To improve the customer experience it is necessary to understand where the first moment of truth happens.  In retail environments, the first moment of truth happened when a customer interacts with a product on the shelf, the second moment of truth happens when the customer actually uses and experiences a product.

Consumer Behavior is changing, consumers are now using smartphones and other devices to evaluate products and service right at the moment when they are buying the product. This introduces a new category of touch points and moments of truth – the so-called zero moments of truth.

From Zurich, Switzerland to Charlotte, NC: consumers lose confidence

Certainly consumer confidence is different in each market and for each brand. Looking at the situation in Switzerland it turns out that a bank like UBS has experiences several shocks (20 billion USD loss in 2008, 50 billion USD have been written down, US tax evasion scandals and rouge trading scandals that required Oswald Grübel, one of the most prolific bankers in Switzerland to resign as CEO) and customers react and move move their money to other banks. Swiss cantonal banks have seen their business mostly unaffected and instead experienced a significant inflow of new customers. Similar situations have played out in Germany, United Kingdom and the United States even though each market has its unique characteristics.

What is common in each market is that the customers perception is that a large degree of these problems are caused by banks that have focused too much on making profits instead of providing services and caring about their customers.

Bank of America has experienced significant losses since 2008 and in order to offset these losses the company tried to introduce different measures, one of them was additional fees for debit cards. After customers protested and threatened to close their bank accounts, Bank of America stepped back and removed the fee again. But the damage has already been done and the result is that more customers have lost their trust in the financial system.

As always there are two sides to these developments: The dissatisfaction with banks and the financial service industry is also the breeding ground for financial service innovations. Several new services are emerging, that directly address the needs of these unsatisfied customers and they are receiving a lot of attention.

Removing merchant accounts

If a merchant wants to accept credit cards it usually requires to open a merchant account which is a complex process, especially for small and medium sized businesses. Startups like Square and Stripe make accepting credit card payments for merchants a lot easier and they don’t require merchant accounts anymore. Merchants can simply accept payments through their platform and the money is transferred directly into the merchants bank account.

Simple: a new bank for customers

Bank Simple has the goal to become a bank for customers because retail banks have forgotten who their customers are. The company is by itself not a bank but it provides innovative front-end services that use latest technologies while in the back-end the company partners with FDIC-insured banks to ensure the customers money is safe. It is a completely digital bank and therefore also the economics allow the removal of fees. No more surprise fees — nor monthly maintenance fees, overdraft fees, low balance fees, and absolutely no hidden fees. The interest is high as customers get ready to leave their bank.

Virgin Banking

Northern Rock, the British bank, was nationalized in 2008 and three years later in November 2011 Richard Branson has bought the bank to rebrand it under the Virgin brand. The focus is on customers again with the goal to bring bank the most important experience of banking: safety and trust between a bank and its customers. It would not be Virgin if they wouldn’t put fun back into banking with Richard Branson discussing whether the bank should be called Virgin Vault, Virgin Rocks or Virgin Money.

Customer Experience in the Financial Industry in 2012 and beyond

The financial industry has develop ideas that address the fears and current emotions of their customers. The times when focus was solely on technical innovations, retail experiences and mobile banking are gone and it is necessary to go back to the basics and restore the essential experiences that customers expect from a bank: safety, trust, fairness and responsibility.

At the same time it will be interesting to observe how established banks will react to the newly emerging players in the market. Virgin and Bank Simple will certainly experience a lot of interest and established banks will still be required to innovate and compete against these new incumbents once they have established their reputation again. In the end customers will benefit with better services and that will make this industry an exciting playing field in the coming years.

Tracking shoppers through their mobile phones

With recent technological developments it seems that we have come a step closer to bringing the sophisticated behavioral tracking known from the online world into the offline work. One solution for this comes from British PathIntelligence in the form of a technology called FoodPath. With this technology it is possible to monitor the movement of shoppers without having them carry any special equipment because it utilizes the shoppers mobile phones to track their movement through a shopping mall.

With this approach it is possible to anonymously capture the shoppers movement and gain insights how the shopping behavior can be influenced. Two aspects are quite interesting from my perspective:

1. This solution allows owners in shopping malls and retail shops to not just understand behavior but actually use these measurements to conduct experiments and their impact on shopper behavior. PathIntelligence has written a Whitepaper about this that reveals some very interesting insights of the impact of special in-center events and empty retails units.
2. The solution seems to be quite cost-efficient with solutions starting in the range of 40.000 EUR.

The possibilities of a better understanding of shopper movement could path the way to a complete new approach to running shopping malls. Just like the management of an e-commerce website with real-time adjustments or short-term “traffic directing”, a technology like this and the understanding how shopper flows can be controlled could create completely new shopping experiences.

Apple’s Spot-the-Shopper Technology

One of the challenges of serving customers in a retail environment is knowing which customers would like to be served and which customers are just looking around. Even if a customer is just looking around he might see something that he is interested in but in order to get his questions answered he needs to try and find a sales person. Once he has asked for help it might turn out that the person does not know about this certain category of products and the customer needs to wait for another sales person. Once again it is Apple who is delivering a completely new customer experience with the help of new technology.

Apple’s Spot-the-Shopper technology allows shoppers to purchase products directly on their smartphone, then enter the shop and pick up the devices. They can also ask for advice directly on their smartphone or use one of the iPads installed next to the products to request assistance. Apple store employees receive a notification that a customer needs service and can quickly approach the right customer. Here is the comment from a customer about his experience using this service:

Used the app this summer in the NYC 5th Avenue Apple store to request an appointment to troubleshoot/exchange a Mophie Juice Pack Air. I soon received notification to meet an Apple employee at the bottom of the stairs. I was met by an exuberant employee who stated he moved me to the front of the queue when he saw someone used the Apple Store app to request in store service as he stated “no one ever uses this and I was so excited!” I truly had no idea you could use the app to request service.

The place was packed and in my walk to find the desk, I wanted to snag an Apple Thunderbolt cable and opened my Apple Store app to show my kids what the cable looked like. In opening the app, it asked if I needed service and the prompts placed me in a queue that looked much shorter than the one on the clip board of the Apple employees trying to organize Genius appointments.

Thanks Apple!

Obviously such an approach is particularly suitable for a technology company that uses its own products to implement such a solution. Nevertheless it shows that it is clearly another step to deliver a customer experience that is better than in any other store. The ultimate question is how other companies will adopt such technologies because one thing is certain: once customers have experienced a service like this in Apple stores, they also expect it in other stores.

Three paragraphs stood our for me:

There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true.

So the challenge for retailers isn’t “how do we mimic the Apple Store” or any other store that seems like a good model. It’s a very different problem, one that’s conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn’t ask, “How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?” He asked, “How do we reinvent the telephone?” In the same way, retailers shouldn’t be asking, “How do we create a store that’s going to do $15 million a year?” They should be asking, “How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers’ lives?”

It’s not easy, of course. People forget that the Apple Store encountered some bumps along the way. No one came to the Genius Bar during the first years. We even had Evian water in refrigerators for customers to try to get them to sit down and spend time at the bar. But we stuck with it because we knew that face-to-face support was the very best way to help customers. Three years after the Genius Bar launched, it was so popular we had to set up a reservation system.

You can read the full article online at Harvard Business Review. An interview with Johnson appears in the December 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Customer Journeys are an essential concept in the domain of customer experience management. A customer journey describes all events and experiences a customer goes through to reach a goal, fulfill a need or while interacting with a brand. A customer journey consist of events that describe what has happened to the customers as well as experiences that describe how the customer felt during these events. Events and experiences are then translated into a visualization to show positive and negative experiences. Customer journeys are often compared to customer processes and buying cycles, the main difference is that customer journeys explicitly include emotions and not just events or activities.

The scope of a customer journey depends on the research scope and can focus only on the interactions a customer has with a company or go beyond an organizations boundaries and include all interactions that a users experiences, starting with the first moment he was aware of a need until his need was fulfilled. The customer journey of a car buyer could be visualized as shown below.

The timeline on the X-Axis that shows the sequence of the events have happened, the Y-Axis shows the emotions of the buyer and how they have experienced each event. This visualization also shows the benefit compared to traditional measures of customer satisfaction which usually provide solely one dimensional perspective on the customer experience and customer satisfaction. Customer journeys add another dimension which dramatically increases the resolution of your understanding of the customer experience.

Customer Journeys provide new insights into consumers by incorporating an emotional as well a time-based dimension of consumer behavior.

Customer Journeys and Customer Experience

Customer journeys are an essential tool for customer experience management because they provide complete, high-resolution insights into the customer’s experiences and behavior. Customer journeys are the visualization of your customer’s experiences while interacting with your brand and it turns out that improving customer experience without understanding the customer journey is a very difficult endeavor.

A customer journey can also contain events that are not directly related to a company yet are still relevant to understand consumer behavior. Two customers who buy a smartphone on Amazon.com might have completely different journeys. While one customer might spend most of his time on non-Amazon websites before his purchase, others might go directly to the site and rely heavily on the recommendations and product reviews on Amazon.com itself. Understanding these differences in behavior builds the foundation to extend existing services and reduce friction from the customer’s experience. Informed decisions for improving the customer experience can only be made by understanding these differences in the customer journeys.

Documenting Customer Journeys

The first step to document customer journeys is to identify relevant customers. If personas have already been defined one could select real customers that represent certain personas, if one hasn’t worked with personas before one can select users and develop personas based on your insights separately.

There are two fundamental approaches how to document customer journeys:

Ad-Hoc Documentation:Ad-Hoc customer journey documentation happens when customers document their customer journeys right at the moment the events and experiences happen. This can be done through hand-written diaries that are written by the customer and analyzed after a certain time period.

Post-Hoc Documentation: Post-Hoc customer journey documentation uses interviews to understand the event and experiences a customer has had when interacting with a certain company. Instead of interviews it is also possible to use web-based tools that help customers to document their customer journeys.

The starting point for both of these research methods can be freely defined, it usually starts with the questions: “What was the first event that lead to the decision buy a car/buy a smartphone/do ….”. Users document their customer journeys and the results of these journeys are then analyzed and synthesized into one consolidated customer journey. This consolidated customer journey is then used to perform an analysis where improvements can be implemented.

Working with Customer Journeys

Once a consolidated customer journey has been created, the next step is to work with this customer journey to identify the areas that influence the customer experience.

1) Where do customers have positive, neutral and negative experiences?

2) What can be done to improve the customer experience in these areas?

3) Are there any events where activities of the organization go unnoticed by the customers and do not generate a positive return?

The primary focus should certainly be on removing negative customer experiences as well as identifying events that are present an opportunity to create positive customer experiences. While the documentation and analysis of the customer journey has been an analytic process, the development of solutions to address these problems is a creative process which we call “customer experience design”.

These events are worth a closer look to better understand current industry dynamics and the challenge of balancing the needs of your users with those of paying customers.

What is Google’s and Facebook’s business?

Google and Facebook are two companies that offer free services ranging from search, email, social networking and others. Both make their money through advertising which brings us to the core concept of the business model of these companies: If users get everything for free, Google and Facebook need to make money another way by getting to know their users and selling that information through advertising channels to other companies.  

Are these companies in the business of “organizing the world’s information” (Google) or ” to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” (Facebook)? Or are they in the business of selling access to users for advertisers?

Now I don’t want to criticize this business model because obviously it is working from an economic perspective and users can have value by very targeted advertisements. Yet evolving such a business model is a very delicate endeavor. There is a fine line between balancing the need to increase user engagement through remarkable user experiences and the need to increase “access to and information about users” for advertisers.

One indicator that this balance has been slightly lost is how the communication of Google and Facebook has changed in recent months. It has changed in a way where both companies are disguising their intentions to collect more information about their users with new features and then arguing their way around it. Let’s look at two examples:

Google Plus: We need your real name

Why does Google want to you to create a profile on their social network with your real name? Because this dramatically increases the value of their platform to advertisers. Once you sign up to Google Plus and agree that Google can use your personal information for advertising, users give permission to be targeted by name. It is probably just a matter of time until you can buy Google Adwords to target specific people in specific circles or network. 

By hiding this behind a social network and combining it with Eric Schmidt’s famous statement of “Privacy is not such a big deal because if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of” shows that Google is pushing hard to move its advertising platform to the next level.

Facebook Like Buttons: We know everything about you

Facebook is also trying to create better profiles about its users with Mark Zuckerberg advocating that people should start sharing more and more of their life. To support this, people started adding Facebook Like buttons added to a homepage, Facebook is able to track your behavior online – even without you clicking on the button. This creates sophisticated knowledge about its users and what they are looking at. Once again, a brilliant business move that disguises behavior tracking through a “Like Button”. By the way, Google is doing the same through its free Google Analytics platform that is installed on the majority of websites to track visitor statistics.

The challenge when users and customers are completely different

In both companies and in the underlying business model, the users are different from the customers. While the initial success of these companies has been driven by a focus on the end user and the user experience, it seems that in order to achieve further economic success, both companies focus primarily now on their paying customers than on their users.

It is a very crucial moment in the growth of both companies and also a very interesting case study for customer experience practitioners. We can observe at the time it is happening whether Google and Facebook are able to balance this trade-off or if they drift off in one direction. Either development will be interesting to observe.

Bill Gates does Usability-Testing

So how can a company like Microsoft not be able to solve these problems? It’s not that Microsoft employees are not as smart, hard-working or creative as their competitors. In one document that surfaced during an anti-trust lawsuit, Bill Gates himself sent an e-Mail in 2003 to his team describing his experience using “Windows Movie Maker”.  The first line starts with a strong statement, the full email can be found at the end of this post or downloaded here.

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

[…. two pages of text describing his experience, then his conclusion at the end….]

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my program, s Iist garbage and being scared and seeing that
Microsoft com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a
low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root
certificate message?

His direct reports then start to analyze the problem, trying to find out who is or should be responsible for a quick fix and the result is something that happens every day in many other companies: Somehow, every department is affected a little bit, but nobody is responsible for the overall user experience. This leads to a “user experience deadlock” where each business unit (Windows, Microsoft.com, Windows Update) could contribute to an improvement, but due to lack of coordination nothing is done.

So I take from this that we have lots of opinions and input However, no one appears to be saying that we,
WMPG, are chartered and/or should own this. So my feedback on the thread would then be that Dave should
take ownership for driving groups around today’s inconsistencies, and that we should send this mail to Bharat
(owns WU) as well and ask who in his team can take requirements from DM

The challenge for better customer experiences

The key point is not that I want to blame Microsoft. Instead it shows which management capability is needed in organizations to deal with these kind of problems: The ability to work across departments to create an integrated customer experience. Sounds easy, but it remains one of the biggest leadership and management challenges.

The full email, download the complete PDF.

From:

Bill Gates

Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM

To: Jim Allchin Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:Documents and SettingsbillgMy DocumentsMy Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

In order to celebrate this anniversary, Apple has created a poster celebrating everything the company has learned in the last 10 years. It shows once again just how far ahead Apple is with regard to their understanding of creating remarkable customer experiences. The poster is directed to all Apple employees, especially Apple Retail employees.

The original text from the poster is transcribed below and I have added a few paragraphs below for better readability. It is a long text but it is worth your time.

In the last 10 years, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned to treat every day with the same enthusiasm we had on the first day. We’ve learned the importance of giving our customers just as much attention as they give us. And we’ve learned the art of hiring the right people for the right positions. We’ve learned it’s better to adapt to the neighborhood rather than expecting the neighborhood to adapt to us. Which is why we spend so much time and energy building stores the way we do.

Our first store, in Tysons Corner, taught us our first lesson within the first 30 minutes. We had just opened the doors when we noticed the steel already needed polishing. With a special polishing solution. And a special polishing tool. That’s when we learned that blasting steel with virgin sand makes it less prone to scuff marks.

We’ve also learned that glass can be much more than glass. We’ve learned that a 32’6" transparent glass box can stand tall even among the giants of the Manhattan skyline. That when glass becomes as iconic as the Fifth Avenue Cube, it can also become the fifth most photographed landmark in New York City. And we’ve learned that if you have to, you can close an entire street in Sydney to bring in three-story panes of glass. And when you create three-story glass, you also have to create a rig that can install three-story glass. We’ve even figured out how to make the world’s largest pieces of curved glass for one of our stores in Shanghai.

We’ve also learned more than a few things about stone. Like how to reveal granite’s true color with a blowtorch. And that sometimes granite has veins of color that have to be matched. We’ve also learned that getting these details perfect can feel like trying to move a mountain. Sometimes two. But in the end, the effort is worth it. Because steel, glass, and stone can combine to create truly unique and inspiring spaces.

We also understand that finding the right design for our stores is critical. We even built a full-scale facade of the Regent Street store in a Cupertino parking lot to be sure the design was right. Which taught us the value of seeing things full size. We once had a notion that ministores would offer the ultimate in convenience. Then we built one. Which showed us that bigger can actually be better. And we’ve learned that even when our stores are big, no detail is too small. This is something we learned all over again when we restored the Paris Opera store down to the last of its more than 500,000 tiles.

We’ve also learned that our customers like open spaces, glass staircases, and handcrafted oak tables. And that those spaces don’t need to smell like pine trees or tomatoes to make them inviting. We’re constantly working to make our stores more artful, more iconic, and more innovative. And we’re awfully proud of every single one. We’re proud of our stores not just because they’re successful, but because of everything they’ve taught us. All the ways Apple Stores have made Apple stronger as a company.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve learned that our stores are the embodiment of the Apple brand for our customers. Now, our customers just happen to be the entire reason we’re here, so let’s dedicate a few words to them.

Around the time we opened the store in Tysons Corner, in 2001, everyone else was trying to talk to their customers less. Which made us think that maybe we should talk to them more. Face-to-face if possible. So we’ve found ways to strike up a conversation at every possible opportunity. We talk while they play with the products on the tables. And when they join us for a workshop. These conversations have taught us that customers love our products, but what they really want is to make a scrapbook out of family photos. They want to make a movie about their kid. Or a website about traveling across the country.

Which has taught us that Apple Stores can and should be centers for creativity. And we’ve figured out through programs like Apple Camp and Youth Workshops that creativity doesn’t care about age. The movies and slideshows we’ve seen kids make are proof that all you need are the right tools and an idea. And we must be doing something right, because the kids’ smiles are just as big as ours. We’ve also learned that musicians can record an album in our stores that goes to the top of the charts. And that award-winning film directors are interested no just in our computers but in our workshops. We’ve learned a lot about having fun.

And we’ve learned our customers like to use our products for business too. Experience has taught us that having one Pro Day per week dedicated to business customers isn’t enough. That we need to be open for business very day. And have space devoted to business training sessions, workshops, and events. We’ve learned that every staff member should be just as fluent in the needs of a business customer as the needs of any other customer.

Our millions of conversations with customers of every stripe have taught us it’s not about making people feel like a computer or phone loves them. That’s impossible. Instead, it’s about giving people the tools to do what they love. And we’ve learned how to create amazing programs like One to One and Personal Setup to give people those tools. We created programs like these to replace fear with confidence. Because our customers have shown us that the ownership experience is even more important than the sale. We learned all this by asking questions. And genuinely listening to the answers.

And to be sure we’re hearing everything, we’ve learned to converse in 36 languages, and a few of the local dialects as well. We’ve even learned a few cultural things. The proper use of the word y’all, for example. And our Japanese customers one taught us that their superheroes don’t wear capes. Which also taught us to see feedback as a gift.

We’ve learned that a visit to the Genius Bar can fix more than just computers. It can also restore a customer’s relationship with Apple. And that we don’t need a minifridge stocked with free water to get people to talk to a Genius. Knowing they can get exactly the right answer when something isn’t working is enough. We even figured out how to shorten the time an in-store repair takes from seven days to one day. Our customers hold us to exceptionally high standards. So we’ve learned how to raise ours even higher.

325 store openings have taught us that a grand opening creates blocks and blocks of excitement. That people will stand in line for hours, even days, just to be among the first to walk through the front door. And to get a free T-shirt. Speaking of T-shirts, we’ve learned more than you can imagine about our own. We’ve found that when we wear black T-shirts, we blend in. And when we wear too many colors it’s confusing. But blue shirts are just right. We’ve also learned that it takes precisely 4,253 stitches to embroider the Apple logo on those blue shirts. And we even figured out which direction the stitches should go in.

When it comes to product launches, we’ve learned we have to work hard to ensure supply meets demand. If not on the first day, then soon thereafter. And we’ve learned how to put our own products to use in innovative ways in our stores. We’ve created entirely new systems like EasyPay to help our customers as efficiently as possible. We’ve replaced the red phone behind the Genius Bar with more expertise right in our stores. All of these experiences have made us smarter.

And at the very center of all we’ve accomplished, all we’ve learned over the past 10 years, are our people. People who understand how important art is to technology. People who match, and often exceed, the excitement of our customers on days we release new products. The more than 30,000 smart, dedicated employees who work so hard to create lasting relationships with the millions who walk through our doors. Whether the task at hand is fixing computers, teaching workshops, organizing inventory, designing iconic structures, inventing proprietary technology, negotiating deals, sweating the details of signage, or doing countless other things, we’ve learned to hire the best in every discipline.

We now see that it’s our job to train our people and then learn from them. And we recruit employees with such different backgrounds–teachers, musicians, artists, engineers–that there’s a lot they can teach us. We’ve learned how to value a magnetic personality just as much as proficiency. How to look for intelligence but give just as much weight to kindness. How to find people who want a career, not a job. And we’ve found that when we hire the right people, we can lead rather than manage. We can give each person their own piece of the garden to transform. We’ve learned our best people often provide the best training for the next generation. And that it’s important for every member of our staff to not only feel a connection to their store, but to the teams in Cupertino and to the stores around the world. Because the best ways of doing things usually translate, regardless of language or country.

We’ve also learned that due to the exceptional quality of our applicants, it can be harder to be hired at the Apple Store than in Cupertino. It can sometimes take two to three years to bring someone in. Not because they aren’t right for Apple. But because we want to be sure the opportunity we have to offer is right for them. Why have we learned to be so selective? So careful? Because our people are the soul of the Apple Stores. And together, our team is the strongest ever seen in retail.

As beautiful and iconic as our stores may be, the people who create and staff those stores are what matters most. So on this 3,652nd day, we say thank you to every single one of you. We say thank you to those who were there on the first day, and to those whose first day is today.

The past 10 years of the Apple Store have changed Apple as a company. Our experiences, our successes, even our occasional missteps, have made us better. They’ve made Apple better. And it’s because of those experiences, and the ways they’ve changed us, that we can’t wait to see what we’ll learn next. It’s been 10 years. What an amazing first step.

via Macrumors.com

The latest Customer Experience Forum took place on December 1^st 2010 in Bern, Switzerland and customer experience pioneers from Switzerland, Germany and Austria met to discuss the role of design thinking to create remarkable customer experiences. Participants from approx. 25 companies including Baloise Insurance, Zürich Life Insurance, Vodafone, BMW Financial Services, A1 Telekom Austria and Swisscom shared their experiences about managing the customer experience in their organizations.

Design Thinking in the Financial and Telecommunication Industry

Ira Holl, who is in charge of the Q110 branch of Deutsche Bank in Berlin, started the day with a keynote about her experiences of launching and managing a “bank of the future”. The vision of Q110 is to create a radically new retail banking experience and Ms. Holl and her team have completely redefined what customers can expect from a bank. The team has permission to experiment with new ideas which lead to occasional cooking shows, a Harrods trendshop for Christmas shopping as well as a café and lounge area that very often acts as the first touchpoint in the financial advisory process. Despite all these activities, Q110 is not just a playground but in fact a financially very profitable branch with enthusiastic customers who visit their bank not just for banking but also for other activities.

Christian Petit, Head of Swisscom Residential Customers, initiated a workshop and knowledge sharing session by asking “What is essential for a design thinking culture? What can be done on the level of an individual employee to live it every day?”. He also shared his experience of leading change at Swisscom from a technology focus to a customer experience and design thinking focus. The recommendations of this session included strategic considerations to foster a startup culture within the organization as well as concrete activities for managers to facilitate design thinking and to allow customer-centric innovation to emerge within the organization.

One central element of the Customer Experience Forum are case studies from participating companies. While I have not been able to attend all of them, I have summarized those where I participated.

BMW Financial Services: A “Key to Key” Customer Journey

BMW Financial Services shared their experience with rethinking and redesigning the customer repurchase decision at the end of the leasing cycle. The main goal is to keep customers loyal to a brand because once they switch to a different car brand, a quick win-back is not possible. The idealized vision of the customer journey is a “key-to-key” customer journey. When a leasing contract expires the customer should hand in his old key and pick up a new car with a new key.

Therefore BMW developed a sophisticated personalization system that allows to address the individual situation of each customer and includes customized up-selling offers to motivate customer would to upgrade his next car.

Swisscom Shop Redesign: The Difference Between Design and Design Thinking

The Brand Experience Team of Swisscom presented one of their latest projects – a redesign project of their retail shops – which turned out to be an excellent example of applying the design thinking and customer experience mindset in an organization.

Usually when companies decide to redesign their retail shops, the first thing they do is to hire famous interior designers and architects to come up with cutting-edge designs based on the company’s brand values and corporate design. Swisscom followed a completely different approach for its retail shop redesign project. The starting point was extensive research in existing shops to understand consumer behavior to understand how shops can enable and foster self-exploration by customers. With these insights, the team started to develop an initial store concept and tested this concept together with different experiments in various stores in Switzerland. In multiple iterations the team improved the initial concept, moved to different shops in different environments and performed new experiments with new prototypes. All of these activities focused on learning and improving the initial concept and the findings are now consolidated into a final design which will be rolled-out in all Swisscom stores in Switzerland.

This project is interesting because it shows the difference between a traditional “design approach” and a “design thinking approach”. A design approach, as described in the first paragraph with star designers and architects, would often focus on making things look nice and base retail concepts primarily on brand-values, modern architecture and existing rules of corporate design. This is not a criticism of designers or architects but instead of decision makers who think that “good design” primarily needs to be aesthetically appealing and then force designers into this work mode.

Following a design thinking approach, Swisscom incorporated the key principles of user-research and prototyping not just once in the development process but on an ongoing basis. The team has detached itself from the assumption that everything can be made perfect the first time and instead incorporated continuous learning and improvement activities in the development process. Each store acted as a prototype that was used to understand consumer behavior, learn from improvements and understand the financial impact of the new concept.

More Information about the Forum

Some of the presentations from the 3rd Customer Experience Forum and additional information about the different case studies can be found online on the website for the Customer Experience Forum. Stimmt AG has also written a summary about the even in German on their website at Customer Experience Forum 3 – Man kann nicht Nicht-Designen.

The next Customer Experience Forum is already scheduled: June 16^th 2011

The next Customer Experience Forum is already scheduled for June 16^th 2011 in Bern, Switzerland. The organizers, Helmut Kazmaier from Stimmt AG and Miriam Bleuler from Swisscom look forward to your E-Mails to discuss a participation in this event in 2011.

Especially if you would like to share your experiences from a customer experience project or how design thinking has been incorporated in your organization, don’t hesitate to contact Helmut or Miriam to discuss your participation. While the conference was so far in German only, there are plans to open an English-speaking track and participants from non-German speaking countries are welcome to join as well.

Project or Department Focus

Incorporation of new methods and tools within certain projects or in certain departments usually means that the concept of customer journeys, qualitative user research, and similar principles are used within a specific project. This is mostly done by passionate individuals or through external consultants.

Staff Function

A dedicated team, usually with top-management support, works as an internal consultancy with other teams to bring in new methods and knowledge to incorporate customer experience in multiple departments. This team is usually staffed with either internal employees who had success with individual projects previously, or external recruits that bring in new knowledge and skills into the organization.

Organizational Change Team

The team is not just working on supporting projects, but focuses mainly on training other employees to incorporate these methods. This is only possible with top-management support. The goal is to introduce new methods and tools in the organization, and facilitate the shift away from internal perspectives towards an outside perspective that puts the customer experience at the center of the organization’s strategy.

The Road to a Customer Experience Driven Organization

The road to implement a customer experience driven strategy in an organization leads in my opinion from a project/department focus to a dedicated staff function. The important aspect is is that these stages are necessary to have some projects that can be used a “best practice” case studies in the organization. This then builds the basis to create traction for organizational change.

These are three common patterns on how companies have implemented customer experience in their organization. Nevertheless the key for a successful customer experience strategy is to find a unique approach for each organization because simply copying other companies’ strategies is not enough.