Mike Wittenstein

Turning Strategy into Action

mikewittenstein — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:50:16 +0000

The promise of customer experience design leaves people full of hope. It surfaces all these great ideas about taking a business to the next level, learning about ways of attracting more customers, strengthening the brand, and invigorating the customer experience.

In fact, practitioners quickly start to amass pages of notes about strategies they need to try and practices you should put into place. It’s all great stuff that can make a world of difference.

So, why is it that so many of the good ideas never see the light of day? How come when you walk through the front doors at work, those great ideas get lost, ground up, or simply ignored? What does it take to win attention and alignment around the ideas that can define your company’s future, make an impact on people’s live, and make shareholders smile? Why do over 70% of projects that involve change fail?

There are two questions to answer:

What are the causes?
What can be done about it?

Many other writers and thinkers have answered #1 quite well. You can check out articles by:

I’m more interested in what we can do about it. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last fourteen years…

When you envision a new customer experience, it’s incumbent on you to also design the story about that experience. The story that will introduce potential new adopters and followers to the future state you wish to create. Here are some really good examples of ‘stories of possible experiences from the future’. These are videos. Depending on your skills, timeframe, and budget, yours can be words or simple storyboards.

Corning’s Gorilla Glass

IBM’s Retail Store of the Future (RFID, circa 1999)

There’s also a case study on IBM’s Innovation Center.

Wingate Inn’s Hotel of the Future (my work at IBM, circa 1999)

Here’s a case study on this project.

Lastly, I’m offering a half-day workshop in London on May 24, 2012 aimed at helping practitioners move from Strategy to Action on their projects–and avoid the 70% failure rate! The focus will be on creating the story that hints at the experience.

It’s at European Customer Experience World (an event put on by The Focus Group).

Hope to see you there!

Sometimes, Taking Care of Non-Customers, Makes Your Customers Happier

mikewittenstein — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:29:10 +0000

Caring about people isn’t enough on its own to create a transformational customer experience. Without caring, however, treasured moments of genuine human warmth and connection just don’t happen. Imagine how you would feel if your car accidentally hit a pedestrian. Most people would be devastated. Volvo has just introduced an innovation—a pedestrian airbag—which allows you to widen your sphere of care beyond your concern for your family’s safety to the safety of an unknown pedestrian who could impulsively dart in front of you.

Sensors indicate contact between car and pedestrian. The inflating airbag lifts the rear of the hood (creating a smoother vehicle contour), then covers the hard pillars and about 1/3 of the windshield (possibly cushioning a blow to the head). See how it works in this animation from Volvo below:

In the customer experience profession, we usually focus on taking great care of customers. Happy customers, says conventional wisdom, is good for business. Volvo’s pedestrian airbag technology teaches us that, sometimes, taking care of others is as important as taking care of the customer! For many people, peace of mind is worth a few dollars.

Thank you, Volvo!

Source: https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/enhanced/en-gb/Media/Preview.aspx?mediaid=42391

Rising Tide helps companies break through stagnation points

mikewittenstein — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:08:34 +0000

Rising Tide Group is my secret weapon when it’s time to include a customer experience strategy at a service company and there’s sales, finance, and operations work to do at the same time. It’s a project-based consultancy that knows how to get companies ‘unstuck’ by making simultaneous changes to their top and bottom lines. I’m a part of this group together with sales maven and award-winning speaker Chuck Reaves and turnaround artist/CEO Austen Jackson. Together, we give companies a picture of how to successfully differentiate and a practical, dollars-and-cents, operationally efficient plan for getting there.

You can learn more about Rising Tide Group on their website–or, just call me.

LightSpeed Focuses on Retailer’s Experience to Improve the Customer Experience

Karyn Croteau — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:30:17 +0000

LightSpeed (www.lightspeedretail.com) introduced a Mac-based point of sale system for multi-location, inventory-focused retailers in 2005. With annual enhancements like e-commerce, mobile, developer APIs, and now iPad support, LightSpeed has made retailing much easier for retailers.

LightSpeed takes the work out of retail by putting minutes back into retailers’ days. Behind the cash wrap, in the stockroom, or on the showroom floor, the retailer-friendly design begins with a Mac operating system. System operation is intuitive, which means training takes less time and new features are easier to use. The retailer interface is simpler too. No green screens, just point, click, drag, and select. Fewer keystrokes for set-up, admin, and day-to-day tasks saves time and reduces errors.

LightSpeed’s Retail Experience

The best part of LightSpeed, in this reviewer’s opinion, is that you get desktop, laptop, web, iPhone, iPod touch and iPad functionality out-of-the-box. This translates to:

The right device in the right place
No wires
Faster set-up
Easier changes to store layouts (including ability to handle high-volume sales with ‘roving registers’
More efficient labor metrics because clerks aren’t tied down to a single location

Mobile commerce is particularly easy with connectivity to iDynamo and Ingenico built-in. Because of its plug-and-play nature, this retail solution makes it possible for retailers to get a better product experience and to deliver a better shopper experience at the same time.

For example, with LightSpeed retailers can:

Enter product images and descriptions once and have them automatically size to any supported platform or device
Put e-commerce equipment (scanners, readers, printers, registers) anywhere in the store that’s needed (great for stores with mobile fixtures, saves costly wire runs and keeps prototype store designs flexible)
Take orders from a show or exhibition with full inventory available in a limited space
Put iPads in RSA’s hands as ‘roving registers’ or attach them to fixtures or walls as customer-operated kiosks
Enter once, use everywhere. Enter inventory at any location and ‘push’ it to the others
ShowNTell feature expands product descriptions into multimedia catalogs that fully inform shoppers, keeping them in control
Use LightSpeed’s front end with practically any back end system (e.g. Oracle) for additional customization and control

The Bottom Line

By focusing on ease of use across platforms, LightSpeed has succeeded in improving the retailer experience. Their clients are delivering better customer experiences as a result.

Coca-Cola Reveals Its Brand Strategy

mikewittenstein — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:08:38 +0000

I’ve been saying this for years, but when a big brand like Coca-Cola says it, people listen more

So, watch how Coca-Cola explains its brand strategy for the next decade here. If you’re a supplier or wanna-be supplier, you’ve to see this and rethink the way you approach this brand.

The content, in my opinion, is spot on. Interestingly, Coca-Cola is tipping its strategy hand–something they’re not known for doing very often. It’s such a bold move and one that requires so much infrastructure building that releasing the idea early will probably do more good than harm. By that, I mean:

People who want to do that work will come to them, reducing their talent sourcing costs
People inside the business will ‘get it’ faster and may adjust more comfortably
Investors will ‘see around the corner’ and anticipate rather than question the new moves
Competitors will be shocked into responding or left in the dust by waiting

Here’s part two of the same strategy expose.

Whether or not you like the idea that story can become self-fulfilling strategy or even like Coca-Cola’s approach, these videos capture valuable truths about storytelling. For example, check out Coca-Cola’s five principles beginning at about 00:01:40 in video #2.

Good ideas, Coca-Cola. I truly hope you fully reach this vision. If you do, you’ll once again be the world’s brand (thought) leader.

Skype Used to Deliver Keynote in Australia

mikewittenstein — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:56:55 +0000

I used Skype to deliver “Crafting an Elite Customer Experience” to an executive group assembled by Marcus Evans in Sydney, Australia from my office in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s the first major event I’ve relied on Skype for and it did remarkably well.

Attendees gained insights into how brand leaders use customer experience to differentiate their brands—on purpose and by design. They also got some rules of the road to design a customer experience strategy that will win your customer’s hearts, employees’ engagement and shareholder’s approval at the same time. Examples were shared from leading brands who differentiate by customer experience design and how they consequently increase their market share and grow organically.

The keynote used two cameras a projector and a monitor on the audience’s end. The two cameras gave me a view of the presentation that was showing and the audience so I could get my timing and transitions down perfectly. The project showed the Prezi presentation and the monitor showed my face to the audience.

Here’s the presentation in PREZI format:

Two weeks after the event, I learned that it Even though this was the only remote presentation, it tied for highest ratings!

Kevin Roberts of Saatchi on Experience Design

mikewittenstein — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:23:45 +0000

Last year, I had the opportunity to meet Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi. He gave an impassioned and impromptu presentation on the value of experience and its love, connection, and authenticity components. Here’s an excerpt:

Consumers Spend More At Places Where Employees Are Treated Well

mikewittenstein — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:06:48 +0000

Researchers at the Universities of Virginia and Colorado polled 1,615 retail employees, 57,656 customers, and 306 stores of a single retail chain to discover that how employees feel about their jobs has a strong impact on how well they do their jobs which, in turn, adds to customer spending and comparable store sales growth. A single digit increase (on a scale of seven) of ‘perceived organizational justice’ on employees led to customers spending $1.43 more per person per visit.

This paper is heavily based on the “Service/Value Profit Chain” work of Heskett and colleagues in 1994.

Heskett and colleagues’ work became an important element in the now popular Net Promoter Score. However, Maxham, Netemeyer, and Lichtenstein’s work goes beyond the basic constructs to quantify the linkages between beliefs and behaviors and introduces a predictive model (a kind of holy grail when it comes to making investments in retail).

My non-researcher’s translation of this line of work is:

Make the right promises (ones that matter to customers).

Keep them (put capabilities into your business design so that what customers want most is what the business does best).

Give employees the same kind of experience you expect them to deliver to customers (employee experiences matter too).

Design your experience as a story that engages customers, delights employees, and pays back shareholders (all at the same time).

Thanks to Anne Rein for bringing this work to my attention from HBR’s Daily Stat.

Can Experience Design Help Healthcare? Yes!

mikewittenstein — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:12:32 +0000

Tom Lee’s presentation at this year’s GEL Conference focused on how his healthcare organization, One Medical, is making tangible progress to making the experience of healthcare delivery better while maintaining profitability. Here’s the video:

In a very approachable style, Tom explains how hard the ‘medical system’ makes it for patients. They put up obstacles for patients to climb over (like voice mail systems); they use jargon that makes it hard for patients to understand them, and there are claim forms that separate doctors from the people they are trying to help.

Here’s what ‘medicine’ looks like to patients:

It’s no wonder people don’t feel good at offices.

One Medical’s offices vary by location. Here’s one from New York City.

Now, that’s the kind of environment that would lighten anyone’s spirit! One Medical doesn’t leave it to the ‘system’ to find new patients. They take accountability for finding their own. Clever advertising, like this subway sign, do the trick.

Summary

If One Medical can do it with the resources they have in a tough economic environment and difficult claims systems we have, larger systems should have an easier job because they have more resources to apply and much more to save. Of course, larger systems are weighted down by legacy behaviors and, sometimes, the lack of energy to drive toward a vision. But, that’s another blog post…

Getting Unstuck Now Has An App!

mikewittenstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:37:51 +0000

Everyone knows what it’s like to be ‘stuck’ and nobody likes it. Keith Yamashita of SYPartners (one of the first experience designers I knew) has put some of his ideas about ‘idea progress’ into an app that makes it easier to question yourself, answer yourself, and make progress on your toughest issues. Every day, in my opinion, people get stuck. Sometimes it’s on little things like what to wear. Other times, it’s on big things, like which strategy to pursue or on a personal note, whom to marry.

Unstuck does a great job at breaking mind-stopping problems you face into small, manageable pieces you can deal with. Unstuck really does turn a mountain into a molehill by giving you perspective on your issue so that you can detach from it and deal with it.

Unstuck is designed to be easy to use. By customizing content on-the-fly as your problem unfolds, the program ‘coaches’ you toward a successful outcome. It doesn’t promise quick fixes or miracles, just some objective perspective so that you can get through stuck moments more quickly.

Here’s a demo of the product followed by a quick analysis of how it works.

Unstuck Demo from Unstuck on Vimeo.
Unstuck deals directly with your attitudes about what’s holding you back. Instead of trying to clinically dissect the problem, the software looks at how you’re approaching your problem and deals with that. Just like a good friend would.

Unstuck introduces categories and personal styles of problem-solving. For example “Lone Leader” below. Then, the program matches solution strategies (like “Call in Calvary”) to suggest options.

Learning more about your problem-solving style in a fun, non-offensive way gives you most of what you need to solve your own problem. When you become aware of your own perspective, things usually get easier.

Unstuck doesn’t stop there, it takes you all the way to decision–and confirmation of that decision.

Finally, Unstuck helps you stay unstuck by sharing just the right tools to consider using on a regular basis so that you can avoid some of the stuck-ness in the future.

Here’s how the program is described from a marketing perspective:

When you ask yourself that question, it’s a sure sign that you’re stuck. When you ask yourself that questionrepeatedly—about the same situation—it’s time to do something about it. That’s where Unstuck comes in.

The Unstuck iPad app is a lot like having a life coach on call. Any time you’re feeling stuck, the app can show you where you’re going astray and then help you think differently.

Having trouble making a choice? Unstuck pits your gut instincts against the clock. Don’t know how to pull off your latest caper? There’s a planning tool for that. In fact, there are 11 Unstuck tools (and 50 some-odd tips) all aimed at propelling you forward.

We’re confident that Unstuck can help you answer “what do I do now?” But don’t mistake it for a quick-fix gizmo (you know there are no quick fixes, right?). It’s an innovative and personalized approach to solving your stuck moment based on proven understanding of how people behave. Best of all, it’s an approach you’ll find useful again and again. So whenever you find yourself asking that question, you’ll know how to find the answer.

The Unstuck app is free and is available in Apple’s App Store now. Read more at the Unstuck website (http://www.unstuck.com) and download the free app at (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unstuck/id478421271?ls=1&mt=8)

Summary

Whether you like the application of this technology to getting unstuck or think it’s a frivolous waste of time, take note of the interface and approach Yamashita has introduced. It’s engaging, promising, hopeful, informative, and useful. I think we’ll start seeing more applications like this from instruction manuals to medication flyers, to problem-solving guides, to product selectors on retail shelves. Unstuck is a great example of using technology to make complex concepts easy to use on the first try.