I was deeply honoured by the PEX community at the annual conference in Florida last month and received the Global Community 2018 Award. Needless to say (but I will) this is as much down to you guys and your great transformational work, so I graciously excepted the Award on your behalf. Thank you so much :
Outside-In is a regular theme during most of my keynotes, not least this last week here in Florida. A question asked from the floor related to the 30-second elevator test “can you explain to the CEO what this stuff is, why it is different, and how it reframes the work we do?”. I guess I was about to fudge and say this needs more than 30 seconds, and then remembered my two-slide explanation!
So, for those guys looking for a simple explanation, these two slides will do the job. I have put a bit of narrative in there also.
120+ in Florida at the keynote, 16 January 2018
Florida keynote to top team of major global industrial corporation
The old, industrial-age traditional way of doing business. We make products (and services). We look for the market to sell them in. We segment customers by circumstance and pitch our products to those segments. We add variations to the products to better fit certain niche segments. We build back-end systems and digital capabilities in this increasingly complex world. We are rigid, functionally oriented and abhor change.
The new Outside-In customer-centric way. We identify the customers we would like to do business with. We understand their needs (even when they may not know them themselves) and specific Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s). We categorise customers by need. We then create the capability to deliver to these categories the SCO’s (both products, people and digital). Progressively we manage new and existing customer expectations to deliver success without exception. We are agile, innovative and attuned to 21st century needs.
Let me know if this works for you.
Ciao, Steve
For the curious, the original slides came from a deck presented as a keynote in Sydney, Australia 3 years ago.
You can access that here: http://bit.ly/SydneyPEX
1. Design digital experiences around the customer needs, not around your customer mythology
Despite mountains of data customer insight remains an elusive animal. As a direct consequence, digital is frequently applied across existing processes without fully understanding customer pain points and the real Successful Customer Outcome.
Making invalid assumptions can irritate and permanently drive customers away. Take grocery checkout for example where retailers digitize an existing experience based on assumptions of customers wants. The resulting experience may still be fractured, with faulty scanners (they break a lot), long lines, and the more than necessary Associates to provide support for glitches. Not a great customer experience. If, however you develop an understanding of customer needs (even when customers do not know them) you may discover the checkout process is not required at all. Eradicating that process meets customer’s desires in terms of speed, convenience, and simplicity.
Amazons (i) checkout-less retail stores, walk in walk out enabled by scanning your phone on entry, scanning goods as you move around the store, and then scanning your phone on departure with automatic billing, provides just such an experience. In addition to improving the experience, costs are reduced and the customers come back for more and thereby grow revenues. In fact, this triple-crown benefit is a sure fire way of measuring any customer experience transformation.
2. Drive digital initiatives to simplify and improve convenience
Customer Research demonstrates the disconnect between what executives think customers value in digital, compared to working out their needs in a more objective and structured way. A technique such as the Successful Customer Outcome Canvas (SCOC)(ii) provides a step by step approach to articulating actual needs and aligning the experiences to deliver them. The resulting insight in terms of a set of objective measures based on needs allows the organization to question every interaction in the context of ‘does this contribute to the SCO?’ and if not, how do we remove it?
Uber(iii) are a terrific example of ‘one click simple’ with the apps user interface designed around understanding the overall Successful Customer Outcome and then delivering an optimum number of interactions. Providing this digital experience helps meet the customer’s desire to move efficiently, pay digitally, and provide feedback in the moment. Part of that ‘Successful Customer Outcome Canvas’ insight was in removing the anxiety of where is the car and how long do I wait? You can see the car and driver speeding towards you on the app.
3. Categorize your customers by need, rather than segmenting by circumstance.
Dealing with customers as segments (age, income, zip code etc.) misses the vital personalisation that digital excels at. By force fitting customers into standardized processes suited to segments creates friction and fractured experiences. Diagnosing objective needs may, for instance, highlight the digital savviness (or not) of a category of customer, and in doing so allow you to create a bespoke experience. Rather than industrial age segmentation, organizations that adopt Outside-In(iv) categorization meet and evolve customer expectations in an informed way with greater empathy and the resulting trust that “you have my back”.
Are you ready? Ask yourself these questions (be honest and not complacent!)
a. Are digital initiatives aligned to Successful Customer Outcomes with optimized touch points, or are they designed around internal functional considerations?
b. Is your approach to innovation Outside-In and not restricted to departments, internal specialisms, legacy systems, regulations and last century mindsets?
c. Are you tapping in-the-moment real-time analytics to understand what your customers are experiencing as it happens, and then course correcting those experiences as they occur?
d. How are you managing your customer’s digital expectations? Are you keeping them informed of developing digital services?
e. What mechanism are you using to incorporate new digital learnings into the customer experiences? And are those learnings (next practices) gathered from outside of your sector, or are they just industry best practices?
> Most successful CX companies do these things to lift their game
> Steve Towers shares the winning strategies
> Model your own strategy based on leading CX next practices
This article is a build on terrific feedback from my recent piece ‘5 Critical Failures of 80% of Customer Experience initiatives’. (You can see that here: bit.ly/CX2017)
George Bernard Shaws observation is pertinent “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”
So with that in mind, let’s move beyond the mistakes and uncover the winning strategies and how best can we implement those insightful approaches?
Based on our recent work and research my report from the CX front line should help you rethink your approach in our collective endeavor to get more scientific about the customer experience.
In the earlier article, we identified five major errors and causes of failure. Let’s review how winning CX companies reframe those into successful strategies.
1. Top teams understand CX success and get out of the way of their people to let them get on with it.
To achieve strategic CX success, it is necessary to understand the limitations imposed by industrial age thinking (getting better at doing the wrong stuff faster, functional specialisms, outdated reward systems) and help the organization migrate to Outside-In thinking and practices. At Zappos, for instance, it is more important to meet the customer (see Zappos hits the road.. http://bit.ly/Zappos2017) and gather insights, and provide input to reshaping the organization. The top team is actually out there “We want to shake the customers hands, give them really big high fives and meet their friends — delivering happiness and memorable experiences along the way,” said Kristin Richmer, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, Zappos.
The task then is not overlaying the new insights onto an industrial age siloed world. It is actually to reshape the organization, its people, the reward systems, processes and systems to better deliver successful customer outcomes. Tony Hsieh reinforces this feed forward approach “we actually want to talk with customers more as 70% of our business are repeat buys. Hiding our contact details and making it difficult to talk is not our way” http://bit.ly/TonyHseih
2. Customer needs are understood and developed to create the organizational alignment towards successful customer outcomes.
Leading CX Companies have developed an a-b-c strategy when boiled down includes
(a) stop asking customers what they want (b) get your head around current customer expectations, and (c) articulate customer needs even when the customer doesn’t know what they are.
This effort is not a ‘one and done’, it is about continual learning and then development of services and products that anticipate customer needs, rather than following the outdated mantra of those organizations seeking more and more (often meaningless) feedback.
And Disney provides a demonstration of this a-b-c approach. Consider this:
Disney World Orlando, is about 43 square miles, about twice the size of Manhattan. 30 million guests per year enjoy 4 theme parks: the Magic Kingdom, the Hollywood Studios, Epcot and the Animal Kingdom.
You can navigate to these parks by car, bus, monorail, boats and a ferry depending on your hotel – and that in itself includes over 20 themed for your delight. Coupled with Disneys new wearable “Magic Bands” (see http://bit.ly/MagicBand) you receive a smooth personalized experience where ever you are.
This collection of entertainment is a dynamic living system focused on successful customer outcomes. With digital real-time feedback, Disney offers an integrated experience built around a co-ordinated set of business and customer outcomes, from the time you think of a trip, to the time you are back home with the kids.
3. Being customer-centric isn’t about projects – it is a state of mind.
A great mistake of many is approaching customer experience as an initiative, something with a clearly defined start and end point. Appreciating CX is a state of mind for the whole company is a major differentiator and allows successful organizations to continually tweak and evolve, rather than live in a permanent state of project stop-start crisis. The guiding principle is, at the heart of CX, change is desirable, welcomed and systematic. It impacts everyone and everything all the time.
4. Successful CX transcends measures and implements a rigorous feedback/feed forward framework.
A recent analysis in the banking industry suggested that more than 85% of the total key performance indicators measured outputs – things that get produced from activities.
Successful CX companies however, have a very different profile and focus, their attention is on measuring outcomes – the result of what is produced. To these companies this is not a semantic distinction, it underpins the total CX strategy. As a result, the measurement systems are simplified, and the focus on results rather than activity moves the dial towards customer centricity so much more quickly. Programs such as Disneys True North set a direction with supporting metrics, and rather than measure everything that moves they focus on the results and outcomes that need to be delivered to achieve successful customer outcomes. In this context, more than 75% of measures are ‘Outcomes’ with less than 25% outputs.
Test this for yourself in the call center. What are your top ten measurements, are they output oriented or outcome based? The former would be things like average handle time, abandon rates, downtime and so on. The latter would be the delivery of customer need, queries completely resolved (not the piece mean partial interim ‘first call resolution’ type things measured with a functional bias).
In summary, CX leaders have fewer measures and the majority are now Outcome-based.
5. CX is both the strategy and the operational objective to overcome needless complexity.
A recent Forrester survey says 81% of CX professionals are mapping experiences from the customers perspective but only 21% are mapping the ecosystem (processes, people, technology). In this context there are two opportunities that successful CX companies exploit:
i. CX can only be successful if you build a complete CX ecosystem map (we call that a CXecomap) which includes cause and effect and connects the people who deliver the customer experience with those people and systems who provide the means for it.
ii. CX Current state crisis. Successful CX companies can clearly articulate the what and how the organization should be doing to deliver great experiences. They do not become mired in the exercise of mapping all the current external and internal processes and systems (which can take years to complete and provides little in the way of direction for what should exist.)
These companies understand the reality that the current structure and systems were never created with excellent CX in mind but were in fact designed around an industrial age, production system based model. Accordingly, next practice is to utilize design principles that envision what should be, and then progressively mature and migrate the organization to that vision.
To conclude CX success doesn’t come from wishful thinking. It is a deliberate and sustained effort to understand and articulate the ever changing customer. To build a new trust with them that goes beyond the platitudes of the past. In the near term it is about becoming more scientific about the customer experience. In the longer term it is a guarantee of business success.
We have codified these CX next practice approaches into the CEMMethod (now version10). You can access that as a resource with others below.
The earlier article can be viewed here: ‘5 Critical Failures of 80% of Customer Experience initiatives’. http://bit.ly/CX2017
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 180 times, in 64 cities with delegates from 118 countries. The program, now in its eleventh year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Honestly, someone has got a grip on this. How can a definition be so difficult to come by? They are either soft, fluffy and meaningless or, try as they might, nothing to actually do with delivering successful customer outcomes. So there you have it, and here is the definitive definition:
Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) is a strategic approach used most commonly as a competitive differentiator. It involves aligning every aspect of an organisation towards the delivery of customer needs and successful outcomes no matter how far removed the customer is perceived to be.
This includes:
•Customer journey – what the customer does, expects and feels.
•Customer Interactions.
•Supporting internal process.
•Associated team and hierarchy structures.
•Performance metrics.
•Digital capabilities.
•Vision, mission & strategy.
Typically companies who engage in Customer Experience Management activities out perform those who do not.
Towers-Dodkins
“We have got to get more scientific about the Customer Experience”
It is good to have a guide in life. Many of us share political creeds, religious beliefs and codes of honour to guide our decision making. Wouldn’t it be crazy good to have the same for the doctrine of Customer Experience? When I co-authored the best selling book “CEM Success without Exception” back in 2006 Customer Experience Management was in its infancy.
Now twelve years later we have the accumulated wisdom of the giants of CEM, proof that focus on Successful Customer Outcomes, Outside-In and working backwards are fundamental to winning organizations.
It is with these thoughts in mind and the worthy experience of many that I set pen to paper to craft these tenets as guidelines for all of us seeking to maximise our deployment of Complete Experience Management.
1. Customers are first, center and last for everything.
Understanding that all the work an organization undertakes ultimately stems from a customer interaction is key. Work to engineer every experience to the optimum.
2. Listen to the questions customers ask you.
Resist voice of customer surveys (they are biased and unrepresentative) and focus on understanding and articulating needs – the Needs of the Customer.
3. Stop selling and let people buy.
Customers are now prosumers and most know what they want and how to get it. You will not win them if you force sell; in fact, you will make enemies of them.
4. Map the Complete Experience.
This is both the stuff the customer sees (the customer journey and the brand promise) and the work that takes place across the rest of the organization to support all interactions. Combine those the Employee Experience and the Customer Experience you are nearing the Complete Experience; these are not separate things but should be viewed through the same lens.
The CEMMethod.com can help you in seeing the Complete Experience.
Customers develop trust when you say what’ll you do, and then do what you say. Conversely, do not project yourself as something you are not.
6. Be consistent and truthful across all your channels.
Customers will interact in ways and times that suit them, so ensure you keep a coherent message across all experiences.
7. Act on People liking people.
Do not hide behind automation, whether that is voice systems, web interactions or even text messaging. The most intimate relationships are formed with people, not computers.
Keep in front of the song.
8. Creating memorable experiences requires anticipation and coordination.
Fix problems before they happen, and when problems do arise (they will) pull out the stops to put things right.
9. Design every customer experience for the category of customer.
You should never ever treat all customers in the same way. Personalization and direct communication are proven winners in an era of standardization.
10. Employees are your first customers.
If they ain’t happy your paying customers won’t be either. Treat your people well and let them know they are the most critical part of the brand and the total customer experience.
Join us for Complete Experience Management with coaching, training, consultancy and Certification at www.bpgroup.org
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 270 times, in 67 cities with delegates from 116 countries.
The program, now in its twelfth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Download James Dodkins latest book ‘Foundations for Customer Centricity’ and learn how the very best companies avoid the Metrics Trap http://bit.ly/cxFoundations
I saw a quote the other day about how increasing testing won’t improve education and It made me think of the parallels between that and business.
Too many times we think in order to get better we need tighter measures over our everyday tasks and activities. However in actuality, the most successful organisations on the planet think more like a football (soccer) team and are more interested in the measures that directly impact success, the most important being the score.
So next time you find yourself wanting to increase your measures maybe you could take a football (soccer) team view and measure less but more important things.
Download James Dodkins latest book ‘Foundations for Customer Centricity’ and learn how the very best companies avoid the Metrics Trap http://bit.ly/cxFoundations
Here is an acronym that will be genuinely useful in all your relationships. Brought to us by Customer Experience Guru Joseph Michelli, it asks us to do, rather than to wish. Have a look at Joseph’s profile (and do connect, he is 100% authentic) https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephmichelli So to the practical FACE and an example:
Now the challenge (and it isn’t eating pizza). How can you make this so in every interaction, personal, and business? You will be a better person because of it.
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success
Certified Process Professional Masters Champions (CPP-Master) Program
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 150 times, in 57 cities with delegates from 108 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Join James Dodkins for this quick, effective and fun icebreaker. Easy to do and always creates an enthusiastic buzz as a prelude to any meeting, seminar or training session.
For more join us…
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success
Certified Process Professional Masters Champions (CPP-Master) Program
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 150 times, in 57 cities with delegates from 108 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Is Customer Experience Management (CEM) a real thing for your company, or just more fluff and nonsense talked of but not delivered? Last week I chaired a remarkable one day event in Sydney Australia. The theme “Customer Centricity Innovation Lab” seemed interesting but there was no real indication of the difference we were about to experience.
Hon. Victor Dominello MP Minister for Innovation & Better Regulation
From the get go the first speaker, The Hon. Victor Michael Dominello MP – Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation for NSW (yes you did read that correct). Innovation and Better Regulation?! What seems like a paradox and conflict is in fact an essential for better government and rather than Innovation falling foul of all the red tape working the two hand in hand makes sure the regulations become aligned to encouraging customer/citizen success. Victor related a recent story of work in the Northern Territories that delivered precisely the benefits needed. What a terrific way to start the Innovation Lab and so refreshing to hear from a politician actually being more busy doing and delivering than promising and debating. We should all be so lucky to have MP’s of this calibre and application! In a packed day of round-tables and talks seventeen session mentors shared their experiences across all industry sectors. One theme rules them all – the customer and our organisations ability to align to Successful Customer Outcomes.
Dirk Dalichau, Chief Operating Officer, Ovolo Group
The business keynote was an incredible insight into the changing world of hospitality from Dirk Dalichau, Chief Operating Officer, Ovolo Group (Hong Kong). If you have stayed at a hotel for leisure or business you would love this presentation. Dirk focused on those Moments of Truth everyone experiences in a hotel and how Ovolo, by taking the Outside-In perspective innovated their offering to something quite exceptional. By way of example Dirk walked us through the customer experience and the impact of people recruitment – how about a party as the main piece of your recruitment interview?
I have just booked my next stay in Sydney – guess where? 1888 Hotel, Darling Harbour to sample Ovolo Groups Australia offering. Watch this space for my report.
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success
Certified Process Professional Masters Champions (CPP-Master) Program
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 150 times, in 57 cities with delegates from 108 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
