Creating a consistent customer experience?

There are three elements, or ‘graces’ to a consistent customer experience:

1. Cultural and brand consistency - across multi channels, media and different employees

2. Emotional consistency - across the complete customer journey covering multi-channels

3. Life-time conversational consistency - using the channels and media of the customer’s choice

At the Grass Roots,  Fit For the Future event in June, it was the cultural consistency that participants agreed was their biggest current burden. For some, consistency was needed across retail outlets and hotels, many belonging to other people eg franchisees and dealers. For others, the issue was across multi-channels, web, telephone, and store. However, it soon became clear that the key issue across people – employees and stakeholders. Even in a call centre or retail outlet in a single location, cultural consistency, and the relevant experience, was a concern – the far flung locations just added the extra complication of creating a ‘local flavour’ – if that was required.

The burden would not be so heavy, it was agreed, if top management really understood the business case for brand and cultural consistency: it was suggested that ‘thought experiments’ on what customers would do if the brand no long existed, might focus strategy and a co-ordinated experience a little more. In discussions, differences in leadership style, and organizational structures emerged as a strong differentiator of the cultural context and the business case needed: for example:

• strong brand value leadership often created a cultural atmosphere where like minded recruits could be left to ‘live the brand’, but, how was this scaled across channels as the business grew?
• strong profit led leadership, often brought in to save an organization eg Sir Stuart Rose at M&S, necessarily focussed on operational efficiency with command and control methods. So, how to convince such managers of the benefits of the ‘more graceful side’ of service and experience.
• amalgamated organizations such as hotel chains or large FMCG companies, built from mergers and acquisitions, are often left without any unifying legacy culture or even brand values; these may never emerge if not designed specifically with a strong case for the business lost through poor ‘emotional’ experiences and staff engagement.
• networks of proprietor owned outlet across different locations , eg automotive dealers, need to turn information into shared knowledge and collaborate to create a unified outlook for mutual benefit: but again how is that case made?

The issues

The key issues raised in discussing a ‘consistent customer experience’ reflected the aforementioned sandwich effect:-

• How do you balance cultural and operational (process/customer journey) consistency?
• How do you created cultural consistency as an imperative for the board?

However, other issues revolved around the specifics of implementation techniques:-

• How do you ensure you have a complete customer journey map across all channels, and from the customer’s preference and viewpoint?
• How do you manage customer feedback from all the channels and turn it into real cultural knowledge?
• What is the place and power of storytelling in building cultural consistency?
• How do you map emotional experiences (the key to the customer asset) against the customer’s journey?

The solutions

Solutions to these issues, centred on ways to engaged all staff with delivering a good customer experience, not just front line staff.

From a strategic or top level view, solutions suggested were:-

• Promoting specific, differentiating, brand values and how they should be turned into the customer proposition and supporting culture – described as ‘peeling the brand onion’.
• Linking senior staff directly back to customers with ‘back to the shop-floor’ methods.
• Making more use of customer journeys mapping and customer feedback at different stages of the journey in order to build the benefit and risk profile for good and poor experiences.

From a delivery view, solutions suggested were:-

• ‘Talking not ticking’ to manage the attainment of KPI’s.
• Creating good customer experience stories for circulation to demonstrate what was required and then leaving staff to ‘live the brand’ rather than micro-manage processes.
• Linking all employees to customer feedback and knowledge, so they could take action in their own roles eg creating a customer knowledge showcase
• Engaging staff by ensuring everyone knew their role in creating the customer experience and how that affected bottom line results.
• Recruiting more on values and brand attributes

There was little doubt amongst participants that empirical evidence and research demonstrated time and time again the value to a business of a consistent customer experience, it was the conveying of the business case, and the building of strong brand values and culture that was the challenge.

Drawing on both our ‘leading ideas’ research programme, and capability analysis tools, we  help you create mutual customer value,  in the  emerging, social business world.  Want to experiment with a co-creative customer programme?  Turn your customer insight team into high value business advisors?  Have an open space workshop to design a distinctive customer experience?  We provide the insight to inspire your customer thinking, strategy and delivery.  We call it,  ’scaling up the values of the old corner shop’.

Professor Baker, based his view on the importance of social business on what he called three coalescing issues:-

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – how do we move into ‘self actualisation’ ?

Rostow’s stages of economic growth – what does lie beyond mass consumption?

Organizational value creation – how do we create value from knowledge?

He also said that the role of marketers was to synthesise and integrate emerging ideas from the social and natural sciences, in the interests of consumers and thereby organizations and society – for the greater good.

So, what does this academic research mean in day to day practice?  I will suggest four key capabilities to consider – although there are more.  Firstly, a greater use of techniques such as PEST analysis,  not just as an audit, but as a tool for knowledge, insight and action.  Secondly, an understanding of the value chain process in the organization, and the knowledge needed at each stage.  Thirdly,  a growth in internal business analysts to triangulate information into issue based knowledge solutions.  And fourthly, a greater use of co-creation techniques for building innovation and value.

Customer value proposition – is the strategy, from the key idea to the ‘distinctive’ bundle of products and services promised to prospective customers in exchange for revenue, and reputation. The ideal creates mutual benefit.

Key tools:- Brand Values, Value Chain Planning, Customer Insight, Capability Planning

Key technology:- Data Mining solutions, Innovation & Knowledge Management software,

Customer relationship management – is the objective, the degree of goodwill an organization has with its customer base, from advocate through indifference to terrorist. It’s a company asset, or not. Loyalty is prized.

Key tools:- Customer Portfolio Mapping, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Econometrics

Key technology:-Customer Database, Customer Analysis and Business Information software.

Customer experience – is the delivery, the building block of the relationship – it’s the ‘moment of truth’ from the customer’s view point, and is measured by them in the light of their expectations. It’s what they talk about.

Key tools:- Customer Journey Maps, Word of Mouth, Feedback, Staff Advocacy, Root Causes

Key technology: Integrated SOA Infrastructure, Feedback software, Enterprise 2.0 for staff.

Customer engagement – is the ongoing process of ‘orchestrating’ customer interactions, to strengthen the involvement (emotional, psychological and physical) and investment between customer and organization.[1] It draws on the value proposition, it monitors the experience, but its essence is a sequence of connected actions, based on knowledge,  that builds up mutual investment (time, ideas, attention, help). Service goes up, messages get fewer.

Key tools:-Permission to Connect, Listen and Learn Process, Experiential Marketing

Key technology: Social Media, Content Personalisation, Next Best Action Software, Mobile

However,  the mist is clearing, and the way ahead is appearing – there are three additional rules.

1. Sales through service – not sales through promotion.

2. Engage through continuous conversations – don’t lobb messages at ‘customers’ over ‘organizational walls.

3. The business of business is social – the value of your network is now more important than your product USP.

Turning this into operational activity  means building innovative services in to transactions and value propositions,  understanding the customer’s experience in order to design a more engaging one, and harnessing new ‘social’ media and channels – face to face as well as technology.

When, presenting these ideas to a client’s marketing team in a workshop,  a young man sat back and said – so we’re going back to the values of the ‘corner shop’!  Exactly – technology has now given us the means of ‘scaling up the values and practices of the local, community, ‘corner shop’.  We’re leaving behind the era where cutting edge marketing was -  mass communication, quantitative market research, and customer acquisition.

It is the disruptive nature of the change to marketing that is causing the chaos – the way out is to rethink your business model (the way you make money),  revamp your capabilities and skill up  in the new thinking, new ideas and new practices.

According to research by Dr Brian Smith, it is more likely in areas of the market that are complex and/or turbulent.  So the current market for mobile communications may throw up more opportunities for actionable insight than the current market for confectionary.  Although in the latter case, turbulence in political and social trends is creating more insight opportunities. It is also found:

• when data from different sources is fused to create a big picture eg customer behaviour data, social trends, attitudinal market research, feedback and econometric models.

“Customer insight is lost down the cracks between different customer information departments” Julian Berry, the customer partnerships

• in cultures where thinking is valued and given time, and where different thinking styles are melded together  eg lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving,

Thinking is the means of productions.  You can no longer have the situation where one person thinks and the rest follow orders.

• in learning organizations,  where the insight behind the current strategy is recorded and understood,  and there is an organized process of scanning information, turning it into relevant knowledge and challenging what is known in order to distilling insight.

Have you worked out where the best place for insight is in your market and organization?

The climate of 2009 will see the nature of CRM mutate from ‘what customers give us’ to ‘what we give customers; and get back’. The idea of providing value for money to customer ‘tribes’ will begin to dawn as communities are explored.  A notion quite distinct from the previous view of CRM as individual cross-selling and retention for shareholder profits.

“2009 is a big year for CRM and a big deal. Transformational might actually be more than a political term.” Paul Greenberg

Customers well understand their ‘premium’ status, and those who give their time and money to companies will want more back to solve personal requirements. Companies who helpfully seek to alleviate the emotional and practical issues of recession will build trust. If companies continue to take the profit from customer knowledge, customers will just opt out of relationships.

Reciprocity for mutual benefit - not only between company and customer, but between customer and customer - is a fundamental part of this new thinking. Here, North America, with its strategic use of social software and experiential marketing, definitely leads the way.

Organisations that see themselves as ‘service platforms’ and build facilitative skills will have tuned into the right wave length. Which is why there is a growing emphasis on new business models utilising both technology and partnerships. Stephanie Seakins, principal consultant at OgilvyOne Hong Kong stresses that Asian companies “are now prepared to consider new thinking in order to recover lost reliability and credibility.”

Other signs of the CRM mutation are a change from ‘customer management’ to the more co-creative ‘customer engagement’, and the popularity of sales through service - where service is an entree, rather than an afterthought, that leads to the provision of a personalised solution. If you don’t listen more carefully to your customers your competitors and other consumers will.

According to Paul Greenberg, US author of CRM at the Speed of Light, CRM in 2009 is about understanding, involving and benefiting customers, and I would agree that that is a good summing up - as long as profitability is also added on the end. The secret of corporate sustainability is the constant balancing of benefit between company and customer.

We were amazed to see that 9 in 10 call centres have introduced this practice, are in the process of doing so, or are currently considering making this shift. - CSO Insights, 2007 Survey on Call Centres

Sales through service revolves around a ‘conversation’, even if that is machine to human. That conversation can be kicked off by the company, but the approach is more often made by the customer when looking for a service.

Examples of StS are:-

• Key account managemers, whose role is to understand client’s needs and find solutions from his company. The best do this through personal conversation, like the IBM client manager for an airline who spends most of his time talking in the airline’s staff canteen.

• The Dyson field service team, who, whilst carrying out servicing in the customer’s home find out through conversation what issues and needs the customer has. They are well versed in all the products and connected to operations to put right any issues. Customers have been highly delighted with this ‘time saving’ service.

• John Lewis, who thought that leaving customers to browse was what they wanted, but customers thought staff were being aloof and unfriendly. After a 5 year sales through service programme, staff now acknowledge the customer, open up conversations, and close sales by matching product to need as closely as possible – even if it means selling a lower priced product than the customer had intended to buy.

• Amazon, who were founded on a sales through service philosophy.

• O2, who supply service contact centre staff with information on the customer’s risk of attrition, and the three best offers (sales or service) to make to that customer based on propensity modelling and the content of the call. Around 6% of their 50million annual calls now generate revenue, and customer satisfaction is reported to have risen.

All the examples emphasise that StS is not just about revenue generating sales, it is about exchanging value. That may be free upgrades, helpful advice, or customer care, in exchange for customer engagement, recommendations, valuable data – and yes, at some point sales.

The quick answer, is that across the globe customer relationships (we will call it CRM but mean the strategy not just technology) are the axis on which 2009 ‘battle plans’ will spin.  A view backed by an Economist Intelligence Unit global survey of 300 executives, which emphasised their belief that customers’ impact on growth will double over the next five years.  However, the world is unlikely to emerge from recession, as it went in.  The nature of CRM will have mutated, and the tectonic plates of competitive advantage will have pushed further towards Asia (and maybe Australasia) and away from Europe.

The strategy for 2009 will be a quest; to find customer segments with immediate value potential, and engage them with ‘new and improved’ value propositions.  Insight will be at a premium.  Current customers will be priority, but fluctuating export markets will kick off a worldwide hunt for opportunity.

Costs will be pared down, but it will be on extras and unproductive activity eg avoidable contact, rather than the ‘slash and burn’ of previous recessions.  Fewer twiddles and more good value basics will align price with consumer spending.  Opinion is that Europe stands in the greatest danger of ‘unfocussed’ price reductions, driven by a heavier regulation and compliance burden.

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth life’s experience” said American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes.  When we think of insight we think of it as rare and valuable, discerning and perceptive;  a knowledge that transcends the superficial and gets to the heart of the matter, to find its inner character:  a character hidden to the less discerning.

Insight in the world of customers can be either ‘flashes of inspiration, or penetrating discoveries that can lead to specific opportunities’ like mining for diamonds.  Or, more usually, a deep understanding of the customer in the context of the market.  Insight is the ability to get into the customers head in a way that is valuable to the business.  The insight that customers think blue washing powder gives a cleaner wash than white, even though the chemicals are the same, is not that useful to a telecoms company, but key to a detergent manufacturer.

Insight unlocks the ‘secrets’ of the market underlining threats and pointing to opportunities.   Which indicates it has several other characteristics:-

• It should be useful, and actionable
• It needs to be ‘of its time’ and can include both hindsight (perception gained analysing the past, and foresight (perception gained from modelling the future).
• It is not obvious to others or easily found