I know that is a mouthful but I felt compelled to put something out there for all my customer experience and human design friends about this subject. Just when we thought the communication assault of making sure we used the words social, mobile, big data, digital, disruption etc. in every conversation was going mainstream (which means we could stop saying it) along comes an acronym such as IoT that now requires us to bring this up at every cocktail party and spew from every presentation that we deliver. What’s a rational person to do?

I know! Keep it simple. Keep it approachable. Keep it accessible.

If you are one of my techie, super smart, brainiac friends who want to learn more about appropriate use of REST APIs or the role Raspberry Pi’s $5 computer will play in the proliferation of intelligent devices, stop reading. I love you all but I am not talking to you at the moment. I am talking to the rest of you, who have a business to run, customer needs to fulfill and a P&L that you are accountable to meet. We need to know how this is going to help us make all the constituents in our balanced scorecard happy and help us keep one step ahead of the expectations we are going to see from those same constituents.

So let’s keep this simple as I said. I think there are 4 components of a really good IoT strategy. The technology is already there to support these 4 components and will get better over time which will allow you to ramp up strategy as long as you get the fundamentals down in the beginning.

It’s really fascinating that we will be able to make a lot of objects “talk” that today are silent. These objects perform tasks everyday and go about their work unnoticed until something goes wrong. I think about things like my blender, vacuum cleaner, gas grill etc which some people would call dumb appliances. Please allow me to use these as examples as I know many of you sell much more sophisticated things.

All of us either use these sorts of things on a regular day basis and a lot of us sell these things or services that require the use of these things. Now imagine being the Dr. Dolittle of things. What would you want to know if you could speak their language? What questions would you ask? What would you do with the answers? How would you interact with this thing in the future? If only my blender could talk to me. What a conversation that would be and wouldn’t you like to know what it said. Scandalous!

Well first and foremost, if these things are going to talk, we will need a place to COLLECT all that information that is coming from these things in an orderly fashion as I imagine that it will be a lot of data. Look around your home or office and imagine if everything that you could see could talk. You also need to be clear about what you want to know so that you collect the pertinent information and design the COLLECTION process in such a way that it doesn’t overburden the thing and your storage.

So now you have all this information. Great! But being data rich and insight poor is not going to help you in any way towards achieving your goals. So now we have to put in a process that will allow us to ANALYZE all of this data to determine what is really happening. Think of it like a diagnostic process that allows us to read the tea leaves and really understand the correlation between disparate parameters that may forecast opportunities or issues in the present and future.

Ok. You found out something really interesting in your ANALYSIS. So now what are you going to do? You have to have a process in place that allows you to make DECISIONS based on parameters that you have either set ahead of time or in real time as you get new insights. These DECISIONS may only take the ANALYSIS about the thing or may be combined with other data points that you have about the customer, their location, the weather and a bevy of other data points outside your IoT data.  These DECISIONS are your action plan that comes from having a deeper understanding of things and the people associated with the things.

Last but not least, you are going to have to ENGAGE either directly back with the thing because you want to change something and affect something or with the person who works, owns, uses the thing either in a reactive or preeminent way based on the mission criticality of the insight. If my blender is working too hard and overheating because my blades have been dulled over time by making too many margaritas, I would like you to either ship me new blades, recommend a local shop that can sharpen them or invite me to buy the newest model that does a better job of pulverizing ice. What I don’t want to do is have the machine die as the party is getting started. I may not think too finely about your brand if that happens and neither will my guests. This will require us to change the magnitude of our customer’s preferences for engagement driven by this new knowledge.

COLLECTING, ANALYZING, DECIDING and ENGAGING are the basic components of the strategy that you will need to build as you start to embrace the use of IoT. I know that this is a very simple statement and that the execution of that strategy is the complex part but it will at least get you started on asking the right questions. Great strategies are built by having the right questions not necessarily the right answers in the beginning. It is about having enough to kick off your brand’s new Minimal Viable Experience (MVE) utilizing the basics of an IoT strategy and learning along the way. The biggest mistake that you could make is fully enabling all of your things and then never getting any value from that data.

I will try to put more information here in the future at a detailed level for those of you interested in deeper understanding of these 4 components.

All feedback appreciated!

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Well…….what were you expecting? An article about pregnancy at the work place? A blog about balancing career and domestic life? What drove your expectation? The title? The picture? Having previously read this book?

Forgive me if I lead you astray and don’t meet your expectations (Spoiler alert: I’m not going to write about pregnancy in the workplace). However, unmet expectations – those moments where your customer’s expectation of the engagement with your brand leads to disappointment, frustration, or worse – is the topic at hand.

So to make sure we’re all on the same page about expectations, here’s a definition that makes sense to me:

Customer Expectations

Customer expectations are beliefs about an impending engagement with a brand that serve as standards or reference points against which value received is judged by the customer.

The important thing to understand about customers is that they are carrying a mental list about what they want to happen and what they think is going to happen. These “mental lists” influence how customers approach upcoming engagements, as well as how they ultimately perceive the experience delivered by the engagement.

Ouch! One more thing our brands don’t control in this ever changing, customer driven, digitally disruptive environment.

People’s expectations don’t just appear out of thin air. Expectations are formed based upon factors affecting people’s every day lives. These include: 

 P.E.S.T.L.E.

You might consider these the current “trends” that the customer is exposed to in their day-to-day lives. These include political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental issues, beliefs and experiences central in their lives. Most PESTLE factors are outside the control of your brand.

Situational Context

Where is the customer at this moment? What are they doing? What is the situation that they are in?  Who is with them? What technology and objects surround the customer?  What time of the day is it? These and many other details paint the complete picture of the customer at the moment of engagement. These factors greatly influence the expectation in the moment.

Previous Engagements

Customers bring their memories of past engagements, whether real or perceived, to each of their engagements and start to determine up front what is going to happen or what should happen. These memories can happen with different brands, different industries and even within different countries.

Geo-Demographics

Finally, expectations are created based upon background and personal narrative, including financial status, age, gender, ethnicity, and the list goes on.

With these factors in mind, your challenge is to identify the specific elements that are driving your customers’ expectations. This investigation needs to be done at a Segment level (expectations will differ between groups of customers), with the ultimate goal of understanding customer needs and attitudes in order to drive their next behavior or set of future behaviors.

I highly recommend that you co-produce customer journey maps with your customers in order to help identify when and where expectations are formed, and then co-create engagements that meet customer expectations and deliver the kinds of meaningful experiences that drive the results you want.

The bottom line is this. You must have an engagement strategy that is aligned to your customer’s expectations if you want win. Better yet, set new expectations of what an experience should be by engaging in a Useful, Usable and Meaningful way and watch your competitors scramble as you set the new standard and the new expectation on what brands need to do to drive stickiness and advocacy.

I am expecting to hear your comments………..don’t disappoint me !

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Lately, my inbox has been swamped with messages promoting the greatness of VOC: “How to Build an Effective VOC Program”, or “Ten Things Your VOC Program Needs to be Successful”, etc. To make matters worse, VOC is discussed  ad nauseum in leading customer service and customer care professional networks and communities. Of course, I’m not referring to Volatile Organic Compounds and their toxicity to people. I’m talking about a subject almost as combustible: The right way to think about Voice of the Customer.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe strongly in the importance and value of customer insight, as well as the criticality of driving customer empathy deep into an organization’s DNA, but do we really need another program with an acronym (or worse – a code name) designed for listening to our customers? My biggest fear is that the program itself becomes the primary focus, and we lose the essence of what’s really important. Action. Innovation. Transformation.

I’m a soccer (football to my friends around the globe) guy, and I often use the game to help illustrate my point. In the case of VOC, there are really only two approaches: 1) Continue to record the action on the pitch (i.e. remain a scorekeeper), or 2) decide to put one in the net (i.e. become a player).

Sometimes, when I engage with a brand on my own, things can go badly. Afterwards, if they send me surveys asking for feedback, I’ll fill them out. Yet despite my feedback, and the feedback from other customers receiving bad service, nothing changes. I’m sure I’m part of a report that provides precise data to these companies regarding my expectations, needs, emotions, etc., but again, nothing changes. This is my point: I suspect these VOC programs are engaged in score-keeping, and are not serious about trying to move the ball forward.

My challenge to you: Instead of using the words “Voice of the Customer”, we should change the name to “Hands of the Customer”. Let’s roll up our sleeves and make actual changes to the experiences we deliver to our customers, and focus energy on making those experiences useful, usable and meaningful.

Let’s show-up at leadership meetings with reports in hand, as well as plans to drive action using principles of good design and agile development. Designing innovations for customers should utilize testing and learning to capture customer feedback, ultimately leading to change and a value exchange (brands : customers). Heck, if we need a new acronym, then let’s use ADHOC            (Already Doing Hands of the Customer)

As always, I invite your comments or to engage with me personally at brian.curran@oracle.com

Originally posted on LinkedIn

I have been lucky enough and privileged to have worked with some fantastically customer centric leaders throughout my career. One that always pops up in my mind is Mike Linton, who was the CMO and my boss back in my Best Buy days and currently the CMO at Farmers Insurance. While Mike was loaded to the gills with skills and strengths, there was one lasting impression on me that is at the root of how I operate and that is that Mike cared passionately about the brand.

 I am not just talking just about the colors that we used or the logo or some other typical academic usage of the word. Mike cared about how customers felt about their experiences and how that translated into how they cared about the brand. I came to know this intimately under the forward thinking wisdom of my then boss John Walden, President of Internet and Direct Channels currently the CEO of Home Retail Group in the UK and their joint decision to move the newly built Enterprise Customer Care organization which I created and led under Mike.

We all of course want to impress our new boss with our command of the function that has been placed in our care and like any good manager, I plied Mike with all the details about how we were managing AHT, increasing occupancy and lowering the overall cost per contact. I might as well have been Charlie Brown’s teacher as he really didn’t care about those things. What he wanted to know was how the customer felt. Not just about how they felt about interacting with Customer Care and my CSAT and Quality scores. He wanted to know about how they felt about engaging with the brand across the entire buying and using cycle and across all the functions that interacted and all the channels. It was more important to Mike that I have real data that could be enacted upon by the retail store leaders and that I met with them on a weekly basis to share what we were learning.

What Mike knew as a fact was this. Your brand is driven by the experiences that you deliver. Period. Sure Mike had responsibility for marketing and advertising and a slew of other functions that drove traffic to our stores and websites. He knew he had to tee up the opportunity but he knew it that if you wanted to drive a sustainable business, you had to deliver the promise that was made through all the campaigns, inserts and commercials.

When I look up the word brand, I am always astounded by the origin of the word from Old Norse which is “to burn”. We of course know this from the old cattle stories of branding a mark of your ranch on the cattle to differentiate yours from someone else’s cow. I don’t know about you but I don’t want a brand "applied" to me like a mark for cattle. I want to be treated like an individual. The differentiation today is driven by “burning a mark” or driving a memory about your brand through the usage of your products and/or services you sell and the moments of engagement through each touch-point of the customer lifecycle. We all know what the byproduct of this experience is. Some call it loyalty, some call it stickiness, some call it NPS but we all know it is crucial to success.

Way before the our hypersensitivity to viral advocacy via social channels and our concern about Digital Disruption etc., Mike had the foresight to care about how our brand met the expectations of the customer while they were fulfilling their needs. He described words that he felt best fit the experiences and attitudinal results that came from those experiences. I remember how he would use the word authority to describe one of those brand attributes. Mike felt that if our associates on the floor, the blue shirts, could become experts in the products and their value, then customers would perceive us as having the authority to be the place to come for that expertise therefore differentiating ourselves in a much commoditized product environment with the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart. Now we can argue whether we were able to create that experience back in early 2001 or not but Mike knew that it was crucial and in hindsight foretold about the rise in things such as show-rooming where the only value is that I can see and touch the product before buying from someone else online. Mike knew that is the absence of price parity, experiences especially focused around knowledge were the key differentiators.

With today’s tools and strategy at the disposal of many of us, there are really no good excuses left on why we can’t deliver the appropriate experiences to differentiate our brands and deliver compelling experiences to the sub set of general consumers we are targeting. It really is about being clear about what you want your brand to stand for in the market at a useful (functional), useable (effortless) and meaningful (emotional) level and aligning everyone around the organization to deliver this day in and day out. Now the only question left is when you are going to start.

Thanks Mike and John for your patience teaching me to become a customer centered leader. I hope everyone finds mentors like the two of you early in their careers and have the passion to transform their brand!

Originally posted on LinkedIn

“How can I take this CX Journey Mapping and implement it in my department and/or company, so that we can become more customer-centeric and reap the benefits of this great methodology?”

Well, I have good news and bad news for you:

The good news is that you have made a great first step. This is because:

1. You are recognizing CX is essential to your business (Congratulations!: this sets you apart from many businesses nowadays), and
2. You got exposure to the CXJM methodology, which hopefully felt refreshing and energizing.

The bad news is that you have real work to do and no one is going to do it for you. This work probably comes in addition your daily work routine.

Fortunately, I've compiled the following list to help you...

7 Things to Consider When Designing a CXJM Workshop Tailored to Your Customer Journeys:

1) Get a sponsor for your “internal CX revolution”- someone who is high up in the hierarchy, has strong visibility, and the decision power to dedicate resources to redesigning the experience for your customers. And if you don’t have hierarchies and follow a holacratic model, hallelujah for you!

2) Be patient - Don’t expect results overnight, prepare for long-shot results. Only after a few CXJM workshops can you set priorities and get a solid idea of potential projects you want to work on.

3) Prepare to break silos and be challenged by people within your organization. People are resistant to change and although many will say they understand the importance of CX, when the daily routines kick in, their enthusiasm may waver. (Note: nothing wrong with you, this is human nature). It is up to you to keep these people engaged!

4) Take a critical look at the customer journeysyou work on: Ask yourself “Is this journey truly from the customer's point of view or is it reflecting our company’s internal 'inside-out process view?” The line between the outside-in and inside-out view is very thin and I am constantly seeing people  mix these up without even realizing. Don't be one of those people!

5) Keep the workshop artifacts.  Post-its with ideas, descriptions of personas, customer journeys, hypothesis statements you generate from the CXJM workshop(s), don’t throw them away! Make them visible in the halls your company, entrance of the cafeteria, toilet doors, cubicle walls, common coffee areas, etc.

By doing this you will:

1. Remind the participants of the workshop results and their roll in carrying them forward.
2. Raise curiosity within your organization. Curiosity is a very powerful force that is underestimated in many work environments, both large and small.

6) Set measurable goals for your CX redesign, like you will do with any other project (i.e. first prototype of a new product line shall be ready by MM/YY; get virtual assistant function ready on our page by MM/YY). integrating this into your existing project roll out structure is often helpful here.

7) Be prepared to fight internal stickiness. Sometimes this means doing things like bringing in external facilitators to run the exercise or engaging your end customers in the workshop.

And if you’re still wondering what the benefits of a CXJM workshop are, here are two teaser videos that explain the power of our Customer Experience Journey Mapping workshops.

1. CXJM workshop in English,
2. CXJM workshop in German

Thanks for reading and happy Journey Mapping!

Last night I received this shipment from Pottery Barn for some seat covers that my lovely wife Dana and I purchased for our outside furniture. After opening the 4 boxes, I soon realized that everything that we purchased could have fit into one of the boxes. This is when things went downhill quickly as my brain kicked in and I started thinking. Why didn’t they just use one box? How much money could I have saved on shipping? What impact will this have on the environment? How will I fit all this cardboard into my recycling bin? The questions raced one after another through my head until finally I was summoned from the garage to dinner finally breaking the perpetual barrage of cerebral energy.

I love Pottery Barn and I will admit that in public but this one small incident has started to tarnish how I feel about doing business with them. I mean this is a sophisticated company who runs a very nice multichannel engagement model of catalogs, stores and call centers. What do you mean they don’t extend that sophistication down to their logistics? Don’t they know that the last mile of getting that stuff to my house and setting it up and actually using it are just as important as researching what I want to buy and select?

I will tell you that when we bought these covers in the store, the salesperson was outstanding and the merchandising in the store was beautiful and the checkout process was simple and I could go on and on about the experience. Then this happens.

I obviously think about the world in journeys and the engagement that I have with a brand in an entire lifecycle. It is the peril of what I do for a living and as my kids will tell you, my life is made up of millions of post-it notes describing the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of these engagements and the onstage and backstage capabilities (people, processes and technology) it takes to deliver the experiences.

If you as a brand are not looking at the entire journey of your customer and determining the moments that matter and measuring the impact of not delivering to the needs and expectations of your customer, you will continue to disappoint them. Dirty bathrooms in restaurants, late installation technicians, trash collectors who leave containers strewn everywhere, and all the other little pet peeves that we have start to accumulate and then some disruptive new business comes along and eliminates all the things that irked us and gets our business and your brand dies a death by a thousand pin pricks of ignorance.

Take time to walk the complete journey, not just a mile, in your customers shoes and you will start to understand the entire experience. Find those moments that matter and design new experiences that drive stickiness and advocacy.

Pottery Barn, I still love you but let’s start to think “Inside and Outside the Box”.

Have questions? I’m always happy to discuss new ways to design valuable customer experiences: email me at brian.curran@oracle.com.

Originally published on LinkedIn

3 Thresholds Your Customer Experience Must Pass

If you hang out with me for long enough, you will undoubtedly be peppered with what my friends call “Curranisms”. These are the sayings, colloquialisms, and quotes I use over and over—ad nauseam. My favorite is the saying “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

As I have gotten older and wiser (or maybe just older), I have tried to reduce the amount of effort I exert (the squeeze) to achieve a valuable outcome (the juice). It’s not that I have become lazy, it’s that there is always a smarter, easier way to accomplish something. That’s what consumers are seeking when they engage with your brand. Will they get the maximum value for the precious time and energy they spend? If you can’t answer yes, it’s time to reevaluate your customer experience.  

Here’s a great example: My family recently planned a trip to Europe, and we decided to take trains in between the cities we visited. To ensure our seats were together, I set out to make reservations. I had a number of booking sites to choose from, including travel sites like The Man in Seat 61, travel service companies like RailEurope, and direct providers like Austrian Federal Railways. Like any consumer with a need, I began my journey by researching all of my options.

Before I gave my business to any of these service providers, I made sure they passed 3 key thresholds: 

Threshold #1: Is the Customer Experience Useful?

I determined if each booking site was capable of answering my most basic questions. Can I find a schedule? Do they have a seat map? Can I determine which trains will get me there the quickest versus which trains stop at every village between here and Timbuktu?

I needed easy access to all of that information, at any hour of the day. Sadly, not all of the providers made it past this first threshold. They were eliminated early in the process with no opportunity to be involved in the selection phase, and more importantly, the buying phase.

Threshold #2: Is the Customer Experience Usable?

While I appreciate the ability to speak with someone via chat or phone, I prefer to do my research without the pressure of someone asking me for an order before I feel ready and informed. I examined which sites made it easiest for me to navigate, try different options, and place orders in a seamless, intuitive way.

During this process, I remember thinking, I wish these guys had the XXX capability that Austrian Railways has, and, why don’t they show the same options to XXX as RailEurope does? I was deciding who to engage with not based on price, but on who was going to make this easy for me. A majority of the providers who made it past the first round were eliminated here, and that’s a shame. It doesn’t take much effort to map the journeys of your customers and design a site that’s usable by multiple segments.

Threshold #3: Is the Customer Experience Meaningful?

I was not just taking a train. I was taking my family on a vacation to Europe to immerse my children in another culture and build lifelong memories. It’s not just about being useful and usable –it’s about being meaningful. Did the websites address my concerns? Did each brand take into consideration that I am unaccustomed to the language, the culture, and the key places that would not only help me achieve my functional needs but allow me to achieve my emotional needs? While many of us don’t start our search looking for this, our subconscious keeps score and adjusts our attitudes toward a brand based on its ability to make us trust that our emotional needs will be met.

Two sites made it to this last round and, probably to your surprise, my decision was not based on a matrix that I created on paper. I had a gut feeling about who I wanted to do business with in the long run. The three thresholds were definitely in play, but beyond that, people make decisions every day based on feelings. I spent my money with the companies that made me feel the best throughout the process—and will more than likely use them again the next time I travel in Europe.

Ask yourself: Is your brand useful, usable, and meaningful to people who are engaging with you? Do you understand the journey they are on and what their functional and emotional needs are? Are you designing experiences that make your brand standout among your competitors—across the three thresholds and the feelings that drive gut decisions?

If so, squeezing your brand is well worth the juice for your customers.

Have questions? I’m always happy to discuss new ways to design valuable customer experiences: email me at brian.curran@oracle.com.

Originally posted on LinkedIn

EXJM is a people-centric discovery process that helps organizations rapidly frame their employee experience challenges and formulate innovative solutions. The objective is to deliver better employee and candidate experiences to improve engagement, productivity, performance and competitiveness.

As you can see in the below slides, This methodology is closely linked off of our existing CX Journey Mapping process.

The EXJM program is the brainchild of our good friend Hajer Mabrouk -  who after a brief collaboration - has really grabbed onto this and made it her own. We're very happy with what she's built so far and we look forward to a continued collaboration.

Let us know what you think! and keep your eye out on our sidebar upcoming EXJM workshops coming to your area.

Words Matter. Words matter even more when you are in the midst of a transformation and want to get everyone aligned around key themes. Of course, the theme that I am referring to is around becoming a customer centric organization and embracing empathy as a key ingredient of that transformation. As Customer Care Leaders, you are the catalyst and voice for a lot of these transformations.

So let’s pretend for a moment that you are practicing empathy and now wearing your customer’s shoes and you are sitting in a meeting or at a conference. Ok, is everyone in the proper frame of mind?

Now, how would you react if I said that my goal was to deflect your incoming call or email? How many of you awoke this morning hoping that you would be deflected by someone before your day ended? Doesn't sound like a very positive experience to me? Sounds like rejection to me.

So let’s look at Merriam – Webster’s definition of the word.

deflect

  verb de·flect \di-ˈflekt, dē-\

: to cause (something that is moving) to change direction

: to hit something and suddenly change direction

: to keep (something, such as a question) from affecting or being directed at a person or thing

This doesn't sound like something that I want to do to customers. If you are like most companies, you are spending an inordinate amount of money to attract and retain customers and deflecting them after all of that investment doesn't seem to make business sense at all.

So why did we start using the word deflection and how did it become so invasive in the customer care / service vocabulary? Like most misguided strategy or language, it started with some form of executive edict to drastically change something in our business without preview to the long term effect of this change. In the case of deflection, I can assume that someone looked at the expenses associated with servicing customers and determined that this expense needed to be lowered. No one in their right mind would say to just abandon these customers and refuse to service them so the best alternative was to determine how to service these customers but at a reduced cost. To this, I say Bravo ! There is nothing wrong with being both effective and efficient in the way we service our customers. What is wrong is thinking about this strategy as a blunt instrument. Reduce the calls, emails or any other assisted service and replace it with some form of low cost self service by forcing the customer to “right channel” and then measuring this short term coup as deflection.

Now I know by now that many of you are saying “No Brian, that is not what we are doing or what we meant” or “You are taking this out of context” and you may be right. But why call it deflection?

I think what we all mean is that we want to offer alternatives to the high cost of assisted service by offering other capabilities that not only meet the customer’s needs but in most cases even offer a more superior alternative to a phone call. We are not deflecting the call but merely offering a solution that is efficient, effective, effortless and empowering to the customer that they can use on their own terms. This is not deflection but merely another form of service elevated to take advantage of all the mediums and trends available in today’s society.

So how about using some more modern terms to reflect what we really want to say? Remember that words matter.

I know that many of you have developed or are in the process of developing much more sophisticated approaches to delivering compelling service to your customers that drives stickiness and advocacy. These sophisticated approaches determine who the customer is, the context of the customer’s situation and the most appropriate way to provide the experience and solution that best fits the moment and the customer’s needs both at a functional and emotional way. Avant-garde strategy such as these cannot be measured by a Neanderthal like term that only talks about reduction. This is about matching the delivery of a tailored experience to the desired attitudinal, behavioral and financial outcomes associated with that experience.

For instance, you may be measuring attitudes such as satisfaction or willingness to promote or behaviors such as frequency of purchase and/or brand mentions. You may be even measuring the correlation of these attitudes and behaviors to financial results such as traffic, conversion rate, AHT etc.

But what if you combined the types of customers (segments) that you are engaging, the situation governing the engagement (journey moment, location etc.), the medium used to engage the customer (self, assisted, community etc.) along with the outcomes (attitudes, behaviors, results) and built a matrix that showed which capability was most effective and efficient and then determined where to invest? Maybe the phone call works best in a complex situation for baby boomers during normal business hours and the self service knowledge based question and answer works best for product support for millennials at 2 in the morning. I am not deflecting the customer but merely matching the capabilities of my brand to my customers in the most relevant way possible.

So let’s come up with a new name. I choose RELEVANCY. Did I offer the right capability, at the right time to the right person and did it offer a value equation that both served the customer and the brand in a long term valuable (LTV) way. Not as simple as saying that our phone calls went down and our self service went up but much more revealing in the long run.

Look for more conversations about how to measure this in the near future. I hope to hear lots of opinions on this subject matter and meet many of you as I am traveling around the globe. You will recognize me immediately as the guy having the allergic reaction to someone touting their deflection strategy.

Originally posted on LinkedIn

This diagram is a simple one-page visual illustration of the five phases of the process and their associated steps.  Alongside each step is a visual reminder of which sticky note color is used, as well as an example entry.

Download links:PDF or JPG

Key differences from our previous CXJM process steps:

1) The Persona, Brand Attributes & Key Trends have all been moved to the front  This provides a clearer overview of these three components, creating a better understanding of their overarching importance when building effective Journey Maps.

2) Teams select one moment need together & one emotional need asindividuals This change helps teams quickly move towards brainstorming the core emotional drivers, which is a key skill we are trying to unlock with participants in our Journey Mapping workshops.

3) Desired new attitude & behavior now come before building CX Design Canvas We've found doing this step before brainstorming innovations really helps focus teams their ideas on things that truly meet the selected transformation impact.

All of these additions are also reflected within the slidedeck that can be found on the CXJM Toolkit page

This file can be downloaded as a PDF or as a PPT

New updates include:

1. New slidedeck with improved formatting
2. better examples throughout the deck
3. refinements to Journey Mapping process

More details about the changes in our Journey Mapping process in in our overview of the CX Journey Map process diagram. 

This new poster provides:

• The Jen/ZoomGo story line across the 3 posters
• A map of the overall step by step CX Journey Mapping process (bottom left)
• Dedicated areas for brainstorming needs, processes, & innovations
• The CX Design Canvas, with color coding to simplify instruction
• Clear designation of areas for On Stage, Back Stage, & Attitudes

Like any good CX practitioner, we have piloted them, incorporated feedback, tested revised versions, and are now ready to share these more broadly.  We've found that not only does it speed up the set up for your session, but that it greatly improves the learning experience for the participants.   We've been using it it at our recent workshops and have found it to be an all around great experience.

Download Links:

CXJM Learn Workshop Templates: ZoomGo Chapter 1 - ZoomGo Chapter 2  - ZoomGo Chapter 3

CXJM Design Session Template: Blank DIY Roll Up Poster

Tips & Directions for use:

• Print these on 42 inch by 96 inch paper  (can be re-sized to fit metric paper sizes)
• Laminate it using a matte finish to reduce glare and improve longevity
• We recommend 3M adhesives to mount it without damaging painted wall surfaces
• Ensure you have enough contiguous wall space in your meeting location
• You'll still need to print out blank CX Hypothesis Statements for the final step in the workshop

Let us know what your think of these and please send us some pictures of you using them in action!

Here are 5 quick Journey Mapping tips we've collected in our work:

1) Start small (be assumptive):

It can be easy to get bogged down by trying to build the perfect Journey Map. Be careful to not let the scope of your activity overwhelm you. We recommend starting things out assumptivly with low resolution when creating your initial Journey Maps. From there you can perform validation exercises on the areas that require more detail to understand.

2) Keep it collaborative (cross-functional)

Journey mapping provides the most value when done with a wide range of people from your organization.This will help maximize your collective understanding during this activity.

Here are some examples of people to consider including:

• Someone with a good understanding of strategic business objectives and financials
• Someone who knows the arch of the sales relationship
• Someone who understands CRM system and email marketing touchpoints
• Someone with insight into product direction and development
• Someone from front-line customer support

3) Build initial Journey Maps in person

Whenever possible, we strongly recommend creating your maps as a collocated activity. Journey Mapping requires high energy, collaborative decision making and heavy focus.  For these reasons, teams who do their initial mapping activities in person tend to gain greater value from their efforts.

4) Use consistent sticky note colors

This may seem trivial, but using a consistent color pallet will maximize your ability to gain rapid understanding from viewing a Journey Map. This will help everyone gain a clear understanding of the layout at a quick glance.

5) Make your Journey Maps visible

It’s no secret that Journey Maps draw attention. These maps can serve as a great reference point for bringing different stakeholders up to speed on your efforts. We recommend placing your maps on the hallway walls, in meeting rooms, or anywhere else that will get them seen by passerby's.

Hopefully these tips are helpful for you. We’d love to hear some other suggestions you have for building great Customer Experience Journey Maps in the comments below.

We’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Brian Raboin, the Chief Strategy Officer of managed cloud services provider HOSTING, over the last year. His enthusiasm for discussing the importance of customer experience is contagious. In the best possible way. Here, Brian shares some of his insight into why a customer-centered strategy has been a winning formula for HOSTING.

Brian, we know you’re kind of a big deal in customer experience strategy circles these days. Tell us a little bit about yourself. When you’re not setting CX strategy, where might we find you? Favorite superhero?

I’ll try and make this short. It was a Tuesday in 1971. It was raining. I was born in Delaware because I wanted to be close to my mother. "I was born at a very young age." - Groucho Marx.

I live in Denver, Colorado with my wife and two children. I left the uncertainty of a corporate job with McDonald’s to join the stability of a start-up in 2001 when I joined HostMySite as the fifth employee. Fast-forward to today and HOSTING is the integrated combination of three companies – HostMySite, NeoSpire, and HOSTING. When I am not focusing on CX Strategy or talking about building a Service Culture, I enjoy doing things to make my colleagues, family and friends laugh. Currently my office window is a real life replica of level 1-1 from Mario Brothers. I also make balloon animals for people’s anniversaries and birthdays.

As for my favorite superhero, I would have to say Iron Man. I saw a graphic once where Clark Kent says, “No one must ever know who I really am.” Bruce Wayne says, “To protect my city, I must wear a mask.” Peter Parker says, “No one can ever know my secret.” And Tony Stark says, “Screw it, I’m Iron Man.” I like that Tony innovates and is iterative in the process. He always has different versions of the Iron Man suit that he is working on and takes successful ideas and applies them in different ways. He learns from the failures, and the failures just make him want to do even better. He is also uber-rich and drives some pretty awesome cars.

You've recently taken up the position of Chief Strategy Officer at HOSTING. Could you tell us a bit about your position and the role CX plays when setting your corporate strategy?

My new role as Chief Strategy Officer is to take a lot of what we have done internally with regards to building a service culture and to turn that outside-in through thought leadership and activation leadership. For example, using CX Journey Mapping (CXJM) and measuring the true impact on an organization from a revenue standpoint is critical in determining the overall success of the process. But for a process like CXJM to be successful, an organization needs to know its vision, values, culture, brand, customers, market, and competition. Getting those pieces in place is critical for companies today to build a good customer experience.

My role is to get those pieces in place for HOSTING and then effectively innovate around the customer experience not just at the product level, but also from initial engagement through the entire customer life cycle. The questions I try to answer are how can we innovate for the customer at all levels to show our vision, values, culture and brand? How do we know that our vision, values, culture and brand are valued by our target customer and market segment? What new markets will find our offerings distinctly valuable compared to the competition? What are the customer's problems, needs, desires, passions and goals that we can satisfy? And how do we do it in a distinctive way that our target market and customers will find valuable?

To that end, I am writing, talking, workshopping (I just made up that word) and activating not only HOSTING, but other companies, so that they can build their own service culture and customer experience.

You’ve been a great partner of ours over the last year, sharing your experiences using CX Journey Mapping (CXJM). What was it about CXJM that really resonated with you and your teams?

Why thank you! You have been a great partner as well.

What really clicked for us with CXJM was the idea of telling a customer story and the uniqueness of the innovations that fell out of those stories. CXJM re-focused us not only on value, but on the problem and on the customer need. It made the customer come to life for us and allowed us to experience things from a first person perspective.

We used to write Agile user stories like,

“As the customer, I want to see a backup log, so I know my backups have run and when.”

After CXJM, we started writing,

“As Bobby, the System Admin who works 60 hours a week and is on-call 24x7, I want to know if, when and why a backup failed and have a say as to when it will run again. Because if it runs at the wrong time during the day and causes the application to slow down, my phone is going to ring off the hook and my email is going to blow up, and I’ll spend hours trying to figure out what the hell is going on, pulling my hair out, while people are yelling at me thinking I am incompetent. Only then to learn HOSTING automatically re-ran the backup without me knowing.  And when that happens, I will hate HOSTING with the heat of a thousand suns.”

The old user story delivered functionality that gave visibility into the backup process. The new user story using CXJM solved for the problem of an overworked, on-call System Admin who doesn’t want to get yelled at more than he already does. Solving for the latter brings so much more value than just building the former. CXJM allowed us to really get outside of the box when it came to solving problems where both the customer and the company benefited. We are now writing stories that will create an experience that will move customers to be advocates. Not everything you do will make a customer an advocate, but CXJM helps identify the points of frustration as well as opportunities to build advocacy.

One overlooked aspect I think a lot of people miss when doing CXJM for the first time is that while the ideas are out of the box, the best and most effective ideas and innovations are ones that not only support, but propel and push forward, a company’s vision, value, culture and brand. At HOSTING, we want our brand to be about “Serve” and “Guide”, which are the two things we always want to be doing for our customers. The innovations that come from our teams while using CXJM always push us towards more unique ways to serve and guide our customers.

Tell us a bit more about how you’re using CX design principles to create engaged employees within HOSTING.

For HOSTING, CXJM brought all parts of the company together to get a wide, horizontal view of the entire customer experience. CXJM works best for us when we can bring together a microcosm of our entire organization to build and experience the customer journey together. The innovations then come from any part of the organization and it brings a much deeper understanding as to what the customer really experiences. It also gets people involved in the success of the innovations who otherwise wouldn’t be involved or interested.  Now, we have Billing and Accounting people really interested in what Engineering and Operations are doing because they were a part of the creation of an innovation. It has blasted cannon balls into the silos of our organization, and that is a good thing.

Like Tony Stark who tries successful ideas in new ways, I wanted to see how CXJM could be applied elsewhere. So we are going to be Journey Mapping the employee experience at HOSTING to see where we can make that experience even better. This is important to me as part of our vision is having the “industry’s best team.” To attract the best team, we have to have an experience that will get people lined up at the door to come work at HOSTING.  We have done a lot this year to make that happen. We built a bar at the office in Denver that is always stocked with beer, wine and other adult beverages. This is important to me personally as I am taking over HR and Training with the goal of creating an awesome employee experience. Frankly, I only have a couple of tricks in my bag (CXJM being one of them) so I really hope it helps me in HR and Training. Incidentally, we also hired a full time lawyer. Despite the outward appearance, the bar and the lawyer are not correlated. However me taking over HR and the lawyer are.

Many companies understand that CX is the new business imperative, but struggle to find a place to start. Could you share any guidance or tips to help businesses build alignment and confidence to start a CX transformation?

The secret to our success in CX transformation was to just start. There is a book by Ari Weinzweig, the co-founder of a company called Zingerman’s, called “Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service”. He lists five steps to building a service culture. Step one is Teach It, and step two is Define It. When I first saw that I thought it was odd that they were in that order, and not the other way around. But the genius of teaching before defining hit me quickly. Transformation requires movement, energy, collaboration and action. The physical act of teaching involves movement, energy, collaboration and action. Also, teaching first makes you commit. Last year, we put December 10-11, 2012, on the calendar on for me to teach a class on customer service. We called it WOW training. When that invite went out to 10 people at HOSTING, including our CEO, COO, CTO and seven other people, I had no idea what I was going to talk about or do for two days. But I knew I had to do something. Six months later, the entire company had been through WOW training. We are now doing WOW 2.0 and Manager WOW, as well as CXJM Workshops, How to Hire a Rock Star Workshops, and Giving Reviews that Matter Workshops.

The other part of teaching first and defining second is that it allows the culture of the company to help define it. Find people that are passionate about CX and Service.  Passionate people like to talk about their passion. Oracle and the folks that work on Oracle CX offered me the opportunity to attend free CXJM workshops and support. I took unashamed advantage of every opportunity that was presented in front of me to learn from the CX folks at Oracle. I did buy them beer on occasion, which seemed to keep me top of mind when opportunities arose. With a little homework and an attitude of not taking no for an answer, you can find people who have done it before. And they will talk to you for free and teach you a ton - just because it is their passion. Just like every journey, CX transformation all starts with taking a first step. Just take it and keep going.

The journey maps pictured above are one of my favorite examples of collaborative mapping to date.

A large cross-organizational team at the University of New England in Australia gathered for a day, divided into groups, and mapped a series of adjacent student and applicant journeys (the rectangular maps shown at right).

The best part is that they didn't stop there. A smaller team, working in parallel and continuing after the initial session, painstakingly remapped copies of these journeys onto a single, cohesive and connected student life cycle (shown at left). Incredible.

I particularly like how they chose to use the infinity-loop form of a customer lifecycle to visualize this. Not only is this form effective, it's also visually stunning (more later about leveraging this to attract attention in your organization).

Best of all: according to the folks that we have been working with there, the work produced a lot of "low hanging fruit" -- opportunities to improve the student experience that they simply hadn't seen before when working inside-out, in their departmental silos. Moreover, the teams left aligned and motivated to act on the opportunities they discovered.

Amazing what a bias towards action produces.