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The Structure of the Experience-Centric Organization: The Wheel of Experience Centricity

The key message of this book is that the customer experience is not an afterthought. It is your reason to exist, and an organizational imperative. Everything and everyone in the organization has to focus on it, and support its delivery. That requires an underlying structure that promotes experiential thinking and describes the roles and responsibilities of each part of your organization in its fulfillment. This chapter describes a model for understanding experience centricity called the wheel of experience centricity. The wheel allows you to see how the experience a customer gains from a touchpoint connects all the way to the structure and strategy of your organization, and vice versa. Understanding the wheel, and how the parts fit together, is key to unlocking the potential of the experience-centric organization. It integrates and orients the whole organization toward its mission: providing memorable customer experiences.

A Tale of Two Restaurants

Recently, I met with my good friend Søren to discuss this book. Søren is an expert on innovation and we have regularly been discussing experience centricity over a meal and a beer. We met up in our regular hangout, a French crêpe restaurant, but this time we were treated badly by a new French head waitress, who was both grumpy and rude. This ruined the atmosphere for the talk we wanted to have, and we left, disappointed that our experience and expectations had been ruined by a single employee. There were plenty of other restaurants to choose from, so we decided to try a new, small one that I had recently passed. I had registered it because of its name (No. 30), its tiled interior (I think it used to be an old butcher’s shop), its size (intimate), and its décor (lots of interesting-looking wine bottles, cozy lighting, nice furniture). I had checked reviews on Yelp and Google and had a good feeling about it, so we decided to give it a try. I booked a table online before we walked over. We were greeted nicely, found a good table for discussion, and had lovely food and wine. Surprising combinations of ingredients, many small and tasty dishes, and a really good choice of wine, all at a fair price. We talked to the chef and to one of the owners, and they explained the concept of the restaurant, their role in the Nordic cuisine movement, and how they had spent time finding the right suppliers of quality food. The dishes were nicely timed so we didn’t get too many at the same time, we were well looked after, and when we paid, it was easy to split the bill and each pay our share (a common thing in Scandinavia). We enjoyed it all, and the expectations we had were fulfilled in every way—even exceeded.

Now, you have probably experienced something like this yourself, many times. But let’s dig a bit deeper into the restaurant visit, because it reveals the underlying structure of the experience-centric organization.

The Story Revolved Around Expectations, Offerings, and Experiences

The story revolved around our experience that evening, which was a mix of expectations, offerings, and events that unfolded over time. I described the expectations we had of an experience at the crêpe restaurant, based on our earlier visits. Surprisingly for us, it defied our expectations and ended poorly, due to one important aspect. Then I described the offering of a possible new place, No. 30. This offering set great experiential expectations, which were more than exceeded when we experienced the place, finally giving an enjoyable end to the story. As we will see later, offerings, expectations, and experience are difficult to separate, and all relate to experiences in one way or another. But let’s move on, now that we’ve noted that the whole story revolved around these key ingredients.

The Experience Was Fulfilled Through Touchpoints and Interactions Along an Experiential Journey

I also described how the experience was a result of interactions with multiple touchpoints over time. The most notable of these was a human touchpoint, the rude waitress in the first restaurant. I briefly described some of the other touchpoints from our experiential journey through the evening, such as the design of the restaurant, reading reviews on a mobile phone, and so on, but in reality there were a lot more that were not described, such as the menu, sound, sight, interior, and other people. There is a rich mix of elements that are central to any experience, including touchpoints, time, behaviors, and tone of voice. These are all aspects of experience fulfillment because, when orchestrated together, they help fulfill our experiential expectation.

The Touchpoints Were Enabled Through Platforms and Processes

I also described reading the online reviews, the online booking of a table, the timing of the meal, and the splitting of the bill. These are examples of the visible (and often invisible) platforms and processes that enable the touchpoints to fulfill the experiential expectation. There are many more experience enablers than I mentioned in the story, such as organizational structure (formal and informal), reward mechanisms, accounting, and stock status. For most customers, these are invisible but necessary. Without them, the restaurant would not be able to provide the fantastic experience we had. These factors enable the consistency of the touchpoints, and are key to being able to scale the experience.

Platforms and Processes Are Supported by a Strategic Structure

Moving to a strategic level, I described the business model of the restaurant,specifically its focus on the Nordic food movement and relationship with quality suppliers. Together these components formed the structure that made the restaurant unique and relevant to us as customers, and comprised the restaurant’s reason to exist. The structure is the high-level strategy that gives shape to the service, and allows the enablers to support the touchpoints that fulfill the experiential expectation.

How It All Fits Together

What I have described can be structured, and makes sense, as a logical set of roles and relationships. The experience is fulfilled by touchpoints over time, and these touchpoints are enabled by platforms and processes, which in turn reflect the strategic structure of the business. This is summarized in the following table:

STAGE	Description	In the restaurant example	Central questions to ask
Experiential expectation + the actual experience	The offering supports the customer’s expectation of an experience. The experience is what the customer actually experiences through use of the service. Offering, expectation, and experience are tightly linked.	Expectations from previous experiences, and a negative experience in the crêperie. Alternative offering that created experiential expectation. Surprising, novel, and delightful taste combinations. A socially shared happening. Feeling of being part of a food movement.	What experience do we want our customers to have? What experiential offering promises that experience? What is a good fit to our DNA?
Experience fulfillment	The interactions the customer has with the many touchpoints of the service—such as adverts, word of mouth, emails, and employees—along their experiential journey	Waitress, cook, owner, restaurant name, location, web page, social media, reviews, reservations, signage, word of mouth, menu, staff, interior, food, drinks, bill, and more	What touchpoints do we need and how do we design them to be able to provide the offering and experience described above?
Experience enablers	The platforms and processes that are in place to enable the touchpoints	The platforms and processes that are in place to enable the touchpoints	How can we enable the journey, touchpoints, and interactions to provide the desired experience? What platforms and processes help us do this?
Experience structure	The business model and actor ecology	Strategic suppliers, pricing structure, target customer	Who are our strategic partners? What is our pricing strategy? Who do we want to be desirable for?

I hope you can see how the experience relates to the whole, and therefore how the experience depends on the entire organization pulling together. Decisions made at each level have huge implications for the experience and need to be framed in that way, which is why it is important to know the experience you want your customers to have. Every decision, from operational through tactical to strategic, needs to relate to the experience.

From a Linear to a Circular Mode: The Wheel of Experience Centricity

As I developed the content for this book, it struck me that there was something not quite right with the linear, straightforward structure I just described. As a way of understanding, the structure is simple and logical, but two things were missing from it. First is the role of the experiential DNA of the organization. It is central to experience but didn’t fit in any one place in my model. The experiential DNA is something that influences every part of the organization and can be perceived as supporting the experience or holding it back, depending on whether and how you have nurtured it. Second, it bugged me that the strategic aspects of the business model and actor relationships were so distant from the offering and experience itself. I kept finding myself saying that strategic decisions define the offering, while at the same time saying that the offering is central to expectation and experience. The only way I could get this to work was to join them together and move from a linear model to a wheel, where the experiential DNA takes its proper place as the hub. Welcome to the wheel of experience centricity.

The wheel of experience centricity has five interlocking parts that all rotate around the hub of your experiential DNA (see Figure 3-1). All parts of the wheel are focused on delivering a desirable customer experience, although each has its clearly defined role in supporting this goal. The wheel describes these roles and helps translate experience strategy into operational excellence. If you grasp and use the structure of the wheel, then you are well on your way to developing an experience-centric organization.

The wheel identifies the roles and relationships between the different parts of an organization from an experience perspective and explains how things fit together, both conceptually and functionally. However, the wheel does not present chronological steps for implementation. It shows the parts that need to work together and how they can integrate their competencies to create the whole—an aligned organization capable of delivering exceptional experiences.

The Wheel: A Short Trip Around

I will describe the wheel of experience centricity briefly here, and the following chapters will go into each part in more detail. The core idea behind the wheel is that you start with the experience and work around the wheel to deliver that experience. The farther around the wheel you go, the more strategic it becomes, therefore ensuring that you are making strategic decisions from a customer experience perspective.

The wheel can rotate in both directions. In the bottom-up direction, the experience is fulfilled through touchpoints, enabled by platforms within a business model that supports the experiential offering. In the top-down direction, the experience defines the offering, which then dictates the business model (and value network). This process is enabled by technology (and other) platforms, which support experience fulfillment through touchpoints to process the desirable result. Both directions of movement occur at the same time, something we call top-up—that is, the coexistence of bottom-up and top-down processes.

The Experience as the Starting Point

The experience-centric organization not only has a laser-sharp understanding of the experience that customers should have, but also understands that the experience is the perfect expression of its heritage, mission, and values.

In the experience-centric view, everything starts and ends with the experience. You start with a desirable experience—that is, one that you want the customer to have—and then follow the wheel clockwise, working backward through the organization to discover how that desirable experience can be made possible. If you do this, you will be in good company. The two most valuable organizations in the world, Apple and Amazon, both work from the experience backward. It’s time for you to join in their success.

You will read a lot more about the experience in Chapter 6, but at this stage, it is important to explain that the experience-centric organization knows its target users so well that it can view the world through the customer’s eyes (more on this in Chapter 4). It understands the individual customer, customers as communities (see Chapter 9), and customers as part of culture in its broadest sense (more of this in Chapter 10).

If we zoom in on the customer experience, you will find that it is a combination of customers’ expectations prior to using your service (among other things, provided by your offering, word of mouth, reviews, etc.) and the experience they have when using your service. This creates a closed loop between the perceived offering and the experience itself. Both of these are powered by the experiential DNA of your organization, which is an aggregation of your heritage, brand, values, and mission. These three aspects work together to deliver the memorable experience that customers crave, and you must consider all three together when designing for customer experience. This is the tripod of experience (see Figure 3-2), and the success of the organization rests on getting it right. It is your triple top line, based on an interplay between your experiential DNA, your experiential offering, and the customer experience itself.

The outcome of the tripod of experience is the experience itself, as experienced by the customer when using your service, but defined and described in advance through their expectation. The offering itself has no value; it is only when the service is used that value is created—what’s known as value in use. The experience that the customer has is the return on experiential investment.

The move from just considering the experience alone toward understanding the tripod of experience is important. Until recently, the customer experience has been viewed simply as a layer on top of everything else, and considered in isolation. By understanding how the elements of the tripod of experience work together to form the customer experience, you can create stronger, more relevant, and more differentiated products and services that bring the customer experience into the heart of the organization.

Noma and the Tripod of Experience

Imagine you are starting a restaurant and you want to give a truly exceptional experience­—one that people will praise above all others and travel long distances to have. You would start by defining what people would experience: the tastes, how they would feel when seeing and eating the food, how they would describe the place to others, how the sequence of dishes builds to a climax, and more. Then, you would consider what offering could provide that exceptional experience. How would it be different from other restaurants, and what sets it apart from them? And then, how does this fit with the DNA of the organization, or in this case, as a new restaurant, the mission of the founders? As you do this, you would bounce back and forth between all three—for example, an offering idea might change the experience, and vice versa.

Noma is a restaurant in Copenhagen that managed to do just that. It was recognized as the best restaurant in the world for three consecutive years and people traveled across continents to experience it. The restaurant had a clearly defined experience they wanted to give customers (and succeeded in delivering it). Their experiential offering was emotional and idealistic. It offered fantastic and innovative dishes based on local ingredients, and delivered them with passion and a desire to convince customers through their very experience that local food can be exceptional. Noma went all out to make its customers feel something, and was very clear about the experience it wanted to provide. The experience was a clear articulation of the restaurant’s experiential DNA, which combined passion, idealism, and a deep desire to change perceptions. Noma is a great example of an organization that perfected the tripod of experience.

You will find that these are circular questions—that is, they influence each other—and that is how it should be. There are strong dependencies between the three elements, and you should put care, time, and energy into getting them right. As we will see later, crafting the experience has strategic consequences as you move around the wheel, so make sure you have a high degree of confidence in what you choose, and that you prototype it before investing in implementation. Only when you are confident that you have something of strong value should you move on to the next stage: determining how to fulfill the desirable experience you want to provide to your customers.

Experience Fulfillment Through Touchpoints Along an Experiential Journey

How does a customer experience your service? The experience comes through use. Until the moments of truth of using your service, the customer only has expectations, and you have only made promises. The experience comes from interactions with the multiple points of contact (touchpoints) as they progress through using your service or product (the experiential journey).

For example, if you want to take someone out for a meal, there are stages to the experiential journey, such as deciding who to invite, choosing a suitable time and date, choosing a restaurant, inviting people, getting ready, traveling to the restaurant, eating, paying, traveling back, and following up. You can connect these stages to the experience you want your customers to have to design the experiential journey: how can you support the customer as part of the experiential journey, when they are inviting people to join them for a meal?

In this way you can ensure that your touchpoints, interactions, and experiential journey are optimized to deliver on the experiential promise. Gaining a shared understanding and support for the touchpoints and journey that you want to achieve is key. This is a challenge, since the journey will likely hop across internal silos, creating cross-silo challenges. In many organizations silos are not used to working together in this way, and they are usually measured for “within-silo” performance rather than performance across silos.

In the fantastic visualization on the next page, you can see all of the human touchpoints needed to create a soccer matchday experience. Thousands of touchpoints are all coordinated to create a predefined and desired experience, one that is focused on 22 players on a piece of grass. This coordination is key.

Comb, No, You Don’t Need No Comb

Once, when I flew from Scandinavia to the US, my baggage was delayed and I had to stand in line to receive an overnight bag of supplies to keep me going. I was tired and frustrated, and in a looong line of other people, who I assume were also tired and frustrated. When I got to the front of the line, I was met by a customer service agent (my major touchpoint), who was strict, to the point, and seemed totally uninterested in my grumpiness. They sorted the paperwork, then took a night bag out and started to fill it, speaking aloud as they placed items in the bag: “Toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, socks, underpants.” Then, “Comb,” at which point they looked at me and, with a naughty smile that I remember to this day, said, “Comb, no, you don’t need no comb,” and put it aside.

We both burst out laughing, and I had to agree, as a folically challenged man (balding… OK, very bald), I had no need for a comb.

During that event, we had a shared moment that transformed my experience from awful to enjoyable, changed my mood from grumpy to positive, and gave me an experience I remember to this day—all because the employee went off-script and injected some humor into our interaction. I will never forget it. Empowering your employees to go off-script, and having an organizational culture that supports it (and knows its limits), can create small “wow” moments in a service and turn a customer experience from bad to good.

As a footnote to this, a similar thing happened to me in my local supermarket last week. The checkout person said to me, with a smile, “You do know that I judge people’s character by what they buy.” After a short conversation, I found that I had passed muster. These kinds of experiences are memorable in a crystal-clear way, because they positively challenge your expectations.

Questions that an organization should ask at this stage are:

• Which experiential journey(s) do we want our customers to follow so that they have the experience we have defined?
• Which touchpoints are the right ones to provide the desired experience?
• What are the experiential characteristics of the interactions when the customer uses the touchpoints?
• How is the service personally expressed through the touchpoints?

What is the tone of voice needed to provide the experience? Working with touchpoints is described in more detail in Chapter 6, and aspects of service personality and tone of voice are covered in Chapter 7.

Now, using the meal example again, let’s dive down a bit into one of the first stages of your experiential meal journey: choosing a place to eat. Touchpoints here could be friends who recommend a place, an ad, a sign, an expert review online, an app ranking, or simply a return to your favorite place. Booking might involve a telephone, a website, an app, or physically walking into the restaurant. Jump to arriving at the restaurant, and there are multiple touchpoints, from the exterior of the place (you ever judge a place by its exterior? I do), the interior, the person who meets you, their clothing, what they say, how they say it. I could go on, but you get the idea. The customer experience comes from a multitude of interactions with touchpoints along the experiential journey, and you cannot control the order or ways in which they are used.

What is key here is that touchpoints are the only way the customer can experience your product or service, so you should choose and design them to fulfill the experiential promise. This doesn’t mean that the touchpoints are the most important part of your organization (though they might be), but it does mean that you have to get them right to be able to give the right experience.

Source: Allianz SE.

Experience Enablement Through Systems, Processes, Organizational Structures, and Platforms

Touchpoints and their position along the experiential journey cannot exist in isolation. They have to be enabled by IT systems, organizational structures, processes, and platforms. At this stage, the main question to ask is, “How do we enable the touchpoints and the desired experiential journey so the customer consistently has the right experience?” Answering this gives the organization a shared understanding about roles and expectations so they can focus on becoming an efficient and well-oiled machine that enables the touchpoints to fulfill the experiential promise. They then can optimize their platforms, structures, internal processes, reward mechanisms, and supporting functions with an experiential focus. Investments in infrastructure will then always be framed in terms of an experiential value—that is, how will this platform enable the experience we want to give?

In many ways, you could say that these experience enablers power the touchpoints. The experience enablers function like an analog watch, in which the different cogs are internal and external actors, working well together to power the touchpoints that provide the customer experience. As an example, take the lovely person who recently met you at a restaurant and showed you to your table. They are part of an organizational structure with a formal and informal culture. The formal covers, for example, the pay structure, degree of hierarchy, working hours, and bonus system. The informal can be how people help each other out when it gets busy, the way they talk to each other, the flexibility between employees to take breaks when needed. All of these have an influence on the dining experience you will have. And this culture goes right down to the formal decision to use a scripted “Good evening sir, how are you tonight?” or the unscripted “Hey, how you doing? You look ready for a great night out.” All of these experiences are enabled, in your organization, by the selection of personnel, the training, the choice of scripts (or no scripts), and the design of internal culture.

But it’s not just about people. There are technical platforms too. The payment terminal you pay with may be linked to the booking system, the order system, the kitchen task list, and the billing system, and ultimately a waiter who finally presents you with a bill and says, “Thank you for eating here, have a nice evening.” Or maybe even, “It was great to see you again, Simon, we hope to see you again soon” (for the regulars).

Experience fulfillment through touchpoints is important because that is where the experience occurs—but to scale your service, the experience enablers are vital. You can only get so far with a creative offering, a great experience, and lots of hard work, if they’re held together with ad hoc solutions. Very quickly, you will need platforms and structures that allow you to deliver on the experience you would like your customers to have. It’s important, therefore, that these platforms enable the touchpoints instead of constraining them when it comes to experience fulfillment.

Part of a Bigger Structure: The Business Model and Service Ecology

The business model and service ecology form a key structure in two ways. First, they define the actor network and ensure that it is possible to create value from the concept. Without a structure, the offering is only a promising concept; the structure is what defines its viability. Second, they support the experience enablers. The experience structure identifies and develops the value streams and service ecology that build the bridge between a promising experiential offering and the technology and organizational platforms enabling the touchpoint experience fulfillment.

Some key touchpoints might be enabled by a partner organization, and that choice is a strategic or highly tactical one, with the decision being based on your business model for the product or service in question. With the restaurant example, there may be a franchise behind the restaurant that has a particular business model structure and a network of trusted suppliers. Alternatively, there might be a strategic collaboration between a small restaurant and many expert small suppliers, creating a strong but risky dependency. Both of these aspects impact the customer experience, and when taking an experience-centric approach, you should directly develop the alliances and business model based on the experience that you want the customer to have. The choice, therefore, of a franchise solution should rest on whether it fits with the customer experience you want to give.

The actor network is central to value creation, and the ecological way of thinking takes a different approach to the value chain approach that Porter made popular in the 1990s. Experiences are not delivered through a value chain, but instead created through a value network, an ecology of relationships, which has as its center a close experiential relationship between the organization and the customer.

Developing the value network necessary to create mutual value is key to experience delivery for two reasons. First, no organization can do this work alone. Second, you have to recognize the role of the customer in your value network, and the network of actors belonging to your customers themselves. In addition, you need to develop a collaborative model for how the actors contribute to the experiential value created—that is, enabling experiential value exchange between actors—which becomes central to your business model.

At the structural level, the actor network supports an efficient and effective series of platforms to enable the customer experience. The business model defines how value is created and flows within the value network, and how the actor network’s powerful web of value exchange creates mutual value for each actor in both the short and long term. At this stage, the customer is a key actor, and the business model is one in which value is co-created between all actors.

There and Back Again: The Offering and the Tripod of Experience

The experiential offering, or experiential value proposition (EVP), is the what of the service, and can be broken down into two main parts: what you want to offer and what your customers perceive as being offered. The EVP offers a particular and memorable experience to the customer, and creates expectations in customers that are later fulfilled through the interactions they have with touchpoints.

The offering is inextricably linked to the experience itself, since the offering is the promise you make to a customer about what experience they will receive as you go together through the experiential journey. The offering entices the customer to try the service and hopefully build a relationship with you through reuse. We will see later how the offering is key to experience, since people continually create expectations about what is going to happen when we use something. The offering supports that way of thinking by providing expectations for experiences that are so desirable that the customer seeks them out.

On the one hand, the offering is promising something experiential (making an EVP) to customers, and on the other hand, it is the source for developing a business model and service ecology. At the same time, both the offering and the experience have to fit well with your experiential DNA —bringing us back to the tripod of experience (Figure 3-3). To do anything else is either a deliberate strategy to change your organization (something that should be rare), or a mistake. The experiential DNA is the foundation that your customers relate to over time, has a long heritage, and is the core part of your organizational logic. Changing your experiential DNA or not aligning to it is a path fraught with difficulty.

The offering develops from a negotiation between your organization’s desired customer experience and your experiential DNA. For the desired customer experience, the organization asks, “What offering do we need to produce to be able to deliver that target experience?” This is an experience pull approach. At the same time, your organization needs to translate its experiential DNA into something tangible by asking, “What is the right fit for our organization?” This is a DNA push approach. This chicken-and-egg-style negotiation has to continue until both components are optimized, producing an offering that both promises a desirable customer experience and fits with your DNA.

The offering forms the yardstick for customer expectations, and is understood in experiential form even before the customer interacts with a touchpoint. In this way, the experiential offering promises functional, emotional, self-expressive, and idealistic benefits that will later be fulfilled as the customer takes their experiential journey through the service.

If you delve deeper into the offering, you will find that it provides meaning to customers by linking to cultural aspects such as trends or cultural phenomena. The link between meaning and the experience that the offering unlocks (see Chapter 9) is a key part of experiential design and a potential multiplier of experiential value.

The experiential offering marks a transition internally in the organization, since it forms the basis for the business model and the actor network needed to realize it. In this way, it evolves from being a concept to a tangible structure. It should be possible to read from the offering (and the experience it promises) which actors will need to be involved in delivery, and what the business model is for the value exchange between actors.

And that closes the circle and brings us back from the offering to the experience itself. We have gone around the circle: the experience is fulfilled by touchpoints; the touchpoints are enabled by (all kinds of) platforms; the platforms are part of a larger business model and service ecology structure; and the structure should be based on the offering.

Experiential DNA as the Hub of the Wheel

We have now taken a quick spin around the wheel, and described how the various parts fit together. But we have one more part to consider: the hub of it all, your experiential DNA (see Figure 3-4). A wheel has a hub and (in this case) spokes that connect that hub to each and every part of the wheel. This hub is your experiential DNA, and it has a key role in the experience-centric organization. You might not have given it too much thought as you have developed as an organization, but it has always been there.

Your experiential DNA, like human DNA, defines what you are and who you can become, and in turn, what experiences your organization will be capable (and not capable) of delivering. Your experiential DNA is the jewel in your crown. As such, it might have been taken care of and regularly polished, or it might be tarnished and faded from neglect. However, it will always be there, defining your uniqueness (good or bad).

At the start-up phase, the organization had a reason to start, and that often is based on some kind of vision from the founders. This is where the DNA starts to form, and as the organization is created, developed, and then scaled, this DNA likewise develops and becomes the organization’s way of thinking and doing. It is often left to develop without being given much thought, but that does not mean that it has disappeared; it is just not front of mind. Now, however, in a society that is driven by experiences, it will play a central role in the experience-centric organization.

Your experiential DNA is the foundation for all that rotates around it. It is your raison d’être (“reason to be”). It is a mix of your heritage, mission, vision, values, cultural standing, and brand all rolled into one. Only Apple can be Apple. Only Google can be Google. Only you can be you, and the more you understand your DNA, the more you can differentiate yourself from the competition. If you provide experiences that do not match your experiential DNA, then you will at best cloud your image with customers, and at worst be seen as irrelevant. From now on, aligning the customer experience, the offering, and your experiential DNA is your main mission.

Your experiential DNA can be defined as the latent potential of your organization and the image it projects to the world. It is a synthesis of external perspective (how you have been perceived), and your internal set of characteristics (how you have been structured and have functioned). Experiential DNA cannot be seen directly, and therefore it is often difficult for people to articulate or discuss it. It needs to be carefully understood through an explorative journey, involving the following stops along the way:

• The historical customer experience: the expectations and experiences that customers have had over time
• Your story: the original dream and how you came to be the company you are today
• Your personality and tone-of-voice heritage: how you have related to customers over time and how customers have perceived this
• Your offering heritage: what you have offered over time and how it has evolved
• What you have become known for and remembered for by your customers
• Your organizational structure and its workings
• Motivators and rewards within the organization
• The information flow within the organization, in terms of how activities are coordinated and how knowledge is transferred
• The mission, vision, and values of your organization: what they are, how they are applied, and how they are communicated

There is no right or wrong way to summarize the experiential DNA. It could be a document, a visualization, or even a mood board. What is important is that you know it very well, like a good friend, and that you adjust your decisions according to it. Good friendships change slowly, and you can influence them, but slowly. It is the same with your experiential DNA. Understand it, nurture it, and make plans for its long-term development.

This means matching the customer experience to your DNA, which makes it unique to your organization (see Figure 3-5 for an example). Matching the DNA and the experience might seem like a simple thing to do, but it is surprising how many organizations do not recognize its importance, lacking both the ability and the structures to achieve it. If you don’t know the experience you want to give your customers, then you are just guessing, and as we know, guessing has a high probability of failure. How can you expect customers to prefer you as a partner if you don’t know what you are offering?

What if you feel you don’t have a strong experiential DNA? You might not be aware of it, but you do have one. Every organization does, and if you are a start-up, you have the opportunity to invent one. This is described in more detail in Chapters 9 and 10.

Innovating Your Service Experience Using the Whole Wheel

The focus in the experience-centric organization is on developing and providing desirable experiences to customers, and that requires constant innovation. Surprise and delight can come from many different places, and as we will see later, not every “wow” has to be a big “WOW!” Even though the experience is the ultimate outcome you want to deliver, I don’t want to give the impression that you can innovate only in the experience itself. Rather, I want to get you into the mindset of considering the experiential value of all innovations. There is a constant din of possible innovations, and the key is to identify their experiential impact.

Improving Experience and Reducing Costs at the Same Time

A few years ago, a large telco gave me the brief to reduce customer care costs, while improving the customer experience. Sounds impossible, but when we explored the customer experience and listened to customers, we found that it was in fact possible. Customers generally wanted to solve the problems themselves, and the information they needed was already available on the telco site. The problem was linking the two together. Poor site design made this difficult—it required a login that no one could remember, it was hard to find what you needed and navigate the menus, it used technical terms, and so on—even though the final information itself was well designed. This led customers to think, “Well, the information might be there, but I’m never going to find it, so I’ll call instead.” A combination of solutions based around an online-first approach were suggested, including contextual labels that could be placed on equipment, with short URLs directly linking to relevant pages.

Source: author.

The experience and the offering itself are probably your first thoughts when it comes to innovation in customer experience, but the experience comes from all the parts of the wheel working in alignment. Innovation in any part of the wheel can radically change the customer experience. For example, innovations in touchpoints can give experiential value. Uber is a great example of how a single touchpoint, and its supporting platform, can transform the whole taxi business worldwide. Innovations in supporting platforms, or through organizational design, all have the potential to create better experiences. Employee empowerment is one area of organizational innovation that comes to mind. And of course, innovations in business models and strategic actor collaboration are also strong means of innovating in the customer experience.

There are plenty of painful examples in the past where huge investments have been made, yet they haven’t provided the expected experiential benefits (yes, I’m thinking of you, huge CRM investment made 10 years ago). In the experience-centric organization, alignment is always toward improving the experience, and innovations should always be considered in terms of whether they improve the customer experience or detract from it, or if they can provide the same experience at lower cost. Herein also lies a danger—slowly eroding your customer experience by efficiencies of scale that slightly detract from the experience. We have all seen it in restaurants after they make a name for themselves: the portions get smaller, the service more abrupt, the ingredients less exciting, the time you get at the table briefer. Each element erodes the experience a little, until eventually the whole experience collapses and the restaurant becomes empty. In our experience-centric world, these things are quickly noticed and spread, and you can quickly lose your experiential mojo and find yourself removed from the favorite restaurant list. If you find yourself saying, “This has a minimal effect on the customer experience but an impact on our bottom line” too many times, think carefully about what that minimal effect is. Is it really minimal ? Customers are very sensitive to experiential change, and are looking (not always consciously) for excuses to distrust you. Don’t give them a reason to start that suspicious train of thought, as it launches a negative spiral that can be devastating. Trust is a fragile thing, and the commitment a customer makes relies on it, so don’t stretch it or abuse it.

The Experiential DNA of SAS and Its Current Dilemma

SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) started in 1950 as a shared Scandinavian vision, buoyed by the social democracy movements of the Scandinavian countries, combined with a need for transport over difficult terrain. SAS had style and glamor, and became known for excellent customer service, particularly in business class. It had an internationally known leader in Jan Carlzon, who championed an empowered employee organization, and this gave the company great success. But SAS became too reliant on its business class passengers, started to be complacent, and took its eye off its heritage after Carlzon left. It was caught out by rapid deregulation and the entry of low-cost airlines exploiting the changing situation. The competition could suddenly offer a better overall experience since they used improved digital self-service touchpoints and, more importantly, new planes. SAS was slow to replace planes and suddenly looked out of touch—and was out of touch with its customers. At its worst, SAS treated passengers as if they owned them, and started to behave like the slightly grumpy older relative at a family reunion. Its ownership structure of multiple countries suddenly became a bickering family, reflecting different political directions in the respective countries. This caused problems with reorganization and resulted in huge economic losses.

In its recent attempts to compete with low-cost airlines, SAS has not capitalized on its experiential DNA, instead trying to be something it cannot be: a low-cost airline. The experiential DNA of SAS is unfortunately in total contrast to the customer experience of the airline today, which has suffered greatly. This is evident in a customer quote from a recent online review:

This just about summed up our experience and impression of SAS as an airline company, tired, old and lacking in any genuine feeling for service and customer satisfaction.

RIP old girl, you were once a half decent airline company. Luckily there are other new airlines eager to please.