7

Experiential Translation: From Experiential DNA to Customer Experience

Your experiential DNA is your prime asset, and this chapter explains how you can translate it into the right experience for the customer. It shows that a successful translation will not only develop your unique experiential position, it will also make it hard for competitors to copy you.

Recently I moved to Denmark, and enrolled with a new doctor. I had moved within Scandinavia, so the general welfare model was the same. However, I became acutely aware of how I was learning about the doctor’s practice, partly because I had this book in mind (but mostly because I am a nerd). I was reflecting on every point of contact, and using these small experiential moments to piece together like a jigsaw a coherent idea of the personality of the service they offered. I don’t mean just the personality of the doctor (although that was a major part of it), but the personality of the whole service, constructed from all of the small interactions I had. From booking an appointment to arranging a blood test, receiving results, going to consultations, waiting in the waiting room, and talking with the doctor, I was putting together a coherent story based on multiple small snapshots of experience. This went right down to details like the furniture in the waiting room, the pictures on the wall, and even the pens—everything. I built up a cohesive story about the doctor’s practice based on all of these touchpoints, constructing a personality, behaviors, tone of voice, and style of interactions.

And then I asked myself, why was I doing this? If you have read Chapter 6, you will understand that I was gathering information to create scenarios in my head, to prepare myself for future trips to the doctor’s practice. I was learning how that particular place worked in an experiential way, so that in the future, I could make my life easier. I would know how to talk to the doctor, what information I needed when booking an appointment, how to behave when entering the waiting room, and so on—a whole load of experiential scenario clues that would make my life easier. Looking more closely, and using the terms in this book, I was decoding the offering, based on my interactions with the different touchpoints and the experiential journeys I had with them. Not only this, but I summarized this offering and experiential story about the doctor’s practice for myself, so that it wouldn’t take much space in my memory.

In other words, I was working through the tripod of experience (see Chapter 3) backward, creating an experiential image in my mind, based on my interactions over time, piecing all of the touchpoint interactions together and then storing them in the simplest possible way in my memory as an offering/experience/DNA combination.

Experiential translation does the same, but as part of a deliberate design process. Translation is a means of ensuring that the experience you want the customer to have from all of their interactions with your touchpoints is a transparent representation of the experiential DNA of the organization. To enable this, you need to have a way of summarizing your experiential DNA, so that it can be used as part of a design process. This is the experiential platform, a transparent representation of your experiential DNA, but described in such a way that it can be used for design purposes. I doubt that the doctor I went to had given thought to this at all as he designed his practice, and it showed clearly. He was also paying the price, as I could see that there was a rapid churn of patients.

Designing for experience is all about multiple translation processes. You translate from customer insights into a desirable experience and offering, you translate that to touchpoints and a journey, and you translate that to organizational structure and culture. And all the time, you translate your experiential DNA, to use it in each and every decision you make.

Why Do You Need to Translate?

If you don’t have a target, what can you aim for? As an organization, if you do not know what kind of experience you want your customers to have, then how can you make it happen? Good experiences don’t happen by magic or by accident, but through direction, understanding, and guidance.

The most important reason for translating, and for involving the leadership in it, is to decide on a direction and agree to focus on a personality and desired experience for your organization. This shows both intent and direction and ensures alignment.

Second, as you start to develop services that implement this personality, you will need to communicate that target personality and customer experience to design teams.

This chapter is about the translation between the experiential DNA of your organization and the experience the customer has when using your service. It describes how you as an organization can create an experience platform that can be used throughout the organization as a means of both identifying the experience you want to give customers and designing the details of your projects. In this way, the experience platform forms a standard within the organization for everything you do. This translation process can be summarized by the following formula:

Experiential DNA × Translation = Experience platform

If you are an existing organization and already have a strong grip on your brand, then you are well on the way to doing this work. You may already have developed a personality for your service or organization. In my experience, most organizations translate their brand into values and a visual identity, but rarely define the personality of the organization or the experience they wish to provide. The experience-centric organization needs to be clear about the experience it wants to give, and that means moving beyond visual identity.

The experience platform is a reference point and should be considered one of the basic building blocks of the experience-centric organization. It builds on and summarizes the experiential DNA of the organization, describing it in an experiential way so that it can be used in the design process. Each and every organization has experiential DNA that defines and delineates what it can and cannot offer and what experiences it can provide for the customer. However, the experiential DNA is a complex mix of your brand, your heritage, your organization, and your position in the market and needs to be translated in a cohesive way to aid design for experience. By converting your DNA into a reference platform, you create something that everyone in the organization can consult when defining what you want the customer to see and feel when they experience your service. It becomes a statement of intent, a target, and a design reference tool, all in one.

Moving from a Visual-Identity Brand to an Experiential Organization

Brand experts will recognize the need for this translation, and it could be argued that this is just good branding. In theory I would agree, but in practice, “brand” has become synonymous with visual identity. It is surprising how many organizations end up developing visual identity handbooks, instead of experience handbooks, as an expression of their brand. It is perhaps a carryover from product thinking, in which the product is the main point of focus and branding is needed to identify the sender, through a logo, web presence, and packaging. As we have seen from Chapter 3, however, the customer experience is enabled by touchpoints, behaviors, personality, and tone of voice, all of which lie outside the traditional brand handbook.

We have consistently used the terms experience and experiential DNA in this book, because the term branding has become misused and misunderstood. The experience-centric organization is about more than the brand as the term is generally used today, so we needed new terms that have a specific experiential focus. Branding has often been discussed in terms of a promise—that is, used as a means of promising something through advertising. The experience-centric organization is instead all about delivering experiences that are co-created with customers, and this is the focus we’ll use from now on. The brand as it is presented in the organization, while important, is only one part of the experiential DNA.

Translation is all about connecting the customer experience to the experiential DNA of your organization, and in doing so developing a personality, behavior, and tone of voice that complement your visual identity. This does not deny the importance of the visual identity, but rather places it in a context where it is one of many contributors to a customer experience. Now’s the time where we focus on the others.

Experience First: The Mantra of Experience Centricity

While it goes against the accepted structured, analytical approach, it seems logical to start by crafting a desirable experience and work backward. The customer experience is where value is created, so it makes a lot of sense to start there, doesn’t it? Crafting desirable experiences draws customers to you, and draws more attention through word of mouth than advertising. Experiences find their market because they get you noticed and shared, recommended, reviewed, and boosted by customers. To achieve this, experience fit is key; you have to start with the experience, one that cements the offering into place through use and that fits your organization and your heritage. The right experience gives meaning to customers, and also gives you meaning as an organization. Without that burning desire to offer something experiential, something that makes you proud to deliver, your customers will see through you and dismiss you as fake.

The Two-Way Street of Experience Fit: Making a DNA Match

There is a close relationship among the three elements in the tripod of experience: your experiential DNA, the experiential offering, and the experience itself (see Figure 7-1). They are powered and structured by the wheel of experience centricity, such that the whole organization stands behind them.

Starting with the experience and using the tripod of experience requires you to work backward to describe the offering that is needed to provide that experience. If you are a start-up, you can use this approach to define your experiential DNA. However, if you are an existing organization, you also need to work the other way around the tripod, to ensure a DNA fit. In this approach, you start with your experience platform, and discuss the customer experience you are able to provide.

In reality, when innovating you will find that you continually switch between starting with the experience, starting with your experiential DNA, and starting with the offering, but always with a focus on the final customer experience. You might have conversations like:

• What kind of experience do our customers desire?
• What if we offered X? How would the customer experience be then?
• What experience can we offer that is a natural consequence of our DNA?

Each of these approaches is a natural way to work with the tripod of experience, and innovation can come from any of the three components. What is key is that finally all three elements fit harmoniously together so that the customer perceives a clear line from the experience, through the offering, to the DNA of the organization. This is a design thinking approach, focusing on “what can be” as the basis for experimentation. This approach also requires that you know your organization and your customers equally well, so that what you deliver is something that customers desire.

Fit or Stretch

The customer experience must be a good fit to your DNA, because the whole organization is a part of its delivery. A mismatch opens you up to high risk of failure. But as in strategy, you can develop a perfect fit to what is, or you can stretch the organization in a new direction. This is an approach where you deliberately aim to change your experiential DNA, which would entail organizational transformation. The degree of stretch depends on your organization—you have to know your organization really well to make sure that it can develop the new competencies and stretch to fit the new experience chosen. Experiential DNA is not totally static, but it changes slowly. The term fit here does include a little wiggle room to stretch your organization toward the experience, and in this way you can consciously move your organization each time you innovate.

Creating an Experience Platform

The translation process comprises three steps, resulting in an experience platform that can support design decisions, which in turn will always be infused with the organization’s experiential DNA.

The three steps of translation are:

1. Identify your experiential DNA.
2. Translate it into a service personality and exemplify its behaviors and tone of voice.
3. Build out your personality to develop an experiential platform for use within the organization.

You can then start to create principles for design, iterate, and use the platform you’ve created for design.

Identify Your Experiential DNA

In the same way that your own DNA, as a reader of this book, is the code for your life as a person, the experiential DNA is the code, laid out for your organization, that defines what experiences you can and cannot deliver. Your experiential DNA is a mix of who you are, who you have been, and who you want to be, and it balances the customer perspective and the organizational perspective. Thus, internal culture and the customer view both play an important part in your DNA.

Your experiential DNA is a mix of:

• Your mission, vision, and values
• Your brand strategy and history
• How you view yourselves
• How you are viewed by your customers
• Your heritage (as viewed by yourselves and as viewed by customers)

Many organizations think they know these things, but in reality their understanding is based on fragments of information and not articulated in detail. Identifying the experiential DNA is often the first time that they develop a balanced internal and external experiential view of the organization. Taking this step, and then acting upon the DNA identified, is a major milestone along the path to experience centricity. Once you have carried out this work, you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

If Your Service Were a Car Brand

I remember getting into a passionate discussion with a leadership group in a service organization by asking them to compare themselves to a car brand. After some discussion, they argued for an hour about how they wanted to be similar to Saab, with its Nordic sensibilities and strong but subtle design, and Audi, with its driving experience and German efficiency. In the end they settled on a combination that was clearly defined.

This nuanced and passionate discussion was in stark contrast to how the leadership group otherwise discussed emotional aspects of their organization. By using analogies (e.g., supermarkets, people, airlines) we were able to have the detailed discussions that were needed to be able to obtain an experience fit. The company went on to match their newly identified experiential DNA with the basis for their offering, touchpoints, and approach to service.

If you are working at a start-up, you have the luxury of creating your experiential DNA. This will normally emerge through an interplay between understanding customers, the mission of the start-up partners, and the development of the offering.

The outcome of this process is a DNA description that has a long-term influence on the organization, and should only be updated gradually and organically as the market context changes.

Warts and All …

Being able to influence people’s emotions requires great insight into your organization and the people you want to influence. Consider a comparison from music: it is not uncommon that musicians create their best music at some personal cost, which is part of the reason it carries such emotional resonance across the years. For example, Joni Mitchell once said that her audience connected with the honesty of a great song because “it strikes against the very nerves of their life.” She then added, “To do that, you have to first strike against your own.”1

It can be painful exploring your own DNA and accepting some harsh truths on the way. But this process is important, and the insights you gain allow you to embrace your organization, warts and all, safe in the knowledge that you will build something fantastic from it. This is not me getting all New Age on you, but influencing emotions requires that you yourself understand them.

I recommend experiential DNA be identified together with external specialists as part of a long-term collaboration. This is because your own internal view can often skew your results, so you most likely need an independent opinion. I specify long-term collaboration, because knowing your DNA is just the first step. You have to then be able to apply it, and you most likely will need support for this later. However, you will need to be closely involved, because the internal view requires discussion and is key to creating organizational alignment. You may also find that the results of the experiential DNA challenge and update your brand. In almost all projects where I have worked with experiential DNA, the brand has been updated as part of the work.

Translate Your DNA into a Service Personality and Exemplify It

The second stage is to take the experiential DNA and describe it in detail, as if it were a person creating your service personality. In this way you give your DNA a human face and describe the experiential behavior and tone of voice expected of your organization when a customer (or employee) interacts with it. A successful transformation will result in a personality that can be used for design and evaluation and, when implemented through touchpoints and customer journeys, will shine through and be recognizable to customers.

In the same way that an author describes the personality of someone in a novel so well that you feel you know them, you should describe your service personality so fully that you feel you know the service deeply. When the personality is correctly chosen, it instills confidence within the organization, since employees recognize it as a reflection of the organizational DNA. Several times I have heard people say, “Wow, that’s us!”

Service Personality

Service personality is a recent construct, based on brand personality but specifically tailored to the characteristics of services.2 Brand personality has been considered an important concept in branding for some time, although primarily for product-based organizations. The term originated in the 1950s within advertising, and evolved during the late 1970s to describe the nonfunctional characteristics of a product. It became used as a common, practical term for assessing non-product-based, nonfunctional dimensions of the brand.

The term became widely debated and discussed in the 1990s, due to the work of Jennifer Aaker. She defined brand personality as “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand” and presented quantitative research that identified five key personality dimensions.3 Her 1997 article on the subject became important for marketing and strongly influenced the view of branding at that time. Aaker’s five core personality dimensions were criticized as being limited, and although there was agreement that brand personality was relevant in conceptual terms, critics disagreed about its core factors, components, and cross-culturality. This is due, in large part, to a desire for reliable and independent quantifiable factors for use in quantitative research.

Brand personality is commonly used in destination tourism, and is central to the destination branding model proposed by Ekinci (2003).4 Further, Murphy et al. (2007)5 show that tourists are able to identify and express the brand personality of tourism destinations. Brand personality has also been studied in terms of the design of a particular touchpoint—a wine label, for instance—to show how it can be used to evaluate the brand personality of a store. Azoulay and Kapferer link brand personality to behaviors, which has particular relevance to the branding of services. They note that:

Indeed, the personality of individuals is perceived through their behavior, and, in exactly the same way, consumers can attribute a personality to a brand according to its perceived communication and “behaviors.’” 6

The term brand personality thus has a wide range of application and relevance in branding, particularly services branding, and is suited to a “multiple touchpoint” view of services. I have further developed this definition in my own work to establish the term service personality.7

We use a mix of words, images, audio, and video to describe the service personality, and using analogies to other existing brands and personalities is an effective means of doing this—not because you should copy them, but because they have elements that we all understand and can relate to.

The Hot and Cold Approach

In Scandinavia, the UK, and the US, kids play a game known as “Hot and Cold” each Easter to find hidden Easter eggs. While the kids search, observers give them tips such as “You’re getting warmer,” “You’re getting colder,” “You’re getting hot,” and “You’re burning up!” as they approach an egg. The same approach can be used to hunt for the personality that fits your organization, and this is a technique I have used with companies several times.

Armed with a good actor, writer, printer, and video camera, we have explored alternative service personalities to find the one that fits. After choosing initial experiential words and discussing the experiential DNA, we script a customer encounter based on each of the keywords and a few outliers (which act as a slight but positive provocation). The script is played out with the leadership, and we evaluate their responses in terms “warmer” (that is more like us) or “colder” (that is less us). We deliberately use these terms first, as the team is often unable to say exactly why a personality doesn’t work. Sometimes people will say, “That’s a bit closer to us, but it lacks some X,” and can be specific, but sometimes not. After a broad first run of the hot-and-cold exercise, the scripts are rewritten to account for the feedback, acted and filmed again, and repeated. After a few iterations we end up with a really precise experiential representation of the organization that has been defined, refined, and agreed on.

As I have mentioned, the only way to experience an experience is to experience it, and this applies to your service personality as well. The best way to discuss and identify your personality is by experiencing it through example. This is because we are generally poor at describing a personality but good at recognizing one. Authors and actors are better at describing personality, but you are best at recognizing whether it fits. Therefore, it is useful to collaborate with, for example, a good actor to try out alternative personalities to find the one you are happy with.

At this stage, you and your leadership group have the agreed-on perfect representation of your organization. It is then possible to work backward, to describe this endpoint in words and images in order to capture the service personality and the experience it delivers.

Build Out Your Personality to Develop an Experiential Platform

As part of the translation process it is important that you develop terminology within the organization to discuss, negotiate, and form the experience you wish to have, so when you find it, you are able to explain it to others. But experience shows that we are quite poor at describing these things, and it takes time to learn the terminology. Thus, it is wise to have some design help along the way. If you are moving along the experience-centric maturity scale, you have most likely employed a designer to act as CXO, or you may still be using outside help. At this stage, it is important that there is commitment and buy-in from the whole leadership group, because they will have to support and represent the outcome in their work. Not only this, but the leadership group represents a large part of the organization and therefore the experiential DNA. Working cross-functionally is central to success.

My experience is that the journey to explore, develop, and describe the experiential platform is as important as the outcome, since it forces leaders to dive into and understand experience. This is not something that can be outsourced and then conjured out of a designer’s hat, but rather something that should be facilitated and co-developed within the whole leadership team.

Your experiential platform is a description of the personality and experience that you want your customers to have. It comprises both a video description of the personality, and examples of how that personality is expected to behave. It includes examples of generic touchpoints where the personality is applied. This allows it to be communicated such that people are able to experience the experience. Essentially, the platform describes an experiential target, exemplified by different touchpoints and experiential journeys. Similar to other standards, the experiential target should be carefully designed and then rarely updated.

Mauricy Filho, who carried out his PhD on service branding, describes the experiential platform as a form of brand experience handbook. I have to admit struggling with this term, since handbook conjures images of three-ring binders filled with pages, images, and specifications, rather than a tool to allow people to experience the experience itself. Still, your experiential platform requires interactions, time, and touchpoints, so examples are a necessary part of your deliverable. Those examples will form the basis of your principles for design.

That’s AMAZING!!!

Recently, I called the customer service hotline for my daughter’s mobile subscription. She is subscribed to a young, trendy mobile operator and the customer service representatives were young and obviously had two principles they had to follow in their conversation. One was to be enthusiastic, and the other was to find something positive that they could compliment the customer about. I met an extreme version of this, someone who was so enthusiastic I felt unnerved as she gushed about the fact that I could speak Danish, English, and Norwegian: “Wow, that is so cool. You can speak all of those languages. That’s amazing!” In reality, it isn’t; my Danish sounds Norwegian and my Norwegian sounds Danish. It made me laugh, because it was so obvious that being complimentary was part of her training. I only wish it had been something worth the compliment, or maybe not expressed so gushingly. Sincerity is key, and if she had been genuine, I would have felt flattered. As it was, it felt tacky.

Create Principles for Design

When you have settled on the personality that fits your organization, and have examples of it for different touchpoints that you are happy with, the next stage is to create principles for design based on them. You develop the principles after you have created the specific examples of touchpoints, because making them will give you some insights into why, say, a particular tone of voice was chosen (see Figure 7-2).

There are many kinds of design principles, from the high-level versions that guide a whole process (for example, “start with the customer”), down to detailed versions for interactions (e.g., font and color requirements). The principles in the experiential platform lie somewhere in between. They are not principles for how to approach innovation, nor are they detailed design requirements, but they can be used to inform a service and its interactions. Depending on the experiential DNA and your personality, they might include guidelines such as being conversational with customers (one used by Airbnb) or recognizing their history with the company (reminding them in a positive way of their loyalty), giving surprising treats (Pret A Manger employees are allowed to give away items to customers), or using humor (a principle from a telco I worked with aimed at younger people). The principles you choose will be dictated by your experiential DNA and personality, and you can start to explore them by asking, “How would our personality behave (and what would it say) if X happened?” The answer will help you define your organization’s principles for design.

Figure 7-2. The Nike tone of voice is designed to motivate as part of a winning mentality, telling you that you really have no excuses to not run. But some people might find this tone of voice provocative or insulting. Knowing your target audience is critical when working with tone of voice, and you need to take a position to get noticed.

Review the (Almost) Finished Platform

The platform is never totally finished and should go through regular cycles of improvement. This is particularly true in terms of keeping abreast of societal changes and trends (see Chapter 10). At this stage your platform should contain the following:

• A summary of your experiential DNA
• A description of your service personality, behaviors, and tone of voice
• Examples of the personality applied to different touchpoints
• Principles for design

Together, these components offer a strong basis for designing new services and improving existing ones. They also have been part of a valuable journey to develop your existential approach, and undoubtedly will have helped foster a strong experiential focus within the organization. Now, the platform is ready for use as a means of evaluation.

The Gold Standard Experience

The image below is of the ISO international standards for length and weight. They are stored in atmospheric and temperature-controlled conditions to always be exactly correct.

You should have the same focus on the experience you want to deliver to your customers and create your own standards as a target for the organization. These standards become something that you can always refer to and relate to, and when adhered to, they can help the organization maintain experiential alignment and consistency.

Your standard experience will not be a physical object—it will take the form of an image, text, or enactment—and it cannot be as precisely defined as weight or length. However, the experience platform you have developed within the organization will convey the desired and desirable experience.

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Using the Platform for Design

The final part of the translation cycle is to deliver on the experiences that you have designed for as part of the platform. This entails using the “gold standard” personality as a target for design work in the organization. This step in itself might seem trivial, but it is not. It requires dedicated functions to implement throughout the organization, and it can require quite a lot of legacy work to update existing touchpoints and journeys. It is therefore worthwhile to evaluate the platform before rolling it out, to ensure that it works and gives the desired results. To evaluate the platform, you should do some design work on several customer journeys, making sure that the project design team uses the platform as a basis for their work. You can take this testing as far as implementation to be able to evaluate the final customer experience, or alternatively (depending on the degree of change), you can put the platform through experience prototyping after the design stage. Either way, you have to have a strong conviction that the platform is correct, since it will influence the whole wheel of experience centricity, including major systems and structures.

Rolling Out the Platform

The journey you have embarked on thus far will have given you plenty of insights into the experience that best fits your organization. The platform hasn’t defined the offerings or the customer experience, but through the personality it has given the service some basic direction. The use of the platform can, depending on the degree of change, have a major impact on the customer experience, so its roll-out merits consideration. Customers are particularly sensitive to changes in personality and tone of voice in a service. I have used a Scandinavian bank for many years, and they, like many other banks, are transforming their personality and customer experience. Unfortunately they are struggling, as transforming from a stodgy and reliable but autocratic and hierarchical bank to one that is customer-oriented is quite a change, and they haven’t updated all of their touchpoints yet. That means I may encounter several touchpoints that speak directly to me with a nicely composed mix of visual design and tone of voice and then the odd, autocratic one, with an old-fashioned visual design and terrible tone of voice. This stands out and brings back my old prejudices, preventing me from accepting their new personality and making me think it is superficial. Since touchpoints usually cross different silos within the organization during a customer journey, there is a real risk that there will be some legacy problems that could destroy all the work you’ve done along the way if you do not do a careful roll-out of the platform.

The platform roll-out should be coordinated with other experiential changes in the organization. As a planning measure, carry out a gap analysis to evaluate the distance between the existing customer experience and the expected new one. Based on this analysis, the roll-out should be part of a systematic change plan. The platform is an important part of the infusion process, and should be complemented by a successful service innovation (a quick win), quick and visible changes, and several future concept services. Together, these should form a wave of change within the organization that is part of a virtual circle, gaining acceptance and positive development along the way.

The Importance of Belief

Finally, you need to believe in your experience platform. Belief may be a strange term to introduce into a hard business context, but it is essential when you are innovating through experience. If you do not have a strong belief in the experience platform now, then you should question why and then do something about it. The platform is a key transformation tool, and will influence customer experience and your bottom line over time. Further, the platform starts a substantial change process by redesigning the touchpoints, enablers, systems, and structures throughout the organization. As the platform is rolled out, belief will aid the transformation process and contribute to experiential fit, becoming a core competency of your organization.