Why use principles?

There are many practical benefits that come from using these simple principles to guide your decision making and help structure your thinking. Here are the key ones:

• Principles are easy to understand
• Principles are quick and efficient
• Principles are scalable
• Principles are flexible
• Principles can be de-centralised
• Principles foster innovation
• Principles complement existing ways of working
• Principles last longer than ideas
• Principles create deeper understanding

PRINCIPLES ARE EASY TO UNDERSTAND

Convoluted processes and complex data analysis might look clever, but unless an approach can be quickly and easily understood – by those who will use it and other stakeholders too – implementation is an uphill struggle. By contrast, the principles of customer experience in this book are easy to understand, so can be put straight to work, by anyone.

PRINCIPLES ARE QUICK AND EFFICIENT

Using principles to guide you reduces your dependency on inspiration and imitation, and they can help you get through the wall when you know something just isn’t right with your solution. They can also bring structure to research and testing. This means less time is wasted in subjective debates, pixel pushing and aimless experimenting in the hope of arriving at something that feels right.

PRINCIPLES ARE SCALABLE

Every business, large or small, has a customer experience, and yet the issues they face and the approaches they take to solve them will vary depending on the scale of the enterprise. A small business may know their customers as individuals; a global retailer may have cultural differences to contend with in different countries. These principles can help whatever the size of the business, since they are based on how the brain works: something common to every customer.

PRINCIPLES ARE FLEXIBLE

Bach, Mozart and Jimi Hendrix all understood the theory of music, but this didn’t stop them creating their own distinctive styles or producing thousands of unique compositions. The same goes for the psychological principles behind customer experiences: they can be interpreted and applied in infinite ways, supporting rather than constraining creativity. Competitor analysis and benchmarking has the opposite effect. It narrows the frame of reference to the point where the only visible solution is that of the market leader.

PRINCIPLES CAN BE DE-CENTRALISED

Not every facet of the customer experience can be controlled centrally – the quality of the experience is often in the hands of individual front-line staff, either manning the phones in customer services, or in a store. In situations where the customer has an unusual query or problem that needs resolving, the usual response is to defer to the judgement of a supervisor, or utter some kind of meaningless ‘computer says no’ answer. It doesn’t have to be this way – any business could give its front-line staff a set of customer-experience guidelines to follow as part of their training. This would not only make their jobs more rewarding by giving them a little more autonomy, but would also tune them into noticing opportunities and issues. Everybody wins. These principles can help with this.

PRINCIPLES FOSTER INNOVATION

In the creative thinking manual Thinkertoys, author Michael Michalko explains that ‘By changing your perspective, you expand your possibilities until you see something you were unable to see before … This new and different way of seeing things will lead you to new ideas and insights.’¹ These principles allow you to do exactly that, by giving ten different perspectives to frame the customer experience, rather than just asking ‘Is it usable?’ or ‘Did the customer complete the task?’ Using the different principles in this book to frame problems can lead to innovations by helping you think about the experience differently.

PRINCIPLES COMPLEMENT EXISTING WAYS OF WORKING

Most businesses of scale have established workflows for improving their customer experience, whether it be a user-centered design process for enhancing their website, or a partnership with a research company that helps them keep track of trends. A great thing about using these principles is that they work with existing approaches rather than trying to replace them. They add another layer of intelligence to what already exists and may already be giving great results.

By contrast, trying to embed a new process in an organisation can be fraught with difficulties. In a way, since these principles are more about structuring your thinking, they don’t even really need implementation at all. You can just use them and let the results do the talking. This is exactly how I started out with them. I used them in my day-to-day design work, and it wasn’t long before people took note.

PRINCIPLES LAST LONGER THAN IDEAS

Good ideas can become toxic over time. As the world turns, expectations and technology change, and what was once a brilliant solution can start to do more harm than good. Principles on the other hand tend to have a long shelf life. Using them as a starting point can help you see the wood for the trees.

PRINCIPLES CREATE DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

Prescriptive solutions – in case of x do y – can only get you so far. To really understand the problems and opportunities we are presented with, we need to trace things back to their roots.

One of the most powerful problem solving techniques in the Japanese continuous improvement philosophy Kaizen is Toyota’s ‘Five Why’s Analysis’, which can be used to trace a problem back to a root cause. There is a puddle of oil on the shopfloor. Why? Because the machine is leaking oil. Why? Because the gasket has deteriorated. Why? Because we bought gaskets made of inferior material. Why? Because we got a good price. Why? Because purchasing agents are evaluated on short-term cost savings achieved. The solution, then, is to change the evaluation policy for service agents.²

This is a brilliant approach to problem solving and truly helps to develop a deep understanding. I followed this approach during the course of my research for this book and in my design practice, and have found that in the vast majority of cases problems can be traced back to the principles I propose here. Using them will help you to develop a deeper understanding of what makes a great customer experience.

Before we get started

The rest of the text explores the ten principles in detail, covering their theoretical foundations and how they can be used in practice, supported by examples. I hope that by the time you’ve finished you will never think about customer experiences in the same way, whichever side of the office wall you are sitting on. As a fun exercise, whenever you have an especially good or bad customer experience, think about which of the ten principles are at work. You’ll quickly internalise them and realise how they play out in practice.

I believe these principles are collectively exhaustive – that there isn’t a facet of the customer experience that isn’t covered by at least one of them. However, they are not mutually exclusive, and there are some topics that could appear under more than one principle.

As an example, the subject of human error could easily fall under effort, since the more errors a customer makes the more re-working there is; or it could fall under stress, since making mistakes can also undermine a customer’s confidence and leave them worrying about whether they have performed a task correctly. I’ve followed a simple approach to resolving this, which is to try to make the chapters short enough that one can be read per day on a short commute. Where topics overlap I’ve split them up to make them more easily digestible, and where appropriate I’ve cross-referenced them.

Not all of the principles apply equally to every part of every experience. There are normally one or two that come to the fore in any given situation, like ‘the customer was expecting something else’ or ‘the task just takes too long’. This is great for solving the most obvious problems, but you will also find that framing a task using the other principles generates previously unconsidered ideas and new opportunities.

Finally, as I will demonstrate through examples, these principles are at work regardless of the price point or sector. If you have a customer, these principles will work. Creating a great customer experience isn’t the sole preserve of luxury brands, expensive products and services, or big budget projects. Anyone can do it.

Summary

• There are ten principles that can be used to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience.
• These principles are universal: they apply to products and services, and to businesses of any size, in any sector.
• These principles are easy to understand and complement existing ways of working, making them easy to implement.
• Using these principles to structure your thinking and guide your decision making will help you come up with better ideas in less time, and will reduce your dependency on inspiration and imitation.
• The rest of the book shows you how to put these principles to work.