Getting it wrong

Despite widespread understanding that the customer experience is critically important, as consumers we are still often frustrated and disappointed. Products are too complex to use, small print leaves us feeling cheated, adverts bear little resemblance to reality, customer service is often rude. Examples of poor customer experiences are a daily occurrence for most of us. Genuinely brilliant ones are still incredibly rare, despite the renewed interest in this area.

Why is this? It’s usually not for a lack of trying. It’s not a budgetary issue either – some companies spend millions on market research, user testing and customer care programmes. It’s not that the people involved aren’t intelligent or talented. There are plenty of smart people who ‘get it’. What’s going on?

While no two companies are the same, there are a few causes that are worth exploring in more detail. They are drawn from my experience working with medium and large businesses, although you may find they are equally applicable to smaller ones too.

The Vulcan death grip

The recent Star Trek movie directed by J.J. Abrams follows the early part of the relationship between the two lead characters. One, the human James T. Kirk is hot-headed and emotional; the other is Spock, a Vulcan, who suppresses all emotion, seeking to live by only rational and logical thought. Needless to say, they don’t exactly see eye-to-eye.

Businesses primarily follow the Vulcan model, seeing their enterprise as a supremely rational endeavour. They check their normal lives in at the door in the name of Spock-like professionalism. As the doyen of design Don Norman concludes, ‘Business has come to be ruled by logical, rational decision makers … with no room for emotion. Pity!’¹

In our role as consumers we couldn’t be less Vulcan. We are often impulsive, basing purchasing decisions solely on emotions, hunches or intuition. Clearly the more in touch a business is with our emotional wants and needs, the more its products or services will resonate with us.

At the end of the movie, while Kirk is captain, Spock serves as his first officer on the Enterprise, giving them the best of both worlds. This should serve as an excellent model for businesses to emulate when making decisions: a total understanding of the consumer – their thoughts, feelings and experiential requirements – balanced by rigorous analysis and rational processes. In most cases, however, the rational and analytical have become a substitute for a more empathic, human understanding rather than the other side of the same coin. Here are two common ways in which this phenomenon manifests itself.

Measurebating

Ken Rockwell coined the term ‘Measurebator’ to describe a type of photographer who is more interested in the theoretical performance of a camera than whether it takes great photos or not. ‘These folks have analysis paralysis and never accomplish anything,’ he says. ‘These people worry so much about trying to put numerical ratings on things that they are completely oblivious to the fact that cameras or test charts have nothing to do with the spirit of an image.’²

The office Vulcans have taken measurebating to its zenith, using a variety of tools to analyse competitors, model customer segments and report on market activity. Unfortunately, these models are only representative of reality; they aren’t reality itself.

As Dev Patnaik explains in Wired to Care, ‘Companies have become so dependent on models that many organisations have started to lose touch with reality. Without personal connection to the people they serve, companies lack the context, immediacy, or experience they need to make good decisions. Far too many leaders make critical decisions without any personal feel for the territory.’³

When working on website projects I’ve often been asked to make the phone number for customer services less prominent. ‘We have a strategic objective to reduce the traffic to our call centres,’ they say. ‘It’s about cost reduction.’ This demonstrates a tendency for people to advocate decisions that can degrade the customer experience when numbers and analytics work against empathy.

Numbers and calculations can rob people of their humanity with truly harrowing consequences. In his deeply thought-provoking paper ‘Accounting in the Service of the Holocaust’, Warwick Funnel argues that ‘Accounting numbers were substituted for qualitative attributes of individuals thereby denying them their humanity and individuality … (Accounting) was not only a means of expediting the annihilation of the Jews but was also one of the means by which people who had no direct involvement in the murder of millions of Jews were able to divorce themselves from the objectives and consequences of their work.’⁴ When people are reduced to numbers, it’s hard to see them as people anymore.

Another form of measurebating is the return on investment calculation that is typically required as part of a business case to get funding for a project. It’s a topic that grates on many in the design world, since it is almost impossible to translate something that is qualitative into something quantitative, especially when the experience is inseparable from the functionality that delivers it. I remember one client trying to prepare a business case for a new feature that would show a product on the website in each of the different colours that were available. The question was, how much would this increase conversion from people browsing the page to actually buying? Would it increase the ‘basket value’ of people shopping on the site? It’s impossible to measure in isolation since there are so many other variables that require consideration – the product itself, seasonal variance, other improvements to the site that are launched simultaneously to name but a few.

Drag racing

Unlike discrete elements of the customer experience, there are many aspects of a business that are easy to measure: how many people you have performing a task, how much they are paid, or how long a particular process takes. Since Taylor’s invention of scientific management in the late nineteenth century, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, the optimisation and standardisation of processes to reduce waste and maximise efficiency has dominated the focus of many organisations. The easier something is to measure, the more of a target it becomes. Computers and machinery are mercilessly replacing humans, and consulting firms make good money from finding cost savings, especially in a recession.

Efficiency has an appeal to both businesses and their customers. As customers we hate waiting around for things to happen, and operating more efficiently can save a business money. As a designer I have a particular fondness for things that operate with wonderful economy, or are cleverly packaged to minimise waste.

You can, however, have too much of a good thing. Nowadays it’s not just the pace of business that is accelerating, it’s the pace of change. Flexibility is as important as speed when expectations can change at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, in their zeal for efficiency, some have engineered out all the slack they can from their businesses at the expense of agility. As Tom DeMarco puts it in his book Slack, ‘An organisation that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer. In the short run it makes a lot of progress in whatever direction it happens to be going. In the long run, it’s just another road wreck.’⁵

The consequences for customer experience can be severe: hyper-efficient companies are usually unable to respond to changes in customer expectations, and any customer issue that does not fit neatly into the optimised solution cannot be dealt with satisfactorily. Few things are more infuriating than calling customer services just to go through eight different menu options unsure of what to choose, when all you want to do is speak to someone about an urgent problem. The automated supermarket till may require fewer people to work in the shop in theory, but the machine is unable to cope with an unexpected item in the bagging area.

Attack of the clones

Measurebators also find competitor analysis irresistible. They are frequently found compiling spreadsheets that list each of the features and functions of every product on the market so that they can position their own products or services with absolute precision.

This has two unfortunate side effects. The first is that competition becomes a contest of one-up-manship: products gain more megapixels, features and functions, which compromises the experience by making the thing more and more difficult to use. It also means you are always one step behind the people you are benchmarking against. As David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, authors of Rework, put it, ‘When you get suckered into an arms race you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on the defensive, too. Defensive companies can’t think ahead; they can only think behind. They don’t lead; they follow.’⁶

The other inevitable side effect is that imitation is almost inevitable when you measure yourself against the competition in this way. This goes some way to explaining why most products on sale bear a remarkable resemblance to the original innovator in the field.

I want it yesterday

When designers are forced to work to unrealistic timescales, two things tend to happen. The first is that they abandon any kind of sensible structured approach, and then they look for things to copy. I feel for these guys, I really do. They usually don’t have the clout to tell their boss’s boss where to go. The same is true in agencies: if the client wants it, they’ll bend over forward to do it on time. It’s become an epidemic that means offerings get rushed to market without thorough design or testing, with obvious consequences. A good customer experience requires careful thought and consideration of the finest details. It is not something that can be rushed.

Even if a business commits to a well-structured customer experience improvement programme they often find they are hamstrung by legacy technology that is itself the product of the hurry-up mantra. Years of patches, bodges and duct-tape in the technology that runs the company can make the experience that businesses desire so much an impossibility. They need to re-platform first and then the whole cycle starts again because they need the new tech yesterday.

If you need to be in another country for a morning meeting, it’s no good getting on a late plane and telling the pilot to just fly faster. If you want it sooner, you need to start earlier, and that means looking further into the future. Therein lies the rub. Too much of what businesses undertake is driven by short-term thinking. A poor customer experience is often symptomatic of a bigger problem: a lack of vision at the top or a programme structured around quarterly profit statements.

It’s a recognised problem. In January 2012 Wired magazine ran a feature entitled ‘25 big ideas for 2012’, and on that list in among the various bleeding-edge advancements in technology was an article titled ‘Here for the Long Haul – Corporate Long-Termism’. The author, David Rowan, explains how business juggernauts including SoftBank, IBM and Unilever have ‘shied away from short-term shareholder concerns’⁷ and are looking towards the long term. They aren’t the only ones.

In Fixing the Game, which I mentioned in the last chapter, Roger Martin explains how we ‘must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value’,⁸ citing Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble and Apple as companies which are getting it right. The message is clear. If you focus on taking care of your customers your shareholders will benefit too, if you try the opposite nobody does, but who does our CEO task with improving the customer experience? The answer is not a straightforward one.

The empty chair⁹

In the business that you work for, who is responsible or indeed accountable for the customer experience? The only time I’ve ever known for sure is when it has been me, and even then I’ve often felt like I’m not. If you can’t immediately answer with at least one person’s name, there is a strong likelihood that your customer experience is suffering as a result.

Look at the board of directors of a large business, and there tend to be a few standard positions that are filled: CEO for strategy and leadership; CFO for finance and accounting; COO takes care of operations; CTO for technology; CMO is in charge of marketing. Who then is responsible for the customer experience? Where is the CXO? The Chief Experience Officer. If no single person is explicitly responsible for the customer experience, and no single person is held accountable if it’s not right, we’re in a pickle right from the start.

Getting the customer experience right necessarily involves coordination of almost every part of the business, but if no one person is unambiguously calling the shots then failure is almost inevitable. I’ve experienced this first-hand. Words like ‘ownership’ and ‘sponsorship’ start getting thrown around and the whole thing descends into a political bunfight as each stakeholder group seeks to grab as much control as they can. Progress internally becomes agonisingly slow, whoever has the most political sway or the deepest pockets gets their way, and designers either quit or become more concerned with keeping stakeholders happy than with creating something great. The voice of the customer gets lost in the mêlée, and nothing improves.

Apple have taken the opposite approach. Steve Jobs is quoted in his biography by Walter Isaacson as saying that design chief Jonathan Ive ‘has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up.’¹⁰ This may go some way to explaining why the design of their products appears to have such purity. By contrast, of the companies that I’ve consulted for in the last seven years, not one has had design or customer experience represented at board level, yet almost all of them have referenced Apple as the gold standard to which they aspire.

Putting the politics aside, without top-level representation, decisions that affect the customer experience end up being made unwittingly. Quality and expectations start to vary depending on which department was responsible, and what their goals and objectives are. This leads to wild inconsistencies throughout the customer journey that can make it hard for customers to know what to expect. When a product or service is mis-sold by salespeople hungry to meet their targets, it’s usually customer services that pick up the pieces and the whole brand ends up tarnished. Rarely is the root source of the problem held to account in such situations.

The Net Promoter Score

These problems are well understood and many organisations are taking steps to solve them. One approach that goes some way towards resolving these issues is the Net Promoter Score (‘NPS’), a system that seeks to quantify how well a business is managing its relationships with customers. The creator of the system, Fred Reichheld, is quick to point out a fundamental problem with an over-emphasis on financial analysis by introducing a distinction between bad profits and good profits.¹¹

Bad profits, he explains, are earned in ways that we as customers generally find abhorrent: hidden charges in the small print, contracts that lock you in, confusing pricing, and poor customer service among others. Good profits, on the other hand, come from delighting the customer so they come back for more and enthusiastically tell their friends and family about their experiences.

The problem as Reichheld sees it is that accounting metrics are unable to distinguish between the two sources of profit, and companies easily become hooked on bad profits: ‘This addiction to bad profits demotivates employees, diminishes the chances for true growth, and accelerates a destructive spiral. Customers resent bad profits – and investors should, too, because bad profits undermine a company’s prospects.’¹²

His solution, which was first published in the Harvard Business Review in late 2003, is simple, yet powerful. It relies on categorising customers based on their answers to the following questions:

On a zero to ten scale, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/service/brand) to a friend or colleague?

Followed by:

What is the primary reason for your score?

Promoters are people who responded with a nine or ten. These are loyal customers who share their positive experiences with those around them. They tend to spend more and are enthusiastic about the brand, product or service.

Passives are those who gave a seven or eight score. These are unlikely to recommend the brand and if they do it’s with caveats and little enthusiasm. They would most probably leave if a competitor offering was tempting enough. Businesses should aim to turn these people into promoters.

Detractors are any score of six or below. These are the guys you see who have had a bad experience and bad-mouth the company. Their problems need to be taken seriously.

To arrive at the Net Promoter Score you simply take the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtract the percentage that are detractors.¹³

Advocates of NPS explain how it provides them with insights that are actionable, and critically takes something that was once deemed too intangible to measure accurately and turns it into something quantifiable. They also find that their Net Promoter Score ‘ties directly to revenue growth’¹⁴ and that, in fact, the value of a promoter or detractor can be quantified. This is a great solution because it fits perfectly with the corporation’s love of measuring things, and also provides grounds for investing in the customer experience that appeals to even the most ardent measurebator.

It is no surprise that there are plenty of promoters for the net promoter system; it has, after all, enabled many businesses to become more customer-centric. But what happens after we discover our score, and then need to make some changes? We need some mechanism for turning our findings into tangible improvements in our customer experience. Knowing the score and having a target can’t do it for us. That’s where this book comes in, to provide you with the toolkit you need to improve your customer experience. Let’s get started.

Summary

• A bias towards rationalism and quantitative analysis cannot substitute an empathic feel for what will delight the customer.
• Reducing decision making to a numbers game de-humanises the customer. Since many experiential factors do not naturally lend themselves to the traditional return on investment calculation they are often overlooked.
• Hyper-efficiency leaves businesses unable to respond to changes in customer expectations.
• Competitor analysis leads to imitation. Products and services become derivative from the market leaders, who pull even further ahead.
• Short termism leads to shaky technology foundations that put a strait-jacket on the customer experience. It also leads to shortcuts in improvement projects that compromise the quality of their output.
• Accountability and responsibility need to be clear if the customer experience is to improve. In most cases there are neither at board level, making the whole topic a political nightmare.
• The Net Promoter Score has brought with it a useful measure of the quality of a customer experience which strongly correlates to growth, but it can’t make the improvements for you.