It seems intuitive that a customer’s personal

experiences are where they derive value in their

relationship with a brand. We define customer

experience in terms of a person's perceptions,

feelings, memories and associations, and so virtually

any aspect of a company can be in question when

considering how it makes a connection with a

customer. New attention on the discipline has

resulted in the propagation of many different

approaches to CX in practice. They have also led to

the propagation of several myths and half truths about

the field and it’s best practices.

This article is aimed at confronting several of the

common misconceptions we have seen about the field

of CX, while highlighting the opportunity that is

presenting itself to nearly every industry, to take a

customer-centric approach to developing channels,

service, product and operations in order to build a

stronger customer connection.

Building a Customer-Centric BusinessPaul Conder, Lenati LLC. 2014

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Customer experience (CX) is a personal thing, and is not something that can be “created” by a company. It is the aggregate of a person's perceptions, feelings, memories and associations around their engagement with a brand. Each customer brings their life’s memories and associations to each interaction, and so it is inappropriate to say that we create specific experiences for each customer. We can only afford the customer the chance to engage. CX is similar to branding in this way. Companies put a lot of effort into creating their brand, but people's perceptions of a company are personal, and belong to the people not the company.

Customers are able to view a company in its entirety; even areas that used to be considered “back of house” are now in plain view. When channel models were more monolithic and uni-directional, companies were able to separate their operations from their customer-facing activities with an opaque curtain between the two. The explosion in digital communication channels, especially social media, means that now people can see the totality of the company including behind the curtain. Every facet of the company needs to be understood from the customer's point of view - it’s all on display. This goes far beyond service interactions with staff or engagement with a product. Customers have expectations that need to be met around a company’s ethics and values, and where and how it conducts its business.

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photo: R2HOX, Flickr, Creative Commons. Digital Art: Ryoji Ikeda, Data Path

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A “customer journey” is the framework of customers’ interactions and experiences while engaging with a brand. It includes all the interactions with digital media, social interactions, word of mouth, service interactions – the works. Mapping the customer journey across all digital and physical channels, interwoven as the customer would experience them, is the key to understanding how the experiences can be enabled, communicated and focused.

Touchpoints are only physical or digital enablers in the customer’s journey. Touchpoints afford the customer the opportunity to carry out a certain pattern of interactions. (In the field of design, they are called “affordances.”) Every touchpoint designed into a website, app, retail interior, hospital, office, store fixture, airport, smartphone or table setting is put there to enable certain interactions, carry certain messages, and pattern certain behaviors. Many companies focus on their touchpoints when they speak about customer experience because the touchpoints are the items that the company produces in the end - and there is a lot of thought, effort and money put into building things like websites, mobile experience, sales networks and retail spaces. When the focus is placed too strongly on the touchpoint, the bias is towards the operational aspects of the company – not what the customer is actually thinking, feeling, saying, doing or spending.

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Unfortunately, every point in the customer’s journey has the potential to drive the customer away from a company. We have seen companies insist that long service wait times allow customers the opportunity to “explore” and “engage,” when in reality about half of the customers were leaving within a few moments of entry. Some companies backload extra charges at the last page of their ecommerce site - creating an unfortunate surprise for the customer just as they are about to convert. In both these cases, the operational obstacles (or pure inertia) were enough to blind the company’s leadership to the real impact this experience was having on their business. These are extreme examples, but we have seen many companies suffer from similar blockages in connecting with their customers.

The customer’s experience can be directly linked to the customer’s spending. We wrote about this in the previous article we published called “What’s an Experience Worth?” Companies are seeing an enormous upside in revenue and loyalty by framing their products, services and systems around the customer’s experience.

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The value in aligning the customer’s experience, brand and sales performance can go far beyond incremental spend. In our projects, we have seen sales increases, improved brand perception, more positive reviews and promoter scores, increased loyalty and retention AND simplified operations by taking a customer-centric view, generating billions of dollars in new business.

There is no such thing as an offline customer. Whatever industry you are in, you can be sure that your customer will be present in several channels, often at once, comparing you to your competition and hearing about what others say about you. A lot of these channels are beyond your direct control; with people tweeting or posting about you in an accelerated word-of-mouth context. For the companies that see every aspect of their business as customer-facing, this is one of their best opportunities to make a connection. For those who cling to old models of broadcast marketing in this space, judgement will be swift.

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Customer experience is not about projecting a made-up theme for your company’s brand. For companies that are new to the field of CX, there is a common misconception that the customer should be delighted and surprised at each step of their journey. This sounds great at first, but attempting to make this happen in the real world can often be cumbersome and contrived. Aiming to drive deep engagement at every point can be overwhelming for the customer, creating a brand perception that is fake, insincere and inauthentic. For the customer it can feel like the company is trying too hard, like that kid in school who wanted so desperately to be friends and seemed to stick to you like glue.

In the pursuit of surprise and delight, theatre has often been used as a metaphor for “staging customer experiences” around a brand theme. Service interactions are highly scripted, retail spaces are compared to stage sets, service reps are considered as actors to play specific roles that all align to the theme. This line of thinking comes from some of the most influential early writing about CX. For example “The Experience Economy” by Pine and Gilmore caught on so well that the language in it permeated business and creative culture in North America, but sometimes the original context was missing. For many, the first taste of CX strategy demonstrated the artifice and superficiality of a Broadway theatre production - and often in complete misalignment to the brand or the product. The same authors later wrote a follow-up book called “Authenticity” which was aimed at reigning in this trend.

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There are three key areas for measuring CX. CX measurement is a core component of any CX practice, letting the team know how well their initiatives are performing in the real world, and giving clues for how it can be improved.

Customer input helps build an understanding of what the customer is thinking and feeling - capturing perceptions, opinions, preferences, feelings, associations and reactions. This can also include input on subjects like their likelihood to recommend the company, brand cohesion, or their general satisfaction.

Observational research and analytics help build an understanding of what the customer is doing. It includes everything from field observations, online analytics, traffic and browsing patterns, social listening data, dwell times - anything that can be observed with a minimum of affect to the customer’s behavior.

Financial data helps build an understanding of how the customer is spending. Analytics from this data can be correlated to the first two areas, creating performance or value-based models.

For a deep dive into CX research methods, see “The New CX Toolbox” - available at lenati.com/cx

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CX is a very new field when compared

with other more established business

practices like sales or marketing. From

its small beginnings just a few years ago,

CX has grown to be an important part of

many of the world’s best-respected

companies. With this rapid growth has

come a flurry of misconceptions around

how CX should be practiced. Each of the

guiding principles discussed in this

article are aimed at countering these CX

myths. They can help keep a CX team

on track towards building a customer-

centric culture, and creating an offering

that is relevant to the customer.

photo: Muns, Creative Commons.

Lenati LLC

Seattle WA, San Francisco CA, Vancouver BC.

info@lenati.com

1 800 848 1449

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Since 2005, Lenati has helped transform businesses to

make stronger connections with their customers. We help

our clients find, acquire and retain customers through a

focus on customer experience, marketing, sales and

loyalty strategy. We emphasize deep research, design

thinking and rigorous testing to prove out new ways to

benefit both the customer and the business. We have

worked with a wide roster of global brands, including

Starbucks, Microsoft, Adobe, T-Mobile, Capital One,

lululemon, Expedia, Nordstrom and Google.

Find out more at lenati.com

Ten Key CX Principles

by Paul Conder

Images by Paul Conder, except as noted.

2014 c