Customer Experience Obsession
Customer centricity is business as usual now
This publication is broken up into three sections:
TL;DR - For those wanting a quick take
Summary - For those wanting a bit more context and high level points
Article - Main body of work containing full detailed article and explanations that you might want to consume over several readings
TL;DR
Customer Experience is the one factor that all organisations can find a way to differentiate on.
If you look across most non-digital native organisations you will find that no single business function or business department has end to end (e-2-e) responsibility for owning and managing the customer experience across the various journeys a customer can take across a range of device and channel touch points over time.
This is a really difficult and challenging problem to address especially more so if you have to integrate legacy channels like Call or Contact Centers alongside more modern channels like smartphone apps and chat apps that have to be factored into either a multichannel or omnichannel strategy.
Given that there is no universal CX framework and specific approach to addressing CX. Your approach has to be contextually relevant to your use case and organisation.
Summary
Peter Drucker once said "It is the customer who determines what a business is...."
A few enlightened businesses will say they have a purpose and that their purpose comes before specifying who their customers are and what their customer’s specific 'jobs to be done' are?
On the surface this makes sense. The reality however is that before an organisation can have a transcendent purpose it has to be in ‘service’ of a specific group of people that first 'buy-in' to the way your organisation helps them to complete their jobs to be done before deciding whether your organisational purpose aligns to their values in the long-term.
Purpose-led first organisations may go astray due to them not fulfilling their customer’s jobs to be done despite having noble purposes.
Businesses exist to fulfill specific customer 'jobs to be done’, this includes unmet needs or desires'.
The ‘jobs to done’ phrasing is an old one and has been developed and refined over the years by various practitioners. I will be using the jobs to be done phrasing in the context of Outcome Driven Innovation.
One common factor most enduring businesses have is that they have a relentless focus on the customers they serve and their experience. Jeff Bezos whilst at Amazon mentioned that Amazon has a relentless Customer Obsession not just a customer-focus or customer-centric orientation.
If you look across most non-digital native organisations you will find that no single business function or business department has end to end (e-2-e) responsibility for owning and managing the customer experience across the various journeys a customer can take across a range of device and channel touch points over time.
One way to start understanding CX is to research how your customers evaluate their experience with your brand in totality today through Voice of the Customer Surveys. This is an important approach but in our times more is required. Depending on how mature your organisation is and if you you have well defined data dictionaries, taxonomies, event catalogues etc., one of the emerging fit for purpose approaches for measuring CX is to understand what your customers are actually doing and experiencing on your touch points through Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) and Orchestration aka Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM) tooling.
To get a sense of how CX evolves we can consider the following example. Overtime what starts off as a ‘simple’ customer job to be done e.g. listening to music on some device like a gramophone can evolve over time into a complex solution where a customer has multiple devices and channels available to them to complete the same job. The core job to be done of listening to music has stayed stable through time, the things that have changed are the modalities for being able to consume that music.
Apple have almost perfected their CX but there is still room for improvement especially when considering the perspective of Don Norman, one of the elder statesman of User Experience (UX) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
Finally there is no universal CX framework and specific approach to addressing CX. Your approach has to be contextually relevant to your use case and organisation.
Article
With all the marketing buzz about digital transformation in these challenging times, it is easy to forget about why businesses exist in the first place?
Peter Drucker once wrote, “It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance - especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers ‘value’, is decisive - it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper” - emphasis is my own.
The Question of Organisational Purpose
The above image is Simon Sinek’s synthesised view of how great organisations or leaders communicate, going from the why, to the how and finally to the what.
A few enlightened businesses will say they have a purpose and that their purpose comes before specifying who their customers are and what their customer’s specific 'jobs to be done' are?
On the surface this makes sense. The reality however is that before an organisation can have a transcendent purpose it has to be in ‘service’ of a specific group of people that first 'buy-in' to the way your organisation helps them to complete their jobs to be done before deciding whether your organisational purpose aligns to their values in the long-term. Purpose-led first organisations may go astray due to them not fulfilling their customer’s jobs to be done despite having noble purposes.
Before we continue I would like to create some shared context on the ‘jobs to done’ phrasing. The concept is an old one and has been developed and refined over the years by various practitioners. For the remainder of this article I will be using the jobs to be done phrasing in the context of Outcome Driven Innovation.
According to Tony Ulwick, “the jobs-to-be-done approach is about focusing on the goal (or job) a person wants to accomplish and creating a product to meet that goal rather than just creating a product and then trying to find a use for it, which is how most companies innovate.” additional emphasis is from me.
The key take-away from the above is the following:
Businesses exist to fulfill specific customer 'jobs to be done’, this includes unmet needs or desires'
One common factor most enduring businesses have is that they have a relentless focus on the customers they serve and their experience. Jeff Bezos whilst at Amazon mentioned that Amazon has a relentless Customer Obsession not just a customer-focus or customer-centric orientation. For those of you that might not want to be seen to be as a fanatical as Amazon can consider alternative phrases like Customer Experience to capture how your customer experiences your organisation.
Some in industry refer to the catch-all term Experience Design which represents the totality of experience that a specific stakeholder group has with your organisation, this can cover e.g. Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), Product Partner Experience (PPX), Developer Experience (DevEX) etc.
For the purposes of the remainder of this article we will focus on CX.
Customer Experience
Given the increased focus on customer value and the overuse of words like customer-centricity or, customer-centric for short or customer-focused why do so few organisations get CX right?
If you look across most non-digital native organisations you will find that no single business function or business department has end to end (e-2-e) responsibility for owning and managing the customer experience across the various journeys a customer can take across a range of device and channel touch points over time. This is a really difficult and challenging problem to address especially more so if you have to integrate legacy channels like Call or Contact Centers alongside more modern channels like smartphone apps and chat apps that have to be factored into either a multichannel or omnichannel strategy.
Typically what happens in an organisation is that specific functions will be responsible for certain customer journeys like Marketing will be in charge of building brand and market awareness, the Sales function will be responsible for acquiring customers, Customer Success or Support teams will be responsible for customer activation and ensuring a customer is able to complete revenue generating activities or other value-added activities, some advanced companies will actively have departments managing churn and retention and some will even go so far as even working referral schemes into their overall CX.
So how can you evaluate the CX in your organisation?
One way to start understanding CX is to research how your customers evaluate their experience with your brand in totality today through Voice of the Customer Surveys. This is an important approach but in our times more is required. Depending on how mature your organisation is and if you you have well defined data dictionaries, taxonomies, event catalogues etc., one of the emerging fit for purpose approaches for measuring CX is to understand what your customers are actually doing and experiencing on your touch points through Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) and orchestration tooling.
Remember, CX covers everything that a customer or end-user experiences (e.g. brand building activities) prior to choosing you as their preferred solution provider, all the way through to making their purchase decision, to receiving or dealing with account queries and eventually off boarding from your brand.
There is increasingly sophisticated tooling that is being developed to manage customer journeys and to have quantitative insights on the actual journeys your customer’s are taking and also taking into account how best to manage these interactions through orchestration tooling or real-time (<100ms responses) interaction management.
Evolution of Customer Experience
To get a sense of how CX evolves we can consider the following example.
Overtime what starts off as a ‘simple’ customer job to be done e.g. listening to music on some device like a gramophone can evolve over time into a complex solution where a customer has multiple devices and channels available to them to complete the same job. The core job to be done of listening to music has stayed stable through time, the things that have changed are the modalities for being able to consume that music.
A great example of this in action is the integrated ecosystem of devices, channels and modalities Apple has created for their customers to consume media, i.e. Apple hardware like iPhones, iPads, iMacs, earpods, software for Apple Music etc. The touchpoints that Apple enable allow their customers to fulfill their jobs to be done for informational, educative and entertainment content at the click or press or swipe of a button.
Apple have almost perfected their CX but there is still room for improvement especially when considering the perspective of Don Norman, one of the elder statesman of User Experience (UX) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
Assuming you buy into wanting to solving your customers jobs to be done then what should you consider doing next?
Companies that are looking to achieve a step change aka ‘Digital Transformation’ in their CX should not start with a technology focus but should rather focus their time and resources on figuring out how best to serve their customers jobs to be done - i.e. unmet needs or desires. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem, any approach will have to be contextual to your organisational environment, culture and ways of working.
There are a lot of schools of thought (e.g. Experience Design, Design Thinking, Human Centred Design, Human Computer Interaction etc.), tools (e.g. Customer Journey Maps, Event Storming, Service Design Blueprints, Ethnographic Studies, Day in the Life of etc.), or ways of work (Lean, ‘Agile’ etc.) that one can employ to meet your goal of better serving your customers unmet needs, wants or desires.
What I propose below is just a sample of a holistic approach that you can take. I will repeat, as with any approach it has to be contextually relevant to your use case and organisation.
The key take-away from the above is the following:
There is no universal CX framework and any approach to addressing CX has to be contextually relevant to your use case and organisation.
Practical Steps to Evolving Your CX
“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” - Ideo Design Thinking
A useful place to start is to first figure out the core jobs being done by your customers either with your product or other alternatives through Customer Development practices. The benefit of focusing on customer jobs to be done is that they tend to be pretty stable over time e.g. wanting to be entertained, making or receiving payments, communicating and connecting with friends and family etc.
If you are fortunate to be working with existing customers it is important to understand how your customers consume your products and services to complete their jobs to be done. Good sources of information include data mining your support calls or customer complaints. Doing this can potentially give more insights into how you can innovate on product, process or even your business model depending on how you interpret the feedback. Other ways to develop customer insights is to make use of user research in general and incorporate the insights into your product development flow process.
You can then use your research to map out the current end to end CX your customers are having by creating a customer journey experience map. From the mapping exercise you can begin to identify pain points, bottlenecks or other issues or friction points impeding your customer experience. This view however does not contain information on business capabilities, processes and the underpinning technology systems.
Next, you could begin unpacking what business capabilities you have built or need to build to enhance the various components of your customer’s experience. These business capabilities would typically be overlaid onto a business process flow map.
The end goal is to consolidate this information into a comprehensive service design blueprint that captures and summarises how all the activities taking place on the front and back stage are captured and overlaid with the core business processes and technological systems that enable practical delivery of your the product or service. Remember, the front stage actions are seen and experienced by your customer, and your customer could be internal or external to your organisation. The back stage actions are the interactions between your employees, process and technology that indirectly influence your customer’s experiences with your organisation.
High-level Summary of Approach:
Identify customer jobs to be done
Map the current experience via a customer journey map or user story map. A user story map captures all the different steps and high-level jobs that your customers are trying to complete and where your products and services can contribute to those jobs being done
Identify opportunities for an improved experience from understanding current user experience discontinuity gaps
Figure out the business capabilities required to meet the improved experience by creating a business process map that captures the key business domains a customer is interacting with and the underlying processes that enable a particular customer experience
Consolidate this information into a Service Design Blue Print which captures the overall front of house and back stage activities and systems leveraged to deliver a product or service experience
You can capture your effort into a value stream map that can be used to develop process KPIs measuring how well a process or activity is performing in delivering value you have created
A user story map can can inform the development of your product portfolio, the timing and sequencing of the product backlog and finally the specific product or service increments to be delivered by the product development teams. In this context, I am referencing a dedicated cross-functional development team that has all the necessary skills in order to own an end to end product or service solution. Some or all of the members of the team would have contributed from the beginning on the prior above steps.
#customerexperience #jobstobedone #experiencedesign #productdesign
PS. If you are moved please leave feedback so I can improve the publication and topic coverage.
Resources
Jobs to be done - Theory and Practice by Tony Ulwick
Jeff Bezos CNN Interview on Customer Focus -
Jeff Bezos on Customer Obsession -
Outcome Driven Innovation by Tony Ulwick
P.Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper Collins, 1954),37.
Simon Sinek TedX Puget Talk on how great leaders inspire action
Tony Ulwick and Clayton Christensen - The Birth of Jobs to be Done
What Customers Want by Tony Ulwick