projects. We should involve IT, IT security and legal departments too.

Ok, I can see the grimace on your faces.

But the truth is, if you handle these professionals as inspectors, they will look for problems and they will find some. We saw in several projects that they want to do a good job, they want to create good services too. The best is to let them see and experience the effect of their contribution on your servicing logic. How can you do this? Well, it easy!

Prototype solutions and test them in real life situations. Bring colleagues to see their service in operation or just record reactions of customers and share it with them.

Recently we were working on a new servicing logic with a pretty good team of senior experts of diverse competences. We created a great looking solution. I can tell you, self-confidence was all over the room. Then we created a simple prototype and went out to a shop. Nothing special, just the average store. We installed the prototype, it was not a big thing. We involved 1 counter, gave a shop representative a 10 minute training on what she should do and put 8 paper footprints on the floor. You can see it in the picture. A perfect prototype.

It operated only for 2 hours, affected approx. 20 customers’ lives, but the team learned a lot. I can tell you, we failed early and smart. We want back to the office, modified the service concept and they wanted to test it again. They wanted to see it work. And after the third round of test, it did work pretty well.

Last but not least we have to talk about implementation.

After some well designed and tested solutions got implemented we came to the conclusion that we have to roll up our sleeves and support implementation as well. There are always issues. And if they are not resolved with a system approach focusing on customer experience, they can ruin it completely.For example if IT cannot implement some features in Phase 1, it is likely you should rethink the way your service works or how you communicate about it at the beginning.

And before the questions. Let me answer the most obvious.

Yes, we have to put more effort that is time of our colleagues into creating services if we do it this way. If you have an experienced project lead and team who are cautious about when and how to involve people this is only a 10-15% more time then usual. But as Peter Gricser, Reatil Management Director said in one of our case studys, the results pay off.

For example, in the bill project I mentioned earlier, you know the one with the 5 solutions. Now in that project we achieved a 20% cut of resources used for bill payment on a national sclae while providing a better omni-channel experience. I think that’s not a bad deal.

If you want to try these tools by yourself, come to our prototyping workshop called “Hands-on tools to be a CX hero in your company”Or visit our blog at business-love-design.com. Thank you for your attention.

Károly TresóHead of Service Design & Innovation at Isobar BudapestTwitter: @karolytreso

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