Never let your business processes dictate your customer’s experience.
Your customers are in your stores and on your sites for the experience, not to experience your processes. Nobody likes waiting, filling out forms, or hearing why “it can’t be done.” Customers want (and deserve) to be treated in an on-brand manner. It’s up to the business processes to make that possible. If you achieve an attitude of experience design first, process second, everyone wins: the customer, the employees, and the shareholders.
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Nothing makes customers happier than feeling as if they’re being dealt with as an individual with individual requirements, or even as if they have similar needs or concerns to others that can be referred to (“quite a few of our customer have experienced x”).
Gets difficult when you’re told ‘you’re going to have to speak to y’, ‘please hold while I check with my line manager’, etc etc.
The trick is engaging with customers in an everyday, branded kind of way, supported by whatever processes exist to support this. I must say, a lot of process work I’ve ever been involved in remains (frustratingly) at one of three levels:
- How can we adapt business processes to the constraints of our out of the box system processes? [#fail - massive business impact, some benefit of harmonisation, but at the expense of chaos and employee disengagement/angst]
- How can we harmonise towards process best practice? [#fair enough, but best practice is really just what everybody else does, and doesn't mean it's particularly customer centric, especially if it's a system vendor or major consultancy telling you this. Can be driven far more by cost efficiency rather than anything. Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but I think it misses a trick or two]
- How can we catalogue our processes for better analysis and measurement? [#heart in right place, but often becomes a process boffin exercise characterised by endless debate over process standards and system alignment...]
So, to conclude, process for process’ sake, all very interesting as an academic endeavor, but in an ideal world, you’d have a customer experience blueprint, highlighting the major touchpoints (from a customer point of view) that you need to deal with. These are all then supported (keyword ‘supported’) by operational processes that can be trained, but also measured. You’ve then got an ideal situation where customer centricity guides your processes.
Ok, it’s rare you can start from scratch with these things, so why not start touchpoint by touchpoint and do a gap analysis against where you need to be. Prioritise a series of sprints and get it done.
Thoughts?
John
Smart and pithy post!
Reducing the irritating, boring or otherwise disrespectful moments that customers experience is one of the most efficient, cost-effective and satisfying ways to burnish your brand and to keep customers loyal.
One way to enhance the customer’s experience is to conduct a moment-by-moment Exposures Audit of the multi-sensory experience they have, from calls/emails before they visit to the first line-of-sight image of your place to walking out the door. Video it, remarking as you go about what you see, hear, feel, smell and note along a continuum of positive to negative, how it feels. Then storyboard the experience to multiply the positively memorable moments that reinforce your brand personality. Here’s how: http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2008/08/02/like-a-movie-director-storyboard-the-experience-for-us/
The headline of this post is one of those mottos that should be printed out and stapled up in the product / marketing meeting rooms (hopefully something along the same lines already is).
It’s not an easy reality to live up too – we build processes to create efficiency, work with our existing systems, people and corporate philosophies. As such it can be very hard, very political to unwind from the “norm”. Take for example the most current trend — social media — legal teams may want to review posts for compliance, brand teams for voice, but the customer expects a real time or near real time response and active engagement strategy. Waiting is not a viable option and doing so only harms the business in the long term.
This idea is not limited to social, or web, or marketing at all — experience can take place at any part of the company and generally the further you go away from profit centers, the more rigid [and unreasonable] process becomes. Customer service is perhaps one of the biggest areas to apply this philosophy too — if the process is about process [efficiency, standards, execution] chances are you denying agents with the ability to truly aid your customers when they come calling. We’ve all experienced this; agents who know how to remedy a situation but risk their job in fixing a problem. Products that are failing but a forced corporate line that doesn’t allow the company to humanize the issue and admit that, while they’re still great, things can go wrong. This in turn leads to a poor experience, viral buzz, and the potential loss of the customer — simply because the process is trying to control the outcome.
You can’t control reality. Customers have always had expectations but in the past were limited in choice. With rapidly expanding world of technology, access to transportation, even to travel the world, choice is no longer a limitation and brands that focus on themselves rather than the customer are missing the whole point – the customer is the brand: win with them and you win.
Changing the process to pursue the experience won’t happen overnight, heck, I doubt any company is 100% there, but it’s the right goal for success.
Whenever I see the words “never” or “always” I am ALMOST always assured someone is not considering everything. When Henry Ford brought the production line to the world and famously stated “If I listened to what the customer wanted I would have built a faster horse” he most certainly was focused more on process over customer experience.
When I walk into a store or shop online first and foremost on my mind is price. Indeed the faster I can find the cheapest price, the better but my experience, especially with online shopping, is secondary to the price in most cases. Has anyone forgotten the recession?
I agree everyone wants to be treated individually and perhaps we’re talking about different audiences expectations. I also don’t want to be inundated with forms and roadblocks but I see another side to this argument where the value of process is diminished (process second) and ignores an overemphasis on experience in the absence of price.
Speaking specifically to online shopping I am in certainly offended and, to an extent, mistrustful of horribly designed websites. It is not because of design but rather because the business owner cares so little about their image that they wouldn’t spend a little extra time/money on enhancing the experience. However, if so much time is spent on design that the prices are no longer competitive I am gone; pretty experiences don’t help my pocketbook.
Information Technology, like other technologies of the past will become increasingly standardized through process engagements and advancements in the technology. Overshooting the needs will be rewarded with bankruptcy and, as with past technological advances (transportation and energy to name a few) IT will likely become a utility supporting business but not driving it.
One final point. The only time anyone denies living in a rapidly changing world is when the topic of energy is raised in context of peak oil. Branding will become increasingly under pressure from the limitations of increasing transportation costs. Those who focus on process efficiency and not ignoring the increasing challenges of global transportation costs will do so at their peril in my opinion. Perhaps a bit of topic but relevant to the importance of process.
Just my opinion…