Telepathy and empathy

We need to be able to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes if we are to understand what their goals are. The best way to do this would be telepathy. In the movie What Women Want, advertising exec Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) has a freak accident that allows him to hear what women are thinking. This leads to all sorts of epiphanies, not least of all that most people dislike his chauvinistic behaviour. He soon realises what a gift this telepathy is: his attitudes to his co-workers, his relationships and his career all improve as he starts to really understand the women around him. As his therapist in the movie says, ‘If men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, and you can speak Venutian, the world can be yours.’¹ This neatly summarises one of the primary goals of any business: if we can really understand our customer the world can be ours.

Unfortunately, in the real world we’re not telepathic so we must find other ways to understand the customer’s goals – we need to build empathy. There are several approaches to creating an empathic understanding of the customer. The first is to design something for yourself in the belief that other people will want it too. This approach, known as self-referential design, is frowned upon by most user-centered design experts, who insist that it is important to remember that you are not your customer. I don’t agree with this.

Designing stuff for people who are like you means you don’t need all of the heavy-duty customer and market research because you have an innate feel for what the customer wants. This is how Patagonia got started. It’s how 37Signals got started, and it’s how Dyson got started. ‘Scratching your own itch’² is a great way to build a product. ‘The quickest way to have empathy for someone else is to be just like them. For companies, the answer is to hire their customers,’³ writes Dev Patnaik in Wired to Care. We often celebrate politicians who are seen as ‘a man of the people’, we don’t tend to praise them as ‘a man who was nothing like the people but researched them thoroughly’.

There are, of course, limitations to this. Many businesses succeed because of this initial affinity for their customers, but over time as they get bigger they grow apart, and start hiring people who aren’t like their customers. There are also some industries that naturally lend themselves to this more than others. This is where the requirement for research comes from, but this too can be fraught with difficulties.

Shadow dancing

In The Seven Cs of Consulting Mick Cope draws a distinction between surface issues that we will happily discuss and shadow issues which are the hidden thoughts or feelings that we are not comfortable sharing.⁴ We might articulate one set of goals but actually have a hidden personal agenda. We may suffer from a phobia that we think is silly, so we let it control our behaviour rather than seek help.

This dissonance between these surface and shadow issues results in that dreaded thing: office politics. I’ve had clients swear blind that they are committed to improving their customer experiences, but actually they aren’t at all. They are committed to getting promoted, or sticking to a budget, or getting their contract extended, or making it home for the kids’ bath time, or looking good in front of the boss, or paying themselves a bigger dividend this quarter. They may want to make improvements, but that’s a surface issue. The shadow issues that are really propelling people’s office behaviour go unspoken and unconsidered.

This is not only a problem within the organisation, but also presents itself when conducting customer research. My favourite example comes from Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar’s book The User is Always Right: ‘When Sony was introducing the boom box, the company gathered a group of potential customers and held a focus group on what colour the new product should be: black or yellow. After some discussion among the group of likely buyers, everyone agreed that consumers would better respond to yellow. After the session, the facilitator thanked the group, and then mentioned that, as a bonus, they were welcome to take a free boom box on the way out. There were two piles of boom boxes: yellow and black. Every person took a black boom box.’⁵ Clearly what people say isn’t always a true reflection of what they think, so we need a way of getting into these shadowy issues and seeing how they affect the customer’s goals.

We can’t just ask customers what their goals are, because they probably either can’t or won’t give a useful answer. We’ve already explored some of the reasons for this in the previous chapter: during research our rationale thinking can get in the way of providing the real insights that the researcher needs. What we need to do is focus on building an empathic connection with the customer rather than just interviewing them, or running workshops or trying to design something collaboratively. Research isn’t just something you do at the start of each project. It needs to be about building deeper empathy over time so you are attuned to what they want not just today, but tomorrow. This is rarely how it happens from my experience. The project plan is laid out, and the research is time-boxed at the beginning with some testing and feedback sessions throughout the process. The research usually only consists of swotting over quantitative data with a few focus groups and interviews. This approach will never yield significant improvements.

There is simply no substitute to spending time with your customers. Get to know them, watch them using your stuff, see where they struggle and what they like. Cultivating empathy is more important than collecting analytics and facts. You need to get people out there meeting real customers and experiencing what they experience. The world would be a different place if senior managers spent even a couple of days a year manning the phones on customer services. It would also help if senior managers actually experienced life as a customer. Do you think the CEO of a telecoms company calls the helpdesk if his phone breaks? Do you think the CEO of a car manufacturer gets the same service experience as a typical customer? Of course not, but they should, because without the empathy that comes from these experiences they can’t make the right decisions.

Identifying goals

It’s clear that the route to identifying our customer’s goals is to build an understanding with them, but what exactly do we mean by a goal? Why look at goals and not just the tasks that the customer wants to complete? In Alan Cooper’s seminal text on user-centered design, About Face, he explains that goals are important because they explain why a customer is performing the task in the first place: ‘Goals motivate people to perform activities … Understanding why a user performs certain tasks gives designers great power to improve or even eliminate those tasks, yet still accomplish the same goals.’⁶ This is a fundamental part of creating a great customer experience. We need to see how the product or service fits into the bigger picture first, then look at the activities and tasks that the customer must undertake to accomplish their goal. This gives us a basic hierarchy to work within: goals underpin activities, which are in turn composed of tasks. Cooper’s work in this area is a useful starting point and I’m going to build on it.

The higher objective

To explain how I think this approach can be improved, I would like to start by using one of Cooper’s own examples of a goal. He writes, ‘When travelling from St Louis to San Francisco, a person’s goals are likely to include travelling quickly, comfortable and safely.’⁷ Yes these things are important experiential goals, but he’s missing something here: nobody flies to San Francisco just to arrive there, there is a higher objective that has caused the flight.

Consider this simple example: Brian and Jenny are on their honeymoon. Steve has a client meeting. James is attending a friend’s funeral. They are all flying economy class to San Francisco. Yet for all their similarity, the three have radically different higher objectives, and thinking about them could open up a world of opportunities for the airline. The honeymooners want a once in a life-time trip, and for them that starts when they leave the house. The business traveller’s central requirement is to have a dialogue with his client. Our funeral-goer must get there by any means necessary. Suppose the flight is cancelled or significantly delayed. If you knew the higher objectives of these three distinct customer groups you could: offer the honeymooners entry to the first-class lounge where they can get some unexpected pampering free of charge while they waited; give the business traveller access to a private meeting room where he could have a video conference or at least get some useful work done in a quiet environment; and help the funeral-goer find an alternative route, maybe with another airline or via another airport with a transfer. The opportunities are endless. Just off the top of my head, for the honeymooners you could send them their plane tickets in a congratulations card. This ‘reason for travel’ information could be captured quite easily during the booking process.

Starting with a simple goal may provide a good experience, but a great one needs to appeal to a higher objective. It is likely that all of your competitors understand the basic goals of their customers as well as you do. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that people want to fly comfortably, safely and quickly. To open up opportunities to improve the experience you need to look a little bit further. Forgetting these higher objectives is why so many businesses fail to respond to substitute offerings when they emerge. The recession, terrorism and environmental concerns may all have an impact on air travel, but so does Skype, Instant Messenger and collaborative tools like Basecamp.

The story so far

We have covered a few key points so far in this chapter:

• The kernel of a customer experience is satisfying an objective
• Identifying these objectives comes from having an empathic understanding of the customer
• We all have surface issues and shadow issues, and those shadow issues are often the most powerful drivers of our behaviour Looking at goals is more useful than looking at tasks, because they give us a deeper understanding of what customers want
• These goals spring from a higher objective

To bring this all together, what we need is a practical way of building empathy with our customers, understanding their motives, shining a light on their shadow issues and relating all this back to a higher objective. We need to look at our customer experience like an actor looks at a script, always trying to put themselves in the character’s shoes. This is exactly what actors do when they use the Stanislavski system.

Mental reconnaissance

Konstantin Stanislavski was a Russian actor born in 1863. He was the first person to create a systematic approach to acting, based on studying what human beings do in their everyday lives. His ideas are incorporated in almost every drama curriculum and their usage is widespread throughout the acting profession. He advocated ‘mental reconnaissance’,⁸ a process of analysing and scrutinising the detail of a script to allow actors to really immerse themselves in their character and hence portray them convincingly.

Stanislavski provides a comprehensive framework for looking beyond what people tell us and what they do, to expose the hidden objectives. He uses five simple concepts that apply equally to a customer experience as they do to a script. These five concepts are explained below and I show you how you can work these into the customer experience.

1 SUPER-OBJECTIVES⁹

A super-objective underpins a whole range of lower objectives. It is our highest level goal. These span a whole range of specific objectives. Start by trying to think about what this might be. The easiest way to do this is to keep asking yourself why a customer would use your product or service until you reach the super-objective. As an example, let’s think of a possible super-objective of buying a camera:

The objective is to take a photograph. Why would we want to do that?

To capture a moment or scene. Why would we want to do that?

So that we can share it.

We now have one possible super-objective: to share our experiences and the way we see the world with others.

Kodak have been in business for 133 years and were once the most innovative photographic company in the world, and yet in January this year they filed for bankruptcy protection.¹⁰ Critics have argued that this was because they failed to respond to the digital photography revolution, which may be true, but then again most manufacturers of consumer digital cameras have also suffered as the photographic capabilities of smart-phones have improved. Let’s contrast Kodak’s fortunes with those which have anchored their business around this super-objective of image sharing: photo sharing platform Instagram has just been sold to Facebook for $1bn,¹¹ photo-heavy blogging platform Tumblr is now valued at $800 million¹². A staggering 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook on New Year’s Eve weekend, 2010.¹³ People are taking more photos than ever, it’s just a shame that Kodak didn’t realise why and still don’t.

Using either the worksheet from my website (www.mattwatkinson.co.uk/worksheets), or just a piece of paper, start thinking about what your customer’s super-objectives might be. There might be more than one of course, but the real purpose of the exercise is to get you to think about your business in a new light and notice new opportunities. Amazon realised that while an objective of their customers might be to order a book, the super-objective was to read the contents, so they created the Kindle reader which did away with the physical book entirely, offering greater convenience and less cost. In the run up to Christmas 2011 they sold over a million Kindles a week.¹⁴

2 SUBTEXT¹⁵

The subtext is best described as the difference between what people say and what they mean – the underlying thoughts and feelings that are compelling their behaviour. The subtext is the most difficult thing to identify, and yet often is the most powerful driver of customer behaviour.

Look at the information we gathered about the customer’s identity in the previous chapter, in particular what rationale they are using, and what sign value may be attached to the product or service. Can you imagine a customer walking into a luxury car dealership and saying to the salesman, ‘I’m looking for a status symbol that will make me attractive to the opposite sex. Something that shows to everyone how wealthy and powerful I am’? It’s unlikely, but the subtext might be there nevertheless. When playing the lottery the objective is to win, but really in many ways we are paying for the pleasure of fantasising about winning. I often wonder how much of giving to charity is more about making ourselves feel good than it is about helping others, although this objective is unlikely to be openly articulated. We need to try our best to identify what the shadowy objective or subtext is. Even just thinking about it for a few minutes can be enough to help us think differently about the customer experience.

3 OBJECTIVES

An objective is the basic reason why somebody performs an activity or task. You need to document these objectives for every stage of the experience, because they form the success criteria for the experience. All too often on customer experience projects businesses charge ahead with designing things without having a clear vision of what success looks like. Without this, we don’t know whether we’ve succeeded or failed, we can’t test the offering effectively, and the project starts to drift aimlessly because there is no agreed vision for what the team is trying to achieve. Start by identifying objectives that satisfy your super-objective and then gradually break them down.

Returning to our example of the airline, the objective might be to arrive in San Francisco at a certain date and time, but here are some other objectives that feed into that:

• Decide when to go on my trip
• Find the cheapest fare
• Decide how to get to the airport
• Pack appropriately for the length of my stay and the weather at my destination
• Get to the airport on time
• Check in my luggage
• Pass security

Looking at these objectives we can see a world of opportunities. Even if we just consider our objective of packing appropriately, why not e-mail customers a weather forecast for their destination a few days before they go? I invariably forget the international power socket adapter for my laptop so I often have to buy one at the terminal or have to borrow a colleague’s at my destination. Why not send an e-mail or SMS with a list of frequently forgotten items to the customer the night before their flight? You could have a YouTube video with tips for how to pack your clothes without getting them crumpled on the flight. I’ve never received any of these helpful things from an airline, yet they would be relatively inexpensive to do.

To discover these opportunities we need to broaden our definition of the customer experience. I normally start with a blank sheet of paper and working from one objective just keep on writing pre-conditions until I can trace back to the start of the experience, much like I just did with the airline example. I then go the other way and work right down to the end, documenting as many objectives as I can. This is an unstructured and messy task, so don’t worry about that. Just start anywhere and follow your nose. You’ll quickly find that more and more parts of the experience emerge that you had never considered before.

4 COUNTER-OBJECTIVES¹⁶

In the real world, we all have different objectives, and a clash is inevitable at some point. This conflict is almost always present between the goals of the customer and the goals of the business: on a simple level, we want a profit and the customer wants value for money – we need to strike a balance here.

More often than not we do not actively consider the relationship between these two conflicting objectives, and there can be dire consequences for both parties. Earlier in the book I told how I have been asked by clients to make their customer service telephone number less visible. This is a classic example of a counter-objective affecting the customer experience. Ignoring these counter-objectives won’t make them go away; the best way to resolve the tension between them is to tackle them pro-actively and specifically think of ways to harmonise them.

To do this we need two lists: one of the customer objectives, the other of our business objectives. Start by trying to look for obvious conflicts between the two as in the example above. Identifying the problem is the first step towards solving it. Another approach is to start identifying a list of counter-objectives for each customer objective that has been identified. We also need to consider from the outset what constraints there might be. We never have a limitless budget or timeline and there are often technical constraints about what we can do with the systems we have. Many businesses are strait-jacketed by industry regulations or legal quirks. I have seen businesses waste thousands of pounds because they never considered the constraints upfront.

Here is an example: a customer objective when buying online may be to check out as quickly as possible, yet the business may have a counter-objective of getting customers to set up an account to encourage repeat shopping and allow them to send marketing e-mails. In most e-commerce check-out processes they start by asking if you have an account, in which case you log in, and if not they force you to set one up. Rather than asking them to create an account upfront, a better design is to let them complete the check-out process, entering their address and payment details, then at the end offer them the option to choose a user-name and password to remember their details for future shopping: you have all the other details you need already. It achieves the same result, removes a possible barrier to sales by making the process quicker and is a more customer-centric experience.

We often find that because of technical or legal requirements we have to ask customers to perform an unexpected process, such as completing an additional form, or performing a task in an unusual order. These experiences can be made far more palatable by explaining why it needs to be this way. A great example comes from Pret A Manger. On their counter is a sticker that says, ‘VAT NIGHTMARE: We’re legally required to add on VAT when you eat in.’ It’s a fun way of explaining why there is a difference between the takeaway and eat in prices of their food and drink, which is in keeping with the personality of the business.

5 STAKES¹⁷

Every objective has a level of importance to us, which determines how intently we pursue it, and how likely we are to concede to other’s counter-objectives. Returning to the airline example again, the stakes are much higher for the funeral-goer than the business traveller.

As customers, when we do not get our way, we are sometimes forced to raise the stakes. It is not uncommon for example, when exasperation sets in, to threaten to take our business elsewhere in order to compel a company to take action. I felt this was necessary when dealing with my mobile phone company recently. I was attempting to re-negotiate my package as I had been misled by them. The customer service agent held firm, until I threatened to leave, at which point I was swapped from the customer service department to the customer retention department who conceded to my requests. Incidentally this is a great example of how the divisional structures in many large-scale businesses build misleading expectations into the customer experience.

Appreciating what the stakes are reveals another critical aspect of objectives: the more important the objective is, the more becomes invested in it emotionally. Imagine two different bus journeys. In the first I am simply heading into town to go shopping; in the second I am heading to the airport to catch my holiday flight. Consider how I will feel if I am running late and I miss the bus in each different scenario. In the first I may be a little irritated, in the second I might be upset, anxious and angry. I am much more emotional because my objective is more important. Now imagine that the bus driver sees me running to the stop and waits a few seconds for me to get on. In the first situation I will be thankful for his courtesy, in the second I will be much more grateful.

Bella Merlin, a Stanislavski system expert, describes it this way: ‘Emotions arise when something or someone either stops you from achieving or enables you to achieve your objective. The more you need to achieve your objective, the greater will be your emotional response either when you are blocked in your pursuit or when that pursuit is made easier.’¹⁸

Understanding objectives in the light of their emotional weight is valuable when making improvements to the customer experience. It helps build empathy for the customer and also provides an additional consideration when prioritising which elements to focus on. Satisfying the high-stakes objectives is the route to a great customer experience. Thinking these through in turn is a really useful exercise. Calling your bank to cancel your credit card because you’ve been mugged is a high-stakes objective. Calling them to change your address has a much lower level of emotional involvement.

Customer profiling #2 – super-objectives and objectives

In the last chapter we saw how Baudrillard’s object value system gave us a means of profiling customers on a brand level by looking at the sign value, use value and exchange value that appeals to the customer. The categories in Stanislavski’s model provide the means of profiling customers on a product or service level by looking at the specific objectives that customers have and how they differ. One advantage of looking at the super-objectives rather than simply the objectives is that there are usually very few distinct differences. It is all too easy to end up with too many profiles, which makes the design process unmanageable. Try to keep the number of profiles to a minimum, only creating a new one where the distinction is clear enough to warrant it.

Summary

• The kernel of a customer experience is satisfying an objective.
• Identifying these objectives comes from having an empathic understanding of the customer.
• We all have surface issues and shadow issues, and those shadow issues are often the most powerful drivers of our behaviour.
• Looking at goals is more useful than looking at tasks, because they give us a deeper understanding of what customers want.
• We can use Stanislavski’s system of ‘mental reconnaissance’ to help us empathise with our customers and identify their objectives.
• The super-objective is the highest level goal for the customer, and the practical objectives spring from it.
• There may be a subtext – a set of unspoken objectives that are really driving the customer’s behaviour.
• Objectives often come into conflict with counter-objectives or constraints that must be actively considered from the beginning.
• Every objective has a stake – the higher the stakes are the more emotionally involved we are in achieving that objective. Thinking about the stakes involved can help us prioritise which elements of the experience to focus on.