The most popular article on this site is the comparison of different customer experience strategies with examples from the Ritz-Carlton Hotels and IKEA. The essence of the article also reflects my personal understanding and believes about customer experience: A remarkable customer experience is the result of an unexpectedly high customer value.

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.

Posted in customer experience, customer value | Permalink | 1 Comment »

If your organization is committed to delivering remarkable customer experiences then simply serving your customers is not enough. It is essential to go the extra mile and use each interaction with customers as an opportunity to "wow" them. "Wow" moments are hard to explain but everyone has experienced these moments when one is just blown away by the efforts retail staff takes to ensure customer satisfaction.

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

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Have you ever wondered why GMs top-management never understood why their customers are not buying their cars? Because they have fooled themselves (or have been fooled) and never experienced the real customer experience. Management got lost in a disconnected reality that was based on staged product demonstrations with customized products that were build for one reason: to make top management believe that GM is producing great cars.

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

Posted in customer experience, management | Permalink | 2 Comments »

The relationship between Design Thinking and Management is receiving a lot of attention recently and it seems that managers can indeed achieve superior results when they apply a “design mindset” to solve business problems. At the University of St. Gallen we have a unique course called Design Thinking and Business Innovation which is based on a cooperation between Prof. Walter Brenner, University of St. Gallen and Prof. Larry Leifer, Stanford University, to teach master students the philosophy and principles of Design Thinking. Four weeks after the presentation in Stanford, the final presentation and design exhibition are scheduled for July 6^th 2009, 12:30 – 16:00 at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

As a reader of this site I would like to invite you to join our presentation and experience the design process and the prototypes that our student design teams have developed for our corporate partners.

Our students and corporate partners

The course is based on the Stanford ME310 course that has been taught at Stanford University for more than 30 years and which has been adopted to meet the special environment and requirements at a business school. A team of students together with a corporate partner will work on a problem statement to develop a conceptual solution by following a methodology that focuses heavily on prototypes. This year’s corporate partners were BASF, Lonza and Swisscom and our students have spent the last 10 months to solve the given problem and come up with innovative solutions.

The project proposals

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

The end of a exciting journey for this year’s class

At the final presentation the student teams are going to present their final conceptual prototype as well as the milestones that lead them to this prototype and the learnings and considerations that formed their decisions. Our students have been working long hours and many nights to find the most promising solution and they have once again shown the great results that a team of motivated student is able to achieve.

Join our presentations!

One month after the presentations and EXPE in Stanford, on Monday July 6th 2009 , the students will present their projects in St.Gallen. They will show their developed prototypes, insights, results as well as the design development process. After the presentation there will be an exhibition (EXPE) where visitors will be able to experience the different prototypes and talk to the student designers.

The event takes place at the University of St. Gallen in the Temporary Teaching Buildings (Lehrprovisorium, see campus map) on July 6^th. Reception starts at 12:00, presentations start at 12:30 and the exhibition is scheduled to start at 15:30. For detailed instructions please have a look at the campus map.

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend, you can reach me at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com

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The Google Chrome team has published an amazing video where people on the street have been asked if they know what a browser is. Only 8% percent of the people they asked where able to give the right answer to this question and the other 82% of answers shed light on the understanding of consumers about Internet. Here is the video, see for yourself.

Are users stupid?

The first reaction that one might get is that you should invest in educating people what a browser is (a piece software to navigate on the World Wide Web) and what options they have available (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and others). But maybe a better approach is to ask “Why don’t they know what a browser is?”.

Most users just don’t care

The reason why people don’t know what a browser is, is that they just don’t care about the browser. And why should they? People care about Facebook, Google and Yahoo but how to get to these websites doesn’t matter. And if you are not one of those that are heavily using some browser plug-ins you probably don’t see any differences in using different browsers.

Browsers are a commodity and a better browser is not enough

The key to understand the dynamics in this market is to understand that the available browsers are basically interchangeable because they are only marginal different. Of course there are differences in speed and compatibility but only power users who spend several hours working online can tell a difference – the majority of internet user can’t tell the difference.

The key to success is in creating a differentiated internet experiences

So if user don’t care about the how to get to Facebook and Google, how can you create a remarkable browser that people care about? The key is in re-inventing what it is that a browser does. Focusing on surfing the internet is not enough anymore. Opera is taking a step into this direction with Opera Unite which offers a wide range of additional services and functionalities to the traditional browser concept. It is too early to tell, if the Opera way of differentiation will be relevant to users, but the core idea is the right one – reinventing the browser.

How can we reinvent the browser?

I think it is still unbelievable that we are seeing such a strong growth of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter yet there seems to be no integration into existing browser. Instead there is a range of companies that are developing desktop applications that integrate into these services and provide a differentiated social networking experience.

It is time that these services get stronger integrated into existing web browsers and instead of bribing users to download the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft should work on a tighter integration of social networking and deliver a different experience of surfing the internet. Now they have a real use to justify their investment in Facebook.

The question is as well, whether we really need to reinvent the browser or if it will become obsolete? What if social networking clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic will see continuous growth in the future and will become the main entrance point for users when they access social networks? You think that is a crazy idea? Remember, only 8 percent know what a browser is.

How do you see the future of the browser and the future of people accessing the Internet? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

Posted in innovation, user experience | Permalink | 5 Comments »