When you go to make a purchase, you don’t examine the functional aspects of the product before deciding. Let’s face it, would you say let me evaluate the quality of this waakye, the ingredients, or how quickly it was served to me and then go on to analyse its suitability based on some very specified criteria? For example, would you go on to check the quality of the meal based on the Likert 0 – 10 scale and convert this in your head into a regression model to arrive at a result? The truth is that when measuring or assessing the experience you are dealing with subjective data.
As customers, we are more inclined to be more emotional when making buying decisions. We respond to a product or service with feeling, thought, and conditional response. Who is your preferred waakye seller? You will probably stay loyal until your friend or colleague introduces you to another one. “That one is too spicy”, you might reflect, this new waakye seller has got the balance right. Suddenly you are hooked until you discover someone else, or change your mind and decide to move on. All I am saying is that whatever you decide one thing that will be missing is logic, the experience is subjective.
Admittedly at some point as CX actors we will need to correlate some aspect of the experience with the Net Promoter Score to make some rational decisions. However, according to researchers treating customers as cost-benefit calculators measuring against ‘as is’ only expectations is not practical. Taking too much of a calculative view of customers can therefore be constraining. It reduces our capability to genuinely understand the experience.
According to S Walden (2017), although with the calculative method, we understand such things as “trust is important”, “reducing the price of the bill”, and “the reliability of network connection”, we are unable to get down to a deeper level of understanding of why we do what we do. I remember a very popular advert years ago when I was in the UK launched by a company “Compare the market”. Using the characterization of a tropical animal (meerkat, found in the southern part of Africa) and a voice-over with a Russian accent the adverts proved very successful for comparethemarket.com.
Using a character named Sergio the goal was to draw attention to the brand comparethemarket.com. So, they would show Sergio (the meerkat) in a clip signposting you to their website with the expression “compare the meerkat or compare the market, simples”. As much as it was humorous what was phenomenal about this advert was the following it generated (from 80pc to 3.6m) in just six months. Here in Ghana, I recall the success of a very popular advert for “Pioneer nails”, the main character uses typical Fanti to express his satisfaction with the nails ending with the expression “no bend no curve”.
Perhaps the originators of the advert were drawn by some rather very unique characteristics of the meerkat animal species. They are immune to venom, they are pretty tough if they see you as a threat, are highly intelligent, are omnivores, and although they are found in desert areas they don’t drink water. Their choice of the meerkat signaling a message to share with customers was perhaps influenced by the special characteristics of the animal and the effect of humour in generating massive interest for the campaign.
Whatever the motivation there had to be a connection with the customer from within the organization. The internal organization represents the employee experience and culture. These two are critical in delivering the experience brand. If the right mindset is not achieved, all your customer experience actions will be in vain. Here are a few tips offered by CX experts on how influencing mindsets positively can bring the change needed to boost your customer experience. First, be customer advocates, and embrace ideas from unbiased stakeholders. Second, de-emphasize metrics, and aim at understanding customers.
Third, influence a mindset change by transforming the way of doing business. Forth, change the corporate mindset and build an effective team.
Customer Advocates
Customer experience must be a well-planned consistent set of initiatives deliberately put in place to address the needs of the customer. A disjointed customer experience programme leaves customers frustrated as it features a bit of support here, a bit of money there, and a head of CX with no power but under the remit of a more influential (and controlling) manager. This situation does not help spread belief in the programme. Without good leadership, any programme will die from disillusionment. Promoting the customer’s view and creating interconnections between departments around this view is the way forward.
An effective CX team is empowered to act across silos (across the company) as a troubleshooting piloting team working to project the customer and employee story. Although silos are great what is important is the interconnections between data to make the customer journey transparent for all. CX proponents argue “that If the business is one eye and the consumer is another, it is essential to bring in a third eye outside your industry. This could be through looking at best practice customer experiences from other industries or engaging with experts.
Customer advocacy is about building and nurturing relationships with loyal customers, who then become spokespersons, and champions for your brand, products, or services. Customers who have a positive experience of your brand become loyal associates and will happily project the brand. So as a brand, your goal must be not only to provide value but also a pleasurable experience for customers to generate repeat business and promote referrals. Ever tried the Kakum Park walkway? How easily patrons recommend the scary walk across dizzying heights on a shaky bridge.
Avoid myopically focusing on yourself and advocate customers’ needs to the C-suite level to creatively champion customer needs cross-functionally. Focusing on the customer first and avoiding the temptation of “navel-gazing” (this is when companies measure in department silos, leading to poor experiences across the end-to-end customer journey), is how you put your best foot forward.
Understanding Customers
A natural tendency in any business is to focus on budgets and be empowered with a clear sense of direction based on ‘right and light’ measures with some very ‘effective’ mechanisms for measuring and evaluating success. customer-centric companies put the voice of the customer (customer information) at the front and centre stage ensuring that customer issues are pivotal across the business. Using the appropriate measuring mechanisms they follow up with the interpretation of customer behaviour to engage them.
The key is to use quality data and not reams of data. successful companies such as DHL use customer information to engage and collaborate with their clients, suppliers, and customers to create solutions. Customer-centric companies share customer stories and de-emphasize abstraction thus peeling away the impersonal nature of rigid data and immersing themselves in the life of the customer to understand how their products and services are used. A typical example is in the insurance industry for instance using an app to get employees to engage in small customer experience tasks.
It enables employees to learn first-hand what it is like to be a customer. Immersing employee ‘’experts’ can change the company’s understanding of customer experience and enable them to develop new solutions which customers may not have thought of. What is important here is a mindset that is focused on investing and improving the customer value, bearing in mind that what matters to the customer are emotions, modulators, and the non-conscious as opposed to rigid drivers such as good network reliability.
Equipping yourself in this way puts you in the mould where you take time to listen to your customer to understand what they want from your business and what the experience is. This requires regular attention to detail in terms of listening to feedback and acting on it. Ultimately that is the key to driving profitable, engaging, and productive relationships with your customers.
Business Transformation
Be prepared to change the way of doing business with your customer. Excellent client relationships ultimately evolve into several key differentiating service excellence principles. According to Rob Frank, Customer Experience Director of a large UK infrastructure and construction company changing the way you do business leads to the perfect delivery value proposition. He cites some initiatives in this regard as ‘on time, to quality’ delivery, looking beyond contract relationships and focusing on how they could add value in terms of practical ways of doing business.
The goal is to go out of your way by focusing on the employee experience. This could be such things as great outings, ensuring facilities for the employees were over and above expectations, and so on. Years ago, during my sojourn in the UK one memory etched in my mind is this company I worked for where we would go on outings on Fridays where we spent quality time at the bowling centre and ended the evening in the restaurant enjoying a great meal and some good team-bonding.
According to experts, this approach has two foci, one on the contractual relationship and one on the experience of doing business. It leads to a service excellence mindset one that doesn’t need an ROI justification before proceeding. The customer is seen as a strategic imperative. By selling employee comfort you provide an excellent working environment and promote healthy work relations where everyone is willingly putting in a shift to address customer issues, a customer-centric environment.
Change the Corporate Mindset and Build an Effective Team
This usually starts with leadership behaviours by showing that customers matter. Without this new mindset, you will never gain traction, however much the mid-tier believes in it. Leadership must walk the talk, communicating their belief in experience throughout the organization. The leadership of customer experience needs to be collaborative. Steve Walden (Customer Experience Rebooted) shares, eighty percent of the leaders’ activity needs to be on the ground dealing with human issues; 20% needs to be about the task itself. It’s about cross-silo and cross-business cocreation.
Consider this scenario in bad leadership. Leadership tells its workers to develop a new project. The workers themselves know this is impossible. Despite regular reports that this was the case, no remedial action is taken. Results are gamed, and leadership is congratulated. Politics is rife here however this is not a customer experience approach. Walden concludes “customer experience ways of working must be allowed to seep into how processes are designed and how teams are built up to operate within a light hierarchy with measures that are loose rather than tight. ‘Over-metricising’ creates a restrictive, myopic bonus culture. “
What is needed is an employee environment that can manage flexibility, adaptability, and change. customer experience techniques such as mapping and measurement apply to the employee environment. More critically probably having a good HR team, one that seeks to build the employee experience rather than is focused on transactional functionality is what will drive customer-centricity to optimum levels. If there is one thing that a company can do in CX, above everything else, it would be sorting out how employees are engaged and inspired.
This is the bitter truth, a strong HR function will counter-balance the worst excesses of leadership and provide a roadmap for the employee experience. It is necessary to drive home the message that ‘what gets measured, is a poor reaction of what needs to get managed’. Note that measurement is also an observation and management facilitation: so if you as a manager can’t observe and can’t facilitate then you should not be in leadership.
Johannisson (1993) writing on SME growth recommends the adoption of the following abilities new realities and make them come true – know why (attitudes, values, motives), know-how (skills), know who (social skills), know when (insights) and know what (knowledge). A great employee experience encapsulates these qualities seamlessly to deliver a great customer experience.
