2

Five Steps to Becoming Experience-Centric

This chapter places the previous chapter into the context of organizational transformation and experience maturity. It describes the five steps that organizations take to become experience-centric. After reading this chapter you will be able to position yourself on the experience-centricity maturity scale and develop a roadmap for the transformation of your organization.

Both a Sprint and a Marathon

After working with organizations and observing their challenges with customer experience, I have seen a pattern emerge in the steps they take, both in terms of how they understand experience centricity and in terms of activities and organizational change. These are summarized here as the five steps to becoming experience-centric (see Figure 2-1). Every company I have worked with has followed these steps quite closely, and you can use this process in your own organization as both a way of benchmarking your progress and a planning tool for development.

During the first stages, it is possible to sprint and get a fast foothold by taking a customer journey approach, but from then on, change becomes a longer-term process of organizational development to alter the internal logics of the organization (unless you are a start-up). This chapter describes the five-stage transition model to experience centricity and the characteristics of each stage.

Figure 2-1. The five steps to experience centricity.

I am often asked if it is possible to jump over some steps or combine them. The answer is that you can leapfrog certain steps, depending on your organizational DNA, your flexibility to change, and the degree of change needed. If you are an incumbent with a long heritage, perhaps even an old monopolist (post, telecom), then you likely have a marathon ahead. If you are a newer organization, with a charismatic leadership team and a dynamic spirit as part of your DNA, then it is possible to move through the steps quickly. The main insights I have gained from organizational change are to plan carefully, get design onboard at an early stage, and don’t do too much too soon. What this means in practice is unique to your organization.

The following sections describe each of the steps, its characteristics, and possible ways to fast-forward through the stage.

Stage 1: The Customer-Oriented Organization

Since you are reading this book, you are most likely past this first stage, but there are a surprising number of organizations that are still here. The customer-oriented organization looks at the world from the inside out, toward the customer. It has great belief in itself, possibly due to a history of earlier success. It views customers as segments and its offerings as products to be sold, taking a transactional view of relationships with customers. The customer-oriented organization uses Michael Porter’s value-chain model and is deeply siloed as a result.1

A customer-oriented organization sees its product offerings as being fixed, and asks for customer input as a means of improving them, rather than considering changing the offerings altogether based on customer feedback.

Although the customer-oriented organization views the customer experience as one of several important factors, it’s akin to a top layer of icing on a cake that has already been baked. When it comes to services, this type of organization has not yet embraced the customer journey as an important innovation tool, although it might (wrongly) consider its process flows to be customer journeys. The main characteristic of a customer-oriented organization are described in the following table:

Criteria	Customer-Oriented
Focus	Organizational efficiency, units shipped
Basic philosophy	How can we adapt our products to suit the customer?
Basic approach	Organizationally focused Incremental adaptation of existing solutions
Organizational structure	Strongly siloed according to business processes
Key terms	Value chain, segments, internal metrics
Orientation	Services as products
Brand orientation	Broadcasting a brand promise
Customer experience seen as...	An add-on—really there in name only
Typical quote	“We have a new service; could you look at it and improve the customer experience?”
Tactic to progress	Introduce customer journey thinking and visualization Develop concept service ideas

Ways to Fast-Forward as a Customer-Oriented Organization

To progress quickly from the customer-oriented organization stage, introducing customer journeys works well. This is because the journey approach encapsulates a customer view, time, touchpoints, and experience. In addition, the division of a journey into periods of before, during, and after use introduces a relationship concept rather than the transactional buy/sell model. Together, the journey and touchpoint approach introduces some key elements of-experience-centric thinking: seeing through the customer’s eyes, considering the experience before, during, and after a journey, and recognizing that customers move across silos during their journey. It also introduces design as an approach that facilitates collaboration between team members through co-design. As we will see in the next section, moving toward the journey-oriented organization is a step both the customer and the organization will notice. It creates huge momentum in the customer-oriented organization and propels it in the direction of experience centricity.

Stage 2: The Journey-Oriented Organization

This stage starts with some relatively small but successful projects to map the customer journey. At this stage, the journey is called a customer journey, rather than an experiential journey, although the customer experience should be reflected in your journey visualizations.

The journey-oriented organization recognizes the huge potential of the customer journey as a new view on innovation and invests quickly in developing this competence. The organization understands the value of customer journey mapping and is hungry for more.

The journey-oriented organization develops an appreciation of what design offers in this context. It is in the early phases of using design thinking and service design, and the journey orientation offers it several advantages:

1. It introduces the view and voice of the customer and often can result in a light-bulb moment regarding the value of a customer’s perspective on a service.
2. It introduces an emotion-based view of the organization’s service, showing how the customer travels across touchpoints (and silos).
3. It introduces touchpoints and highlights the way that customers interact with the service. Initially the organization may feel that touchpoints have limited value, but they quickly realize how many touchpoints they have, and how poorly coordinated they are across the organization. As a result, they come to understand how the offering as a whole is experienced through its parts.
4. Branding and marketing teams begin to take a more active role in service delivery and move from advertising and visual identity toward touchpoints. The idea of journey orchestration begins to take hold.
5. It introduces the visual and integrative skills of the designer. This is the start of an understanding that designers, particularly service designers, add value and have relevance for the organization.
6. It raises awareness that the customer experience is not simply good or bad, but can be nuanced and shift over time. The idea of using Net Promoter Score (http://bit.ly/2ZKbLhf) gains traction due to this heightened awareness.

The journey-oriented organization quickly starts to use terminology such as customer journeys and touchpoints and deploys journey mapping as standard practice, although at first without any clear specifications regarding what format the journey maps should have. For some of this innovation work, the organization uses external designers, who are seen as a valuable addition. The designers introduce four valuable aspects, which are then used to further develop the organization itself. First, designers bring creativity in that they are oriented around what can be, rather than what is. Second, they bring a visual approach to collaboration, and by visualizing they make tangible many of the aspects discussed in team workshops. Third, they bring a customer view, often introducing customer insights and voice into the organization in a different way than the norm. This galvanizes a customer perspective, which later leads to a customer-centric initiative in the organization. Finally, designers bring an experiential focus to their work and proposed solutions. They focus on the experience of customers (and staff), and not only have a terminology for it, but also prototype it at an early stage. In addition, they do a limited but relevant translation, matching the customer experience to the brand strategy of the organization.

The following table describes the key characteristics of the journey-oriented organization:

Criteria	Journey-Oriented
Focus	Service delivery and consistency
Basic philosophy	How can we improve our products using a customer journey approach?
Basic approach	Organizationally focused Incremental adaptation of existing solutions
Organizational structure	Strongly siloed according to business processes, but now with some collaboration across silos
Key terms	Terms such as touchpoints, journeys, and voice of the customer are introduced
Orientation	Services as products delivered over time and across touchpoints
Brand orientation	Still focused on broadcasting a promise
Customer experience seen as...	Something that can be considered during the design process
Typical quote	“It really helps to see the whole journey and the individual parts.”
Tactic to progress	Introduce the customer to customer journey thinking Develop a customer-centric initiative Develop concept service ideas

Ways to Fast-Forward as a Journey-Oriented Organization

To move through this phase as fast as possible, you need to do three things. First, invest in service design and look to develop a long-term relationship with a good service design company. At this stage, you need to find some designers that you feel you can work with, including over the long term. Second, introduce experiential mapping as a standard tool within the organization. As part of this, I recommend you focus on experiential fulfillment (see Chapter 3) and create your own templates for describing experiential journeys (see Chapter 6). This introduces a customer-oriented explanation of your services that is also visual. Third, establish a way of gaining customer insights as part of your projects, which means making sure that the teams start listening to customers (you can read about seeing, hearing, and being the customer in Chapter 4). If you do these three things, you will rapidly move through the journey phase toward the customer-centric phase.

To accelerate faster, establish a function in your organization related to customer journeys and customer experience. With careful planning, you can later develop this into the area responsible for experience design. However, the skills you need at this stage of maturity will be different and more functional than those needed later, so be prepared to change the mandate and leadership of this group once it’s established.

At this point the journey-oriented organization will have developed a momentum and positivity toward change that will quickly orient them toward customer centricity.

Stage 3: The Customer-Centric Organization

The customer-centric organization has a very different worldview from the customer-oriented organization. Instead of asking how its existing offerings can be adapted to customers, the organization asks, “What offerings do we need to provide to satisfy customer needs?” This might sound like a subtle shift, but it is a profoundly different position. While the customer-oriented organization is still focused on itself as its main interest, and customers simply take what is offered, the customer-centric organization is genuinely focused on understanding the customer. This is a huge change, not only of leadership mindset but of organizational logics, in which the organization’s “reason to be” is transformed into serving customers (which is what service is really about, right?). To do this, the organization has to go on a collective journey of understanding the customer.

This step toward customer centricity is usually sparked by journey mapping and involving customers in that process. The journey mapping approach brings customers in as co-designers, and the organization realizes that there are huge benefits to be gained from listening to customers and placing their voice at the heart of the organization.

The customer-centric organization augments journey thinking with a customer focus and a customer mindset. One of the main priorities of the customer-centric organization is satisfying customer needs, and large-scale initiatives are introduced to identify those needs and then convert them into services. As part of this process, there is a push to measure to what extent the customer’s needs have been satisfied with quantitative metrics, such as Net Promoter Score.

The goal of this organization shifts from directly identifying the customer’s needs to understanding their lives and lifestyle. The organization recognizes the importance of identifying latent customer needs, and the fact that customers are not always good at articulating what they want or need. This broadening of the view of customer need is an important precursor of the move toward experience centricity, since it introduces a social and cultural view of customers (although at this stage, it is latent and not explicitly discussed throughout the organization).

The customer-centric organization has a deeper understanding of what it means to deliver service, and this leads to a desire for long-term relationships with customers. However, it also makes the organization aware of its collaboration with external actors and how this relates to the customer. The organization begins to view the world using an actor network lens rather than a value chain one, and thus becomes aware of the importance of key internal and external actors as essential contributors to the customer experience. Further, the organization may realize it needs to develop new actor configurations to satisfy the customer needs that are identified, and establish strategic collaborations around customer needs as a result. This shift also introduces the customer as a key co-producer of value, as well as the customers’ own networks as an important source of insight.

When it comes to the customer experience, there is a growing understanding of its importance within the organization, but this is framed in terms of satisfying needs, and by developing consistent and satisfactory experiences. There is still, as yet, poor terminology regarding customer experience within the organization, and the brand is still not fully focusing on the customer relationship or on translating the brand into experiences.

The following table summarizes the key characteristics of the customer-centric organization:

Criteria	Customer-centric organization
Focus	Value is created by providing what customers want, including over the long term
Basic philosophy	What services should we offer to make our customers loyal and satisfied?
Basic approach	Externally focused Development of customer-initiated solutions
Organizational structure	In flux from earlier siloed organization; customer responsibility visible on organizational chart
Key terms	Customer insights, voice of the customer, Net Promoter Score, life stages, customer lifetime value
Orientation	Services delivered over time and across touchpoints to provide relevant experiences and satisfy customer needs
Brand orientation	Early orientation toward service delivery
Customer experience seen as...	Something that supports customer satisfaction
Typical quote	“We need to offer something customers need,if we are to survive.”
Tactic to progress	Move the conversations with the customer from “What do you want?” toward “Tell us more about yourself.”

Ways to Fast-Forward as a Customer-Centric Organization

Moving through this phase of development takes longer than the previous stages. This is because it requires a fundamentally different organizational logic, one that takes time to infuse into the organization. Therefore, the emphasis here should be on developing and encouraging both formal and informal organizational structures to facilitate this step change. Storytelling, and sharing myths and examples within the organization is a strong way to accelerate this stage, especially when combined with images of customers, customer insight quotes, and repeated internal rewards for customer-focused activities. Stories about the time an employee went the extra mile for a customer become epics, and they help cement the new mindset.

KPIs for customer centricity should be developed. This is not an easy task, but it leads to important cross-silo reward mechanisms that recognize that achieving requires collaboration. There should be active discussion regarding the destruction of silos to create a new, cohesive structure based on customer needs. These can be customer journey–based structures, or customer life stage structures that are contextually dependent on your organizational DNA.

The organizational DNA plays a key role in this phase of development. There is a real danger of becoming entranced by your customer insights, so much so that you start to develop solutions from customer insights that do not fit with your DNA. Be aware here of your limitations as an organization, and spend time discussing and raising awareness of your organizational DNA. This can be framed as a return to the heritage of the organization, getting back to the basics of what you are good at, or a celebration of your heritage. However, you might genuinely identify a customer need that can radically innovate on your existing offerings. In this situation, you have a difficult choice between stretching your organization to change, or starting up a new organization to exploit this potential, possibly as a joint venture with other key actors.

The customer-centric organization works to create alignment around customer centricity, and it becomes the organization’s mantra. This is important priming for the next step toward experience centricity.

Stage 4: The Experience-Oriented Organization

The experience-oriented organization builds on the customer-centric approach and forms a stepping-stone toward experience centricity. This is a relatively short-lived stage, because the organization realizes quite quickly that it needs to take a more radical approach to truly deliver desirable experiences.

In many ways, the previous stages have started a transformation that, like a supertanker, has a momentum that is difficult to stop. This move toward a greater focus on the customer experience comes from having closer customer contact. During the customer-centric stage, the organization realizes that customer centricity is not just about listening to customers. Indeed it is about understanding customers, and doing so in a much wider context. This fosters a greater focus on the lives of customers outside of the transactional sphere, and the addition of a cultural understanding of the customer (for more about this, see Chapter 10). The organization increasingly realizes that the customer-centric phase has perhaps focused too much on the functional aspects of the experience. The emotional aspects have also been considered, but the dominant logic in the organization is still centered on functional benefits.

The integration of design into the organization brings design and marketing closer together, and creates a shared understanding of the importance of the customer experience during this phase. This initiates a deeper discussion about designing for experience, and brings the brand closer to an involvement in experiential delivery.

In organizational terms, the customer-centric organization began to stretch the existing organizational logics and structure without radically changing them. The customer-centric phase required more of an organizational paradigm shift rather than radical organizational change. The experience-oriented organization stage incrementally adds to this by deepening the focus on the experience. It is at this stage that the organization begins to realize that transformational change is required to be able to adequately embrace the customer experience. At the same time, the organization is primed to make this transformation, since many realize that change is due. In this way, the momentum that has built up almost demands the organizational transformation that is about to happen.

The following table describes the key characteristics of the experience-oriented organization:

Criteria	Experience-oriented organization
Focus	Value is created by providing experiential benefits based on what customers want
Basic philosophy	How can we adapt our services to provide experiences based on what customers say they want?
Basic approach	Externally focused The addition of experiential benefits to functional benefits
Organizational structure	An incremental change from customer centricity that brings marketing and design closer together; increased focus on experiential metrics
Key terms	Experiential benefits, customer insights, Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value
Orientation	Services delivered over time and across touchpoints to give emotional, in addition to functional, benefits
Brand orientation	Orientation toward customer experience as part of service delivery
Customer experience seen as...	Something that is central to customer satisfaction
Typical quote	“We need to add something experiential to customer’s needs.”
Tactic to progress	Shift from customer needs to customer experience as the starting point for all discussions

Ways to Fast-Forward as an Experience-Oriented Organization

The experience-oriented organization already has a customer focus and now has integrated an experiential orientation. This organization is therefore almost ready for the last step toward experience centricity. To accelerate this process, it is time to focus all development work on the customer experience and to initiate projects with an experiential brief. Customer contact should now be supplemented by an understanding of what customers feel, in addition to what they want. Further, the organization needs to discuss how best to organize to deliver on its experiential promise. This discussion should involve a closer collaboration between design and marketing, particularly brand management.

Stage 5: The Experience-Centric Organization

Welcome to the experience-centric organization! You have gone from customer orientation through a journey phase and customer phase and are now in the final stage: optimizing your organization to deliver valuable customer experiences. This section briefly describes the experience-centric organization. It is brief because there is a separate chapter (see Chapter 4) dedicated to the core behaviors of the experience-centric organization.

The experience-centric organization is a logical next step for a customer-centric organization because the customer-centric stage developed an organization with an extreme customer focus. This will have revealed the importance of the customer experience in their decision making, and make it clear that an experiential focus is the natural next stage of development.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

The experience-centric organization knows the experience it wants to provide for its customers, and knows how customers perceive its offerings and brand. This kind of organization tries harder to deliver the experience that it has defined, since everybody there knows what experience to deliver and how to do so. The offering clearly differentiates itself as being better than its competitors and provides an experience that fits the DNA of the organization, making it difficult to copy. This organization is faster, because it has a natural ability to adapt to changes in outside culture and to any technological or market disruptions—it has an internal alignment around flexibility. And this organization is stronger, because it has a shared vision and cohesive reason for being, and a clear focus to work toward.

The following table describes the key characteristics of the experience-centric organization:

Criteria	Experience-centric organization
Focus	Experiential desirability
Basic philosophy	What do we want our customers to feel?
Basic approach	Proactive and experiential
Organizational structure	Experientially aligned
Key terms	Experiential value proposition, translation, trendslation, experiential journey
Orientation	Experiences promised and delivered along an experiential journey
Brand orientation	Transparency of organizational DNA delivered through a desirable customer experience
Customer experience seen as...	The core source of value
Typical quote	“How does that suggestion impact our desired experience?”
Tactic to progress	Improve your cultural interaction

Ways to Fast-Forward as an Experience-Centric Organization

The experience-centric organization is something that you develop into, becoming deeper and wider as you proceed through the stage. This is because the more you understand experience, the more you find that you have to integrate new areas of competence into your organization. You have already implemented new ways of working through the previous stages, and you can shoehorn these into an existing organizational model without making radical changes to your organizational logics. Now, however, as you enter the experience-centric world, you are changing the organizational logics. The degree to which you are challenging these logics depends on the journey thus far. If your whole organization has a customer journey approach, and genuinely is focused on understanding customers, then it will be ready for an experience-centric approach. If, however, the work until now has not been organization-wide and has not genuinely influenced the organizational logics, then progress toward experience centricity will be slow.

Getting an Orange Belt in Experience Centricity

The orange belt stage starts with making a deliberate choice to move toward experience centricity and getting buy-in within the organization’s leadership. This is a leadership activity that demands alignment for success. Thus, a first logical step is to set up an organizational structure that clearly places customer experience on the map, and then hire the right person to become your experience director. This position will be tasked with creating a shared understanding of your experiential DNA within the leadership, such that you have consensus and authorization to continue with the transformation.

The experiential DNA work will involve the whole leadership group and create your gold-standard experience. As a part of the process, you should apply this gold-standard to some services to check that they are a good fit for your organization. Then you should use the gold-standard to develop some future concept services. These can be used to promote infusion and alignment in the same way that concept cars are used in the automotive industry to influence both the market and the organization. When added to the shift from a silo culture and leadership visibility from the previous stages, the spread of the gold-standard experience within the organization will accelerate.

Leadership skills are central here in visibly championing the transformation and the new orientation of the organization. This is particularly true when it comes to having formal organizational structures in place for the transformation, and at the same time supporting the informal organizational behaviors that need to be in place to focus on the experience. Use of success stories, heroes, and internal rituals assist here. Empowerment of frontline employees is central at this stage; it is important to publicly recognize their value by highlighting their hero status and finding success stories.

Getting a Blue Belt in Experience Centricity

The blue belt stage is part of formalizing an organizational structure to deliver on the gold-standard experience you have developed. After you’ve focused on the informal structures and established an informal experiential culture, it’s time to implement new formal structures and strengthen existing ones.. KPIs around the experience should be considered, although this is an area where you’ll need to adapt traditional KPIs to fit the current context.

At this stage, your customer understanding should become deeper; you should start looking beyond what the customers say to intuit the meaning they attach to their needs and behaviors. This is the spearhead for innovating new services and developing closer relationships with customers. This will also open up the organization for the next stage, focusing on culture.

Getting a Black Belt in Experience Centricity

The black belt is a deepening and broadening of the previous work wherein you take a more active role in culture. This requires that you focus on and foster interaction between your organization and your customers (as described in Chapter 10) through trendslation and the lens of culture. The personality of your services and organization will be the basis for how you engage with culture and meaning. As Claire Dennington discusses in Chapter 10, this can include anything from the more traditional focus on idealistic aspects (Intermarché’s “inglorious” fruits and vegetables) to more noticeable political aspects (Nike and Colin Kaepernick), or it may come about though identifying some change in cultural consumption (Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn.” campaign).