Insights from a day focusing on customer experience

Some might say that it’s all about the customer experience. After spending a day moderating our very first customer experience conference track as a part of the 12th J. Boye Aarhus conference, I would say that customer experience is indeed many different things.

I thoroughly enjoyed 3 case studies from the US, Finland and Denmark coupled with an experienced consultant from the UK. The presentations and discussions that followed showed how wide of a field customer experience — or CX as a tech-savvy agencies like to shorten it — really is. 

Speak human – a few years later

Back in 2010, Canadian designer and digital maker extraordinaire Eric Karjaluoto flew in from Vancouver to share his thinking on how most small businesses repeat the mistakes of the large businesses. He had just published a book titled Speak Human. For our audience of mostly participants from large and complex organisations this was a subtle way to zero in on their bad habits which directly impacts customer experience. 

Fast forward 6 years to our conference last week and Sara Walsh from US-based Capital One opened the track with an impressive case study on bringing clarity and humanity to banking. To me, this was the best Speak Human case study from a large organisation that I’ve seen so far. 

As one participant noted as main take away: 

The importance of simplicity of language and focus on outcomes

Sara shared several examples of how even minor text changes can make a big difference and her presentation was full of examples of before & after screens that demonstrated how a focus on content has visibly improved the customer experience. 

Following Sara’s presentation was a talk by Janet Morgan on how to create a cohesive narrative for an organisation. Again, in the footsteps of Eric Karjaluoto, but also based on Janet’s experience from a large, global and complex organisation, she stressed the importance of storytelling. 

Looking beyond the screen to improve customer experience

In the afternoon, Jukka Helin from Finnish energy company Vapo provided a case study that involved Internet of Things. He brought a physical red button for easy ordering by customers who shouldn’t need to go online, log in and help themselves, but simply press the button to create a new order. 

His presentation also encouraged easy ways to get started with Internet of Things and led to one of the most popular tweets of the conference:

Taking the #UI out of the equation is superior to making it more attractive says @yuccis #CX #IoT #jboye16

— TheBernd (@BerndBurkert) November 2, 2016

Finally, as a closing session, Morten Dam-Andersen from Copenhagen Airports shared their data-led transactional approach to improving the digital experience.

His session title also carried a question: How to make digital relevant in transit? During his talk we discussed the dilemma between many flyers who just want to look at departure times, while the airport want to lure them into duty free shops. 

Learn more about customer experience

In advance of the conference, I published a few posts on the topic, including:

• Creating good customer experiences call for openness and collaboration

• The rise and upcoming fall of customer experience

• Two steps in delivering value to your customer

Two steps in delivering value to your customers

Many CEOs are looking to turn their organisation into a customer-focused one, but let’s take a step back and look at what that actually entails.

Does every CEO perceive customer experience activities the same way? Is the CEO familiar with all the possibilities we have to choose from when trying to become a customer-focused organisation? These are difficult questions.

In many organisations, Mr. Marketing thinks about improving the website to increase sales while Mr Product Manager thinks about reducing production costs by getting rid of features customers don’t appreciate. They are both right, but there are also many other ways of increasing customer value. The question becomes how to identify the potential and implement it throughout the organisation.

Boye Aarhus 16 conference keynote speaker Claudia Urschbach has spent the past 18 years of her career helping organisations such as BBC, Siemens, Carl Zeiss, the German newspaper giant Süddeutsche Zeitung and many others to become customer-focused. In her experience, developing and implementing a strategy sets off a chain reaction of changes in many different corners of your organisation.

1. Identifying the value potential in your product

Claudia emphasizes that the first step in providing value to your customers is identifying how your product is actually currently providing value. This analysis needs to be in depth, which is why Claudia believes the recently published 30 elements of customer value will be a game changer.

This table expands upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and breaks down concepts into their fundamental building blocks. If the customer describes the product as convenient, often it will really mean a combination of time saving, simplifying and effort reducing.

The table operates with four general categories that provides you with a great overview. It can help open your eyes to those areas where further development of your product and organisation could provide increased customer value. Perhaps your product is already providing functional value, but could be providing emotional value as well.

2. Implementing it throughout your organisation

Once you have identified the value potential of your product, it is time to turn you organisation into one that is able to provide that value.

Claudia points to change management as being vital for this to work. Where you should start the process, becomes extremely important:

“As always with change management you have to be clever with your decision where you start. You want to reach momentum quickly and without the effect of demotivation in your teams.”

You want to ask yourself which activities have the biggest positive impact, cause the least tension and bring return of investment quickest?

Becoming a customer-focused organisation is much easier and cost-effective when you have a dedicated customer experience strategy that clearly points to specific ways and areas where the product and organisation could be providing more value to it’s customers.

Learn more about customer experience

Customer experience is on everyone’s lips and professionals are going at it from different angles. In two other recent postings I have spoken with professionals who deliver perspectives that might also prove to be food for thought:

• Defining your company’s data ehics is a competitive advantage

• Banking has changed. Soon it will change more

Needs versus requirements

Much has been written about why projects, and in particular digital projects, don’t succeed. Be it lack of executive sponsorship, poorly documented requirements, technology problems, simply lack of follow-up and the list goes on.

At a recent Boye group meeting in Munich, Claudia Urschbach from Süddeutsche Zeitung took a different approach by looking behind stakeholders and their requirements and trying to get to a deeper understanding of their needs and anxieties. Might our lack of appreciation for these basic human emotions be exactly why projects gets stalled and too often fail?

Understanding needs

In most projects that I’ve been involved in there has been a reasonable understanding of key requirements. Some also have a carefully developed requirements specification detailing functional, design and technical aspects of the project. But what about the needs of the executive sponsor, the needs of the project manager, the needs of the designer and everyone else involved?

Claudia has worked with user experience since 1999, incl. a few years at the BBC in London before moving to Munich and joining Süddeutsche. In her workshop at the group meeting, Claudia referenced American psychologist David McClelland and his work on motivation need theory. As shown on the illustration, the driving factors of human actions are below the water.

Some usual needs involved in projects, incl. the need for being heard, the need to get a promotion, the need to be seen as competent. If your projects fail to address those, why should your stakeholder invest time and resources in the project?

As the famous management quote goes from Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!

To paraphrase Claudia, my take away from the workshop, was that most probably don’t want a drill nor a hole, but instead we have to think deeper to ensure that our digital initiatives stay on track.

Understanding fears and anxieties

Taking a step deeper from the needs are the fears and anxieties. What might go wrong in a project? Could I get fired? Might the project make me look silly or even incompetent? Might I miss my annual bonus?

In my experience, these fears are rarely made explicit during a project. Instead they reveal themselves indirectly, when people delay projects, make it difficult to move forward and in more or less subtle ways try to distance themselves from a project.

Making it work in your organisation

The advice from Claudia was not necessarily to spend much time with the entire project team on what you might consider pop psychology, but rather use your deeper understanding of needs and fears, to have 1:1 conversations at the onset of the project to help drive the project forward.

According to Claudia, it is worth for a project manager to systematically think through each stakeholder group’s perspectives on the project focusing beyond their requirements on their needs and fears. This process should be part of a project managers risk assessment of a project and ideally is repeated and reviewed throughout the project.