Foundation Customer Experience Masterclass

A business starts with a product or a service that solves a customer's problem very well.

That product is targeted at a need of a customer and is exchanged for money.

A lot of businesses today have lost touch with the actual problem they are solving for customers. The transaction of selling a product of service has been stripped from its emotional value proposition.

A BRAND makes a promise through its existing customer’s endorsement, TV or radio or press advertisements. They market to their definition of a target customers. Backstage inside the company the promise is delivered through an orchestration of employees, processes and systems.

The BRAND has a mission, vision and values. It has a strategy that guides them on important decisions for the customer, the shareholders and the staff. This ecosystem, in harmony, delivers a good customer experience, but when the harmony is off, customers have a less than ideal experience.

What do customer need from you as a brand?

What are the problems today with experiences?

Let's look at business a hundred years ago before industrialisation.

A person would make something, often, they loved making the product and were considered a craftsperson and an expert. Customer’s loved buying from the craftsperson, because they were getting a quality product, a story about the product infused with the pride of the maker of the product.

People were close to what they sold or served.

They were proud.

They cared for their customers and their product.

They were emotional and connected.

Today, mass producing and mass marketing have stripped out a lot of the emotional value, like crafting the product, feeling the pride and being willing to make sacrifices for the customer, who are emotionally invested in the product. We have removed the craft, the pride and often the quality and reduced the exchange to a transaction.

The people who lead and make decisions today, are too far removed from the purpose and everyone else in the mix are too scared to do the right thing.

Brands became strong, but the people behind them became weak.

In future lessons, I will address how to turn transactions back into connections.

Let’s deconstruct an experience to break it down to its smallest components.

An experience consists of interactions, that consist of stages and moments.

In each moment, there are various considerations that the customer can measure the effectiveness of the moment with, like

Did I achieve my goal in that moment?

Were my expectations (rational, sensory, emotional) met, exceeded or failed?

What are the memories of that moment that I will recall later? What are the stories I will tell about this experience?

The power of deconstructing experiences is that it opens up possibilities for designing the ideal experiences for brands. Experiences that will make customers feel valued, special and worthy.

Questions to ponder on:

• What are the moments that matter to your customers?

• Can you design these moments for customers deliberately?

• Do your employees know what the moments are for customers that really matter?

• Are your employees trained to look at emotions rather than compliance to a process?

The definition of customer experience for me, is NOT how a customer feels about a brand, but much rather how a customer feels about themselves in an interaction with a brand.

Let me tell you a story of a mom with three kids making a trip to a supermarket.

She arrives home on a Wednesday afternoon 17h30 and opens the fridge to discover, there is no milk and no break either. She curses under her breath so the three kids don’t hear the flowery language. She is angry at herself.

Option 1: She gets the kids back in the car and drives to the supermarket 2 km from home. She struggled to find

parking. Continues to curse silently and gets more angry. Now she is angry at the other drivers, shoppers and gym moms with their tight butts in gym clothes descending from high clearance, expensive sports utility vehicles in the parking lot. She is angry at the children for their slow reaction times when she really just wants break and milk and to NOT be at the shop in the middle of the week at 18h00.

She rushes through the store, barking at the kids, “No you cannot have that”, “I said No” and by isle three she says loudly “I gave birth to you without an epidural for 18 hours, if you don’t shut up, I will take you out”. She pretends to not see the gym mom dash around the corner. This shopping experience is not about bread and milk, it is about remaining a good mother through this store and not letting the anger at herself overwhelm her. By the time she joins the queue, she wants to kill the store manager. She feels helpless, useless and has no capacity anymore to hold in the feelings of insufficiency, so it spills over and her story contaminates the interaction with anyone in her way. She leaves with milk and bread but continues to feel like a shitty mother and housewife. She does not want to go back to the store EVER. She is ashamed and embarrassed and will for the rest of her days scurry away when she sees “oh so perfect gym mom”.

This story is why customer experience is complex and why it needs to be designed from the perspective of the person not the brand. The store will never know the deeply personal details of a divorced single mom, fighting for acceptance and worthiness, trying to make life bearable for her kids. They will only see an unhappy person, shitting on the store manager, for not having enough paypoints open.

Customer Experience is how a customer feels about themselves in an interaction with a brand.

Under the surface is their needs, their goals, their stories and their fears and by seeing to understand more about customers, we can get to solutions that address more of their needs and quiet some of their fears.

Questions to ponder on:

• What are the expectations of your customer?

• What is the promise your brand makes to customers today?

• Where are you failing customers?

• How are you exceeding their expectations today?

In the previous lesson, I deconstructed a customer experience for you. In this lesson, I will do the same for employee experience.

What is different in the employee experience, is that these interactions are cyclical and more routine. An employee would start with a company, and they would come to work every day, they would have a vacation, take some sick leave. But if we look carefully, we can identify significant moments in the life of an employee. If we only look at the moments that matter to the company, again, we will be missing out on opportunities to really design for the employee.

Employee experience, is NOT the way an employee feels about a brand, but much rather how an employee feels about themselves in their interactions with their employer. So much of that is determined by who they report to, how much opportunity they are given to grow, how they are rewarded and acknowledged. Many of my coaching clients report that they feel misunderstood, not valued, underpaid, unseen. Many say they feel like imposters, that they are treated as if they are not equipped to do their job. Many organisations are led by fear. That leads to anxiety, which is a contagious emotion. When I walk into a company and something feels off, I look for language and signs that tell me that there is fear under the surface. These unspoken, subtle tell tale signs, tell me that the culture is not conducive to a great employee or customer experience. I tell this as a joke, but it really is not. Usually when I visit a new company, I first visit the restroom and carefully study the notices in the restroom. Nine out of ten times, without fail, I find the same tone of voice and cultural nuances in the boardroom. This for me has become an important indicator in how I engage with companies.

If we time travel to the past before industrialisation, people followed their calling to the craft. They were intimate with what they made, sold or served. They cared about the people who helped them and represented their craft. They were connected with their employees and emotional about them and the craft and the tribe who loves the craft.

People felt pride in continuing a family legacy or being part of a long term family legacy of making a product or creating a service that solves a problem for someone else.

With mass producing and mass marketing, we have removed the employee from the purpose and stripped the moments in their daily life from pride by introducing productivity metrics and incentives based on transactions and not connections and relationships.

Questions to ponder on:

• How are your employees feeling about themselves day to day?

• What are the most important moments in their life that your brand intersects with?

• What are your employees biggest fears that keep them awake at night?

• What are the life goals that your brand enables for employees?

  
  

I define experience essence as the blueprint DNA that you would like to be imprinted on every interaction between your employees inside the organisation and engagement with customers outside the organisation. This is the perfume of your brand, the secret sauce that will make me recognise your brand, even if I strip the logo and corporate identity from the tangible artefacts that a customer would consume. Once you have defined your essence, it is time to design it into every interaction, every letter, webpage, online chat, telephone call and every human engagement and leadership decision that you make.

In the previous lessons we have unpacked the components of the business ecosystem and how important harmony is to deliver a memorable customer and employee experience. We also looked at how products and services were delivered and received before industrialisation. We looked at what we have lost and essentially what we yearn for in today’s interactions with brands.

These are the six competencies that you will need to make an impact on your organisation.

1. Customer Centric Culture

2. Voice of the customer insights

3. Organisation design for accountability and change management

4. Strategy, planning and implementation

5. Experience and service design thinking

6. Metrics and measurements

In future courses we will go into the techniques used to re-infuse pride into moments in a journey so that employees and customers can feel great about themselves.

Thanks for watching right to the end and it has been such a pleasure to share my knowledge with you in this foundation module.