Get in touch!

If you are interested in participating in the Customer Experience Forum in Berne, Switzerland you can find more information in this PDF file, the agenda for the day is listed below.  In order to discuss your participation you can contact either Helmut Kazmaier (helmut.kazmaier@stimmt.ch) from Stimmt AG or Miriam Bleuler (Miriam.bleuler@swisscom.com) from Swisscom.

If you click on the picture below you will be redirected to the Customer Experience Forum Facebook Page which has a more information as well.

The event will be mostly in German, if you don’t speak German get in touch with the organizers to discuss how you can participate.

Participate and share your knowledge!

If you are working in an organization that has done projects in the field of customer experience management you are invited to participate and share your knowledge in one of the workshops. All you need to do is present one of your projects and the lessons you have learned from this project and you can participate in this invitation only event. I have done that and I can guarantee that the time you will spend on creating this poster (templates are provided) will be offset by the people you will meet and the ideas and knowledge you will get on that day.

A unique cooperation between Stimmt AG and Swisscom

The Customer Experience Forum was initiated as a joint project between Stimmt AG and Swisscom. Stimmt AG has a 10 year history of user & customer experience consulting and is successfully organizing the Customer Experience Forum, Intranet Breakfast and other events in Switzerland. Swisscom is the biggest telecommunications company in Switzerland and has performed a radical strategic change in recent years. The organization changed their strategic direction from a technological focus to a customer experience focus and has pulled-off one of the most challenging cultural change projects I have come across so far. In this event selected Swisscom employees share their experiences with this transformation process and their new approach to developing new products and services.

Discussions with active customer experience practitioners

I have participated in the last Customer Experience Forum in November and the event has positively surprised me. The limitation in number of participants and the knowledge exchange that emerges in such a setting was extremely valuable. The mini-workshops stimulate discussion of new telecommunications pricing models, tangible insurance products and customer experience oriented organizational structures. The best is that these discussion are with people who have actually done these kinds of projects. Additionally you will also have a chance to visit and experience the “Swisscom Brand Gym”, a unique office environment at Swisscom that is used as a the central hub within Swisscom to facilitate the change process in the organization. A first impression of the Brand Gym can be seen in the picture on the right.

Agenda (German only)

08:15 Frühstück / CX-Reise
Für alle Frühaufsteher gibt es im wunderschönen Ambiente des Café Mélange des BrandGym ein Frühstück und die erste Gelegenheit, sich kennen zu lernen. Wer zudem vorab einen Überblick über die CX-Welt und aktuelle Beispiele erhalten will, kann mit uns auf eine kurze CX-Reise gehen. Eine gute Gelegenheit, in die richtige Stimmung zu kommen und fit in den Tag zu starten.

09:00 Begrüssung und Einführung
Wir starten gemeinsam und geben eine kurze Orientierung über den Tag und den Ablauf.

09:15 Führung durch das BrandGym
Wer das das BrandGym kennt, weiss, dass dies ein besonderer Ort ist. In kleinen Gruppen bekommen wir einen kurze Führung und Erklärung zur Entstehung, den Hintergründen und Gedanken, die das BrandGym geformt haben.

09:30 Keynote von Christina Taylor, Head of Brand Experience bei Swisscom
MaNagINg By CaRPET – oder wie bringe ich men- schenzentriertes Design in ein technikorientiertes Unternehmen? Vor zwei Jahren hat die Visionärin die Ärmel hochgekrempelt mit dem Ziel, die Zukunft von Swisscom zu gestalten, Dinge zu vereinfachen und Kundenherzen zu gewinnen. Zwei Jahre später sind 500 Produktmanager ausgebildete Customer Experience Designer und aus dem Konferenz- zentrum ist eine kreative Oase rund um Human Centered Design entstanden, das BrandGym – ein Ort, wo Wissen lebendig wird. Christina lässt uns einen Blick hinter den Vorhang werfen und lüftet nicht zuletzt das Geheimnis, wieso sie mit einem farbigen Teppich am meisten Manage- mentattention erhalten hat!

10:00 Eröffnung Vernissage CX-Fundstücke
Das CX-Fundstück ist die Eintrittskarte für das CX-Forum. Ein Objekt pro Gast mit Bezug zu Customer Experience und eine kurze Geschichte, warum das Objekt ausgewählt wurde. So entsteht eine gemeinsame Vernissage an CX-Fundstücken, die inspirieren, zu Diskussionen anregen und Aufschluss über die Paten geben. Erlaubt ist, was beeindruckt: Bücher, Blogs, Filme, Podcasts, Bilder, Geschichten, Gegenstände und und und… Wir sind gespannt.

10:30 Fallstudien Block I
Die ersten zwei Fallstudien werden zur Wahl stehen. Nach der Vorstellung des Beispiels gehen wir in einer interaktiven Diskussion im World Cafe Format den angesprochenen Themen, gewonnen Erkenntnissen und aufgebrachten Fragen weiter auf den Grund.

12:00 Mittag
Zeit für eine Stärkung am feinen Buffet und Gelegenheit weiter zu diskutieren, Kontakte zu knüpfen, CX-Fundstücke zu entdecken oder einfach zu geniessen.

13:15 Marktplatz | CX-Herausforderungen
Bis zu fünf Unternehmen stellen eine aktuelle Herausforderung vor und laden zum Nachdenken, Diskutieren und Feedback geben ein. Das Ganze in lockerer Marktplatz Atmosphäre bei Kaffee und Dessert.

14:00 Fallstudien Block II
Wieder können die Teilnehmenden eine von zwei Fallstudien wählen und anschliessend wie zuvor vertiefen.

15:30 Pause
Verarbeiten des Erlebten? Gedanken austauschen? Ein Kaffee in Ruhe? Alles ist möglich.

15:45 Ausblick Customer Experience Network
Wir geben einen kurzen Überblick über das Customer Experience Network, die weiteren Gefässe und Formate und die Möglichkeiten sich einzubringen.

16:00 Visuelles Kommunizieren – Highlights des Tages
In kleinen Gruppen bekommen wir einen kurzen Einblick in die Kunst des visuellen Kommunizierens und können gleich an einem konkreten Beispiel üben und unser Highlight des Tages visualisieren und zusamentragen.

16:30 Offizielles Ende
«All good things come to an end.» So auch das CX Forum. Vermutlich viel zu schnell. Wir verabschieden die weit Gereisten und freuen uns auf den Apéro, den wir ganz entspannt geniessen, dabei den Tag reflektieren und Pläne für die Zukunft schmieden. So fällt der Abschied weniger schwer, denn nach dem Forum ist vor dem Forum.

Here are two videos of iPad users who you would probably not include in the typical group of users for such a device. Nevertheless the experience that this 2 year old kid and the 99 year old grandmother have with the iPad is once-in a lifetime experience. I think it is well worth your time if you invest the 10 minutes and just observe how they interact with the device.

A 2,5 Year-Old Has a First Encounter with An iPad

iPad Helps 99-Year-Old Woman Rediscover Writing

There is also a longer version available with an interview with Virginia.

After watching these clips of “extreme users”, you have observed two humans whose life has just changed:

• A 2 year old child who will never know what a world without tablet computers is like, and
• A 99 year old grandmother that becomes an active, creating part of a digital society.

And the core learning is: Contrary to many industry pundits and technology experts, users don’t care about multitasking or a webcam because the iPad opens up so many new opportunities for them that the device becomes a life-changer. These two videos are also an excellent starting point for a conversation in your organization what this new device category ultimately means for your business.

Nevertheless the question is not what application you could transfer to the iPad in the next 3 months. The ultimate question is: How can you solve your customers problems with this new device category? Which business opportunities will emerge with this new category of devices in the coming 18 to 24 months? How can you trigger new business opportunities and leverage existing ones?

New iPad applications: An opportunity for Customer Co-Design?

I have run several customer co-design workshops and the experiences I have made during these workshops confirmed that this is a useful approach to identify opportunities for product and service improvements.

In a customer co-design workshop you bridge the gap between designer (product management, software development, product design) and the customer by integrating the customer into the actual design process. This has the benefit that you don’t need to “extract” implicit knowledge from your customer but instead give him the tools and method to express his requirements.

The iPad is an an excellent opportunity to integrate customers into the design process and develop new ideas with your customers. And the best of all, you can probably do this by yourself:

1. Buy at few iPads – If you are not in the US you can either wait until they are available in Europe or tap into other sources (eBay, friends, your next business trip) to get a device.
2. Invite a few customers and use the iPads together with your customers, let customers explore the device and imagine how the iPad and applications on the iPad could help them solve their problems, run their business and enjoy life.
3. Brainstorm ideas, sketch prototypes for new applications and imagine different business models that utilize the iPad.

This is not a guarantee that you will indeed find the next breakthrough idea after one event, but it is a big step into that direction. Certainly the selection of customers is important and the workshop itself should not become an “all you can wish for” event but with the right approach it will help you find answers to the biggest question: How will the iPad impact your business?

Design Thinking in Action in 2009

One of my personal highlights of 2009 was our “design thinking & business innovation” course in which business students develop innovative solutions to problems that are defined by industry partners. In this course we follow a methodology that has been originally developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University and which we have adopted to meet the requirements of teaching the course at a business school. Our student teams developed solutions ranging from community involvement in the life-science industry to personalized sales consultation for telecommunication services as well as a new printer concept which turns the printer into multimedia terminal in your living room.

Besides the these teaching projects, we have also applied our “design thinking & business innovation methodology” in a number of workshops with industry partners to bring the idea of concept design and design thinking into organizations. These projects were about: 1) ensuring end-user acceptance for a IT-based CRM and sales solution, 2) training employees the skills to run design projects themselves and to train other employees, 3) setting up and coaching/managing an internal design innovation team at a major financial service provider in Germany, 4) organizing a co-design workshop with customers to improve the service experience for a German premium car manufacturer

Several observations I have made in these workshops:

1. Most organizations have idea management processes and systems in place but this is not enough to trigger breakthrough ideas in an organization. You cannot “manage” and “analyze” yourself towards innovation.
2. If employees are given the freedom to innovate and experiment with ideas for new products and services, ideas will emerge that are not just incremental improvements but truly breakthrough ideas. With our approach we basically define rules that overrun corporate rules to unleash a surge of motivation and creativity.
3. The way many large organizations are managed and controlled is exactly the opposite of management and control that is necessary to allow the emergence of breakthrough innovations. Nevertheless changing “the organization” or “changing the culture” is a long and tedious process that is not measured in weeks and months but years and decades.
4. If you want to foster change, you have to start with implementing an agile “organization within the organization”. This internal startup needs dedicated employees who have mechanisms and support to circumvent control mechanisms that are necessary to manage and keep large organizations in control.

These findings are by themselves not radically new. The interesting aspect is the process we have followed in these projects to develop customer-oriented solutions with minimal budgets, limited time frames and various other constraints that are present an mature organizations.

The documentation of these findings as well as a detailed description of our projects will be my main academic focus in 2010. In the coming months I will be working on my Ph.D. thesis and synthesize all the experiences, results and data that we have gathered in the last months and years into a coherent document. So stay tuned for updates about this.

Customer Experience Labs in 2010: The same but different

While I won’t be focusing on much else than my Ph.D. thesis I am in the process of redefining and changing the “Customer Experience Labs” blog to better reflect the development of the customer experience management field since I started writing three years ago. While I still strongly believe in the concept of creating remarkable customer experiences through innovative products and services to gain a competitive advantage, I think the “customer experience community” has evolved in the last three years.

The State of Customer Experience Management and Design

I think we have come quite far in the last years with more and more companies understanding that customer-orientation is very often too abstract but by focusing on the customer experience a new, more concrete understanding and frame of the customer’s requirements and needs can evolve.

In this process, two trends shape our understanding of customer experience. A number of innovative companies emerge who bring methods and tools from User-Centered Design, Industrial and Interaction Design and transfer them to design remarkable customer experiences. These methods and tools are getting more and more accepted. Therefore doing an ethnographic study instead of a questionnaire based survey is a valid option and nobody is irritated when you test a low-fidelity prototype with a selected group of customers to get feedback as early as possible in the design process.

At the same time many companies start to use the term “customer experience” to spice up their marketing material. The services are the same, they just have a different label. There is nothing wrong with that but I think one should be aware if you are actually confronted with a new set of innovative methods that help you to transform the customer’s experience or if it is simply the same call center solution that has been turned into a “customer experience platform”.

Of course user-centric, customer-experience focused design principles are not yet established in every organization but I think a blog like the “Customer Experience Labs” should discuss new topics and address emerging issues and not try to advance the diffusion of well-known practices.

Based on these findings as well as other trends I plan to put my focus in 2010 on three areas:

1. Leading the realization of innovation

2. The Tipping Point of the Mobile Revolution

3. Innovative Pricing to influence the customer experience

Leading the realization of innovation

You think you have a great idea, now what? The customer experience and innovation community is obsessed with new ideas and how these can be integrated into new concepts for products or services. The only problem is that most of the time these ideas are not as useful as everybody thinks they are. If you have done a sufficient number of design projects with different groups of people you usually come up with pretty similar ideas. Or as the head of design for a major printer manufacturer told me once “I have observed this industry for more than 15 years and I have to tell you, we have every variation of printer design that you can imagine in our design studio. The big question is, which one do we bring to market?”

I strongly believe that ideas individually are not the key ingredient for successful innovation. The key is instead the execution and implementation of these ideas, overcoming obstacles and the persistence that is necessary to realize an idea and bring a conceptual prototype to market.

This becomes increasingly important for organizations that are already successful in a market and which have to find the balance between maintaining the status quo and driving innovation to launch new products and services. While setting the goal that a certain percentage of revenue has to come from new products is one step in the right direction, the question how to design and manage an organization that is able to achieve this goal needs to be answered as well.

So in 2010 it is not just about designing solutions but also implementing and delivering these solutions to the customer – within a mature organization as well as within a startup. Facilitating and managing the change that is necessary to deliver remarkable customer experiences through innovative products and services.

The mobile revolution gains traction

The first mobile application that I have developed was a simple WAP-based application to monitor air pollution in a project for the Tyrolean Government in 1999. A lot has changed since then and while the iPhone was an industry game-changer, the real change is happening now with other mobile phone companies adapting to Apple and the iPhone. The move away from feature phones towards smartphones, the increasing power and functionality of mobile operating systems and the increasing availability of mobile broadband connectivity are creating an ongoing stream of new opportunities. The latest Quantcast Mobile Trends report gives a clear indication in which direction the mobile web is directed to:

Concrete examples are the rapid adoption of Android OS, the increased use of mobile application stores (i.e. Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile), the potential of carrier billing (paying for mobile content and applications through your phone bill) and the number of streaming music applications for smartphones like Pandora, that will substitute your storage based MP3 player in the next 5 years.

Many companies have already developed mobile applications, but most of them followed the principle “we have something available for the desktop/web, let’s bring it to the mobile phone”. The next generation of mobile applications will not just be a translation of existing apps on mobile phones but instead take the user behavior into consideration as well as the simple fact that the mobile phone has become the most pervasively used device besides our wallets and keys. The best example for this are mobile banking applications: The need to do money transfers while on the go is probably very limited, nevertheless basic account information would be great. Even though I am able to receive emails and even my credit card invoice on my mobile phone I still can’t track my account balance conveniently on my BlackBerry smartphone. Hopefully this will change in 2010.

The mobile market offers huge opportunities for companies who understand the “mobile behavior” or “mobile lifestyle” of their potential users and then come up with solutions that integrate into existing behavior. I think 2010 is the year when we will see large organization bring radically new solutions into the mobile space and use them to offer new services and build customer loyalty.

Prototyping Innovative Pricing Concepts and Business Models

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, creates the best customer experience by bringing the lowest prices to customers. Yet many people understand customer experience principles as a way to charge higher prices. Sure, that’s one way to approach customer experience management but I think the most powerful untapped area is by reducing prices but still delivering a remarkable experience for customers and through this generate increased revenues and profits. Economics 101 tells us that when lowering prices, volume has to increase in order to maintain or increase revenues. Innovative approaches to pricing as well as new business models could create this increased demand by better meeting and addressing the customers “willingness to pay”.

That sounds easy in theory but there is a huge untapped field that needs to be addressed: How do we prototype innovative pricing concepts and new business models? And how can these new concepts be tested before rolling them out and maybe exposing your bottom-line? Just as you can’t introduce a new car by driving around on a parking lot you can’t test new prices by simply showing customers a prototype in an artificial situation. I see a lot of opportunities in this area and I plan to focus on the area of “prototyping innovative pricing concepts and business models” in 2010 on this site.

What are you interested in?

Most importantly I would also like to hear your interests, suggestions and comments what you would like to read in 2010 on this site.

Just drop me a question, comment, critique and I will try to address it in a dedicated blog post. You can do this by either leaving a comment on this blog post (you can do this anonymously as well) or just send me an email at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com

If you are intersted in the topic of customer experience managemend and design thinking and you in Switzerland, Southern Germany or Austria let me know, maybe we have a chance to grab a coffee and discuss experiences and share ideas.

Yet if you are facing an operational decision whether you should increase the number of agents in your customer care center or if you should save costs because service-levels are still “good enough” you know that this question is more complex. One has to accept that there are times when you are not able to deliver a remarkable customer experience and I personally believe that consciously accept these situations as outliers is not a problem. But there is one area where you should not accept trade-offs: strategic decisions.

Don’t let operational goals interfere with strategic goals

If you are truly committed to delivering remarkable customer experiences you have to form your design decisions with the customer experience in mind. Kevin Mattice has written an article where he calls designers to be arbiters of truth who protect the customer experience.

Designers should be arbiters of the truth: They should be the kind of people who stand up and tell it like it is, and that usually calls for courage. Fixing a bad customer experience requires the courage to admit that something’s wrong, and it only comes from a willingness to be transparent, to be open and honest, to communicate, and to be accountable. Good design is all that, and good designers are as transparent as they can be, even if it hurts them. Sometimes it does.

Now you might say this is a mundane statement. But just have a look at the integration of MySpace with News Corp and you will understand that this is not just an empty call to action. At News Corp strategic design decisions have been made with a focus on short-term profits instead of the long-term customer experience. If you have been wondering why MySpace lost its edge over Facebook make sure to read the article “The rise and fall of MySpace” in the Financial Times that brings light to some decisions made at News Corp. Here is the section that was most eye-opening to me:

[…] Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.” (emphasis added).

News Corp, meanwhile, contends that the request to adopt Ajax came at the beginning of 2009 – when Facebook had already established its supremacy. In other words, it was too little, too late.

Such a decision is hard to comprehend but the responsible advertising manager might have said: “Well, if we change the system now, revenues might drop now and I risk losing my job. If we keep it this way, we might lose revenues later on, but at least I will keep my job for now”.

Conclusion

Consciously making operative decisions to accept a trade-off on the customer experience can be accepted if they are indeed based on operational conditions – increased call-center activity or short-term product and service problems. Nevertheless strategic decision should never be influenced by operative goals and responsible managers have to ensure that employees are able to openly communicate – to speak the truth – when short-term profit gains might have a negative long-term impact on the customer experience.

Read the full article “The rise and fall of MySpace” in the Financial Times

Read the full article “The Clear Way” by Kevin Mattice

Customer experience management can not just focus on customer service or branding because a company’s products and (core) services are ultimately the drivers of customer value and therefore essential for the customers experience.

When flying with a low-cost airline it is accepted to take the bus to get on the plane. Yet when you are booked on a business class ticket with a traditional carrier everybody expects to use the jet bridge to enter the plane. Customers can indeed have a great experience even though they have to take the bus because the price of their ticket is so much lower.

"The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine" is an article in Wired Magazine that applies a similar understanding of the elements that constitute a great customer experience.

Even though the business model was not successful, the founders of Pure Digital and creators of the now famous Flip Camera found out something interesting about customer expectations:

"Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway."

The article continues and describes the success of the company’s next product, the Flip Ultra:

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. But it was small , inexpensive , and so simple to operate that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

The success speaks for itself:

Today—just two years later—the Flip Ultra and its subsequent revisions are the best-selling video cameras in the US, commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.

The article presents some additional examples ranging from MP3, to unmanned aircraft to healthcare and closes with a statement from Pure Digital founder why Flip knockoffs from the likes of Sony have failed:

"I think it’s because we have a better product." What’s odd is that executives at Sony and Canon would likely say the same thing—after all, their models have far more features and often produce sharper images. But Fleming-Wood is using a different definition of "better." He now defines quality entirely in terms of ease of use—how easy it is to shoot and share the video.

So what is the essence of a great customer experience? It is not about the number of features and it is not about providing always more and more functionality and amenities (like in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel or with a Sony DSL camera).

A great customer experience can also be the result of a product that offers the core functionality in a way that is easy to use and in a quality that is just good enough and a prices that creates a remarkable value offer for the customer.

Read the full article in Wired magazine.

The best indicator that you – as a customer – just had a "Wow" experience is that you feel a strong desire to talk about this remarkable experience with your friends. And this is exactly what companies have to aim for: not just serve their customer but to wow them so that customers start to talk about your products, services and brand.

The Elements of Wow Experiences

Wharton School of Business has teamed up with the Retail Council of Canada to identify the elements that constitute a Wow experience and have identified five major areas:

• Engagement: being polite, genuinely caring and interested in helping, acknowledging and listening.
• Executional excellence: patiently explaining and advising, checking stock, helping to find products, having product knowledge and providing unexpected product quality.
• Brand Experience: exciting store design and atmosphere, consistently great product quality, making customers feel they’re special and that they always get a deal.
• Expediting: being sensitive to customers’ time on long check-out lines, being proactive in helping speed the shopping process.
• Problem Recovery: helping resolve and compensate for problems, upgrading quality and ensuring complete satisfaction.

The article also stresses the importance of selecting the right staff that is able to take basic information about shopper preferences and convert that knowledge to customized service. This is in my perspective the essential aspect for delivering remarkable customer experiences.

Delivering Wow is hard, but it can be done

When reflecting on these elements it is obvious that it is not “rocket science” that is required to deliver remarkable customer experiences. On the contrary, it is not  the most sophisticated strategy that will bring success but the discipline and committed of the organization and its employees to deliver “Wow” every day to every customer.

A "Culture of Wow", a commitment that is lived in the organization where every retail employee understands that it is necessary to Wow and not just to serve, is requires for organizations to achieve this.

References

• Getting to ‘Wow’: Consumers Describe What Makes a Great Shopping Experience
• Discovering ‘WOW’ — A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North America

One of the best indicators of a customer experience focused organization is the commitment from top-management not only to deliver ordinary products and services but to go the extra mile and surprise and delight customers with a company’s offerings. If top management wants to show real commitment, it has to experience the real customer experience in order to ensure that decision are made based on reality and not on a“virtual reality” based on product demonstrations in the boardroom.

Product Demonstrations vs. Experiencing the Customers’ Experience

In an article from “The Truth About Cars” I have found an interesting statement that described how top-management at General Motors experienced their products:

As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models. The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

For a number of reasons, middle-management at General Motors decided that it might be better to deliver a staged customer experience to top-management instead of showing them the real customer experience of driving a GM car. Of course this behavior was probably induced by top-management itself. But for now the cause is not import, the impact this has had is much more important.

If this would have happened in the accounting departments, auditors might have discovered this lack of transparency and there would have been investigations about false accounting practices and false reporting. But in product development the only signs for misinterpretation through staged customer experiences are lackluster sales as well as a management board which is unable to explain them since they have only experienced the greatest products.

Experience is the best Teacher

It is essential for top management to experience the “real” customer experience first-hand. If you are not doing that it is just like looking at your balance sheet that is not audited but merely created to give an impression that everything is fine.

If you are working in a truly customer-oriented company, your CEO will spend time right where the company’s customers are. Without assistants, without a secretary and without his direct reports who ensure that everything is working perfectly. If your CEO is not doing that, you don’t truly have a focus on the customer and one might end up in a situation just like GM – wondering why nobody is buying your amazing products that have been presented in the corporate boardroom.

Read the full article: Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved

How would the focus in your organization change, if your corporate vocabulary is dominated by words and associations from either competitors, shareholder value or customers? If you talk about your customers all the time, your focus tends to shift on customers and through this you could take a big step in getting closer to your customers.

With this in mind it is interesting to see a blog post by Ian Sefferman, a former Amazon employee, about the use of the word customer experience at Amazon.

Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company.

Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?

I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.

The implications for your business

Reflecting on your corporate vocabulary and how it is used could provide valuable insights about the real focus in your organization. Is your organization focused on itself and communication is mostly about your organization, its products, management and processes or do you focus on the customer and actually mirror this in your language? Is your organization’s vocabulary focused on preserving the status quo or on shaping the future? If you want to change your corporate culture, how would you need to change the language that is used in your organization?

Research Potential

I think it would be very interesting to do a analysis of documents, emails and other communication in an organization to identify the degree of customer orientation and customer focus. Doing this with a longitudinal analysis one might get an interesting measurement tool about change within an organization.

IBM is a great example of a corporation that has successfully shifted from a hardware business that was faced with price erosion and increased competition towards a service business. In 2007 revenues from service business represented more than 55% of IBMs revenues compared to 32% in 1997, in the same time-span hardware revenue declined from 47% to 21% (see Annual Report 1997 and Annual Report 2007).

This shift was not without problems as the Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services” shows.

At the same time, Big Blue was facing a problem experienced by many services businesses that rely on a heavy element of direct interaction with customers. The more that sales increased, the more people it had to recruit, in a linear progression that would ultimately have been unsustainable.

In order to overcome these challenges, IBM approached this from three perspectives:

Standardization

In effect, IBM set out to standardize the way it “manufactures” services, so that exactly the same processes determined how an as­signment was carried out in Egypt as in the Philippines. “The real scale comes out of doing the work in a codified way,” says Mr Daniels. “The key breakthrough was to ask ‘How do you do the work at the lowest-level components?’”

Technology

The technology IBM has applied to services comes in two parts. One involves raising productivity by automating some repetitious work. Turning repeatable processes into software that can be used widely in similar assignments has played to an IBM strength, since it is the world’s second biggest software company, after Microsoft.

The second technology development holds the greatest promise for the future, says Mr Daniels. It involves inventing new ways to solve customers’ problems, by applying the sort of deep computing skills that have long lain at the heart of IBM’s business.

Anthropology

[…] the services research arm employs anthropologists and other social scientists to investigate how to make services engagements more effective.

Overall, in spite of the increasing use of technology, Mr Morris says of services: “It is fundamentally a human enterprise.”

How does this impact your customer experience?

Designing a service that provides a remarkable experience is one thing, consistently delivering this service with the expected quality is even more important. Businesses that ignore the service delivery aspect will see themselves confronted with the problem that their services – as remarkable as they might have been on a small scale – simply don’t hold up when they need to be rolled out on a larger scale.

And if you cannot consistently deliver a service, all your efforts to create interactions that lead to remarkable experience will have been to no avail.

Read the full Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services”.

Customer experience management is not the successor of CRM, it is not a better word for call center management and it is not about “staging” some interactions with customer services.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (shown in the picture above presenting the Kindle 2 ebook Reader), explains his understanding of customer experience in the BusinessWeek article “How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking”:

“Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience,” he says. “Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations.”

So a customer experiences includes all encounters and interactions that customers have with your product, services and brand. The core is to deliver customer value through each of these three areas and not just by doing “a little bit customer experience management in the call center”.

With such an understanding you also see that the biggest potential for remarkable customer experience lies in the core functionality and price of your offerings.  Only if you shift your attention to these areas, you can truly create a remarkable different customer experience.

Amazon and the Kindle:

Looking at Amazon from this perspective, it becomes clear why an online retailer would develop an eBook reader like the Kindle. This device would significantly improve what is most important for an online retailer: instant availability of books and cheaper prices of electronic editions while at the same time revolutionizing the book industry.

Read the full article “How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking”.