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

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.

5 things that will sink LinkedIn’s empire

By Janus Boye

Will LinkedIn last? A reasonable question given the remarkable and monopoly-like position LinkedIn has achieved as a professional network during the past decade.

The announcement that LinkedIn is being acquired by Microsoft came on June 13 and has so far had little impact for the many using LinkedIn to showcase their work. According to their own numbers, LinkedIn has over 400 million users and more than 100 million active users per month.

Clearly LinkedIn will not disappear anytime soon, but people such as Silicon Valley pioneer Andreas Ramos say LinkedIn is about to lose its place at the centre of the social Web for business purposes.

I had a recent conversation with him trying to understand better why he considers LinkedIn a dinosaur. Or as he says in standard Valley jargon:

“There is a great opportunity to build a better LinkedIn”

1. The customers are recruiters, not users

LinkedIn started as a social networking site where people posted their professional profiles so they could connect to each other. But people weren’t willing to pay to build social networks. However, recruiters are willing to pay thousands of dollars per month for access to the resume database. So LinkedIn turned into a service for recruiters to find workers.

This means LinkedIn’s customers are recruiters, not users, so LinkedIn pays attention to the recruiters. And ignores the users.

That’s why many of LinkedIn’s user tools, such as profiles, messaging, portfolio, and so on are nearly useless or look like something from fifteen years ago. It’s very easy to spam users, so many requests for contacts are ignored. There is a way to post articles, but it’s convoluted and few use it. There is no way to send an email newsletter to one’s connections. The messaging tool is outdated. The app is nearly useless. Although LinkedIn did an IPO and raised $350 million, they spent very little of it on improving the user experience or interface, because users don’t produce revenue. In contrast, recruiters, who pay around US $1,000 per month per seat, have powerful tools to filter and sort resumes.

So LinkedIn is a resume database. Which means if you have a secure job, there’s little reason to visit LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a Facebook for professionals, but a site for recruiters.

2. LinkedIn isn’t the place to find the best jobs

When sociologists studied social networks, they learned that a few people have weak or poor connections and most people have okay connections. However, a few have thousand of connections and those connections are to the best people. Those top connections are also the people in charge of companies, projects, and budgets. They are the ones who hire.

Which means top people don’t need LinkedIn. They already have extensive personal networks. And the ones who hire also don’t use LinkedIn to hire; they ask their friends quietly for recommendations. The top people share their resources.

The bias towards recruiters affects how people are using Linkedin. Users see it as a resume site, not a professional networking site. Since the goal is to get a job, it’s easy to buy fake recommendations or create bloated or too-good-to-be-true profiles.

The solution lies outside of LinkedIn, and is quite simple, which I will expand on shortly.

3. LinkedIn are ignorant of the member experience

For a company with almost 10,000 employees, you would assume there would be a sizable team focusing fully on delivering an outstanding customer experience to members.

If such a team actually exits, their progress is weak to say the least. As already mentioned, there are simply so many examples of the member experience failing. To name a few:

• The mobile app still leaves great room for improvement

• Groups and community management is far behind anything you would expect in 2016

• Emails when someone updated their profile. Sure, you will receive emails to make you pay for what used to be free. But useful email notifications, such as a new posting in your group or an important job change: forget about it.

• Do you enjoy your activity stream solely containing postings about Pokemon Go? Or Chuck Norris jokes. No? Well, who cares? Linkedin definitely doesn’t.

• Did you like a recent update a friend wrote and want to link to it? Facebook has had the feature for years, but for Linkedin such a feature is rocket science.

4. LinkedIn doesn’t care about your career

You would think that a site built around finding jobs would have helpful career advice, but there is very little career advice or help at LinkedIn. What they offer is generally useless or bad advice, such as telling you how to appear like someone the recruiters want, instead of actually becoming better at your job, how to expand your career, or other fields and opportunities.

LinkedIn could hire the very best career coaches to offer free books and videos on how to create and manage your career to your benefit. It could be argued that LinkedIn and recruiters don’t want you to improve your career because when you move up, you move out of LinkedIn’s and the recruiters’ range. But LinkedIn is already making enough money so they don’t care about this.

If you’re looking for a job or want to improve your career, my advice is to put LinkedIn lower on your list of tasks. Reach out to people who are at the top or ten years ahead of your career. Send them an email, call them, or even better, meet them for lunch or coffee. Join professional organizations and volunteer to help in the organization. Build your network. Take classes, read books, and improve your skills. It’s the oldest advice in networking handbooks and with good reason: that’s how the world works. The few at the top have all the connections: get to know them.

5. LinkedIn provides recruiters with well-educated white people

If the people at the top aren’t on LinkedIn, what about everyone else? The people who use LinkedIn are mostly white-collar mid-level corporate staff. They are generally in companies that use computer technology. Workers at small companies in traditional fields rarely show up.

This means people at the bottom aren’t on LinkedIn. They work in jobs that don’t use computers. These jobs are low-pay so the recruiters have little interest because the recruiter fees are small. McDonald’s isn’t going to hire expensive recruiters to fill temporary jobs, nor will they use LinkedIn’s recruiter tools for this.

To quote Andreas:

“I’d hate to see how low the numbers are for black women. LinkedIn has what recruiters want, or to put it the other way, it doesn’t have what recruiters don’t want. This means LinkedIn has a significant share of the blame for low diversity in the workplace.”

Thoughts on a better professional network

There’s a strong need to build a jobs and careers network platform that reflects the world we live in.

People would be able to improve their skills and move up in their career. By building strong relationships, they would have better job security, either by being in better jobs or able to find new jobs when a company shuts down.

A new platform could also make money from recruiters, but a new platform will hopefully focus on a superior member experience.

More about the problems at LinkedIn

Thanks to Niels Rysz from the communications department at higher education institution UC SYD in Denmark who shared several good examples of horrible customer service at LinkedIn in his posting in Danish: LinkedIn kolos på lerfødder.

Patrick Moore wrote a good analysis titled LinkedIn has lost its vision. Why don’t people update their LinkedIn profile? Patrick offers the following reasons:

• “I am not looking for a new job”

• “I am looking for a new job, but I don’t want my manager to know I am looking.”

• “I just got a new job, and I don’t know if it is going to work out so I am not putting it my profile until I know that it will.”