The way we talk not only represents who we are but also influences what we might turn into. This is not just true for individuals but also for organizations. The vocabulary that is used within an organization is a mirror of the organizations culture.

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.

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Increasingly companies that have originally been focused solely on products are shifting their focus towards services and the combination of their products with services in order to countervail the commoditization of their products. In this process of “servitization of products” businesses see themselves confronted with the challenge of scaling their service operations to maintain growth and profitability.

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”.

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What is “the customer experience”? A lot of people wonder is meant with customer experience. The problem is that the term customer experience is used ambiguously and too often just to present old wine in new bottles.

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”.

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Did you ever think what your life will be in 2019? How will your company change in the coming 10 years? Will you still be working at the same company?

While it is impossible to predict the future, it is possible to envision the future and understand the factors that might influence work and life in the coming years. Personally and Professionally.

Microsoft just published a series of videos where they envision the future of work and life in the year 2019. From their websites, the Microsoft Office Labs:

Take a step into the future and get a glimpse into how technology may transform the way we live and work in the years ahead. Explore some of our concepts for how leading edge technologies might be used in real world settings – such as health care, manufacturing, banking and retail – over the next 5-10 years.

Here is the video that summarizes the different future visions.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage ">Video: Future Vision Montage </a>

Other concepts

Other concepts that are shown on their site (some of them are already a little bit older) are about using Touch Walls, Health Future Vision, Manufacturing Future Vision, Banking Future Vision and Retail Future Vision.

What is the value of such "predictions”?

First of all, these are not predictions. The future is not predicted but created – these videos should merely act as inspiration and vision to help understand what the influencing factors are.

The point is not to say that “this won’t come true” but instead “how could this come true”. Understanding the emerging technologies and evolving trends through experience prototypes provides the basis to not just image additional scenarios where these technologies might come into our lives but to actually realize them.

What are the trends that might impact your personal life, your professional life and your organization in the future? If you have never thought about it, then maybe times of economic and financial uncertainty are exactly the point where you should do this.

Image courtesy of MichaelMarlatt

Posted in customer experience, future, trends | Permalink | 1 Comment »

Every retailer has at some point thought about the design of his retail stores in order to create a remarkable customer experience with the goal to maximize revenues. The design of retail stores with customer experience in mind is a complex task and usually a lot of focus is put on the stores environment, the stimulation of the customer’s senses and extraordinary service.

With all these different areas that provide opportunities to design remarkable experiences, the ultimate question remains: What are the areas of customer experience design that will have a direct impact on your sales?

Let them touch and they will buy

A recent study has shown that the longer people touch certain products, the higher is the probability that they will actually buy the product. The researchers from Ohio State University and Illinois State University discovered this by asking participants about their willingness to pay for a product in a bidding process depending on the time they have hold the cup in their hands. In case your products are locked away in a glass showcase or – even worse – have a sign that says "don’t touch" you should think if there might be a better solution to present your products and give customer a chance to experience them. You might be missing out significant amount of sales.

Thinking about these findings, I asked myself: What is really the essence of a remarkable shopping experience? What drives people to buy instead of just look around?

The reason why people enter your shop

It is clear that not every potential customer enters a shop to make a purchase. Sometimes people enter your shop just to look around and collect information. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the underlying reason why people enter your shop:

Customers enter your shop because they want to experience your products, not your shop.

The focus of designing retail shopping experiences is therefore on designing opportunities for the customer to experience the product as realistically as possible and not to design the shop so that it creates a better experience.

Customer want to experience what it is like to own your products – your shop should be designed to help create these "product discovery experiences".

Exclusive interior is overrated

Following this approach, it becomes obvious that exclusive and expensive interior does not necessary lead to a better shopping experience. Potential customers will enter your shop because they want to experience your products, not to see a nice shop. Just ask yourself how this exclusive wood boarding will influence the "product discovery experience".

“But what about exclusive fashion boutiques?” you might ask. “They have nice shops with expensive interior so it must have an impact, right?”. Yes, they have expensive interior but the interior is secondary. The primary experience driver is the interaction with the sales clerk who will "simulate" real world experiences by telling you how great this new suit or dress looks on you. This is a simulation of the real-life effect that you want to achieve with your exclusive clothes, handbag or watch, created by employees in a personalized “product discovery experience”. A pleasant environment plays a role to create a remarkable experience, but it is not the key driver of the experience.

The implications for your business

If you are responsible for designing a retail experience or shop for your business, you should ask yourself the following question: Are you designing a "shop experience" or are you designing a "product discovery experience"? If you approach the design problem from a "product discovery experience" perspective, you should identify the design elements that contribute to a simulation of the effects of owning your products. Let your customers feel what it is like to own your products.

Approaching the retail shopping experience problem from this perspective, I am sure you will come up with countless opportunities to create a truly remarkable customer experience that will not just make shopping more fun, but also influence your bottom-line.

 

Images courtesy of [silent7seven] and [esp22]

Posted in customer experience, experience design, retail | Permalink | 3 Comments »