The Framework to Ask Powerful Questions

It is important to note that these next few chapters are not about giving you answers as much as they are about giving you the framework to ask the right questions. The EMF was conceived in an effort to provide you and your organization a complete foundation and structure to ask the fundamental questions needed to build your road maps in a way that aligns your major business objectives to the priority needs of your customer. All of this is set within a model that can optimize the reliability of your processes and draw out the creativity of your people.

As we dive into the next few chapters, we will provide you categories of specific questions and steps to take your team through that will both baseline and enhance your approach to build your strategy with humanized tactics that are built with digital sense.

We are both proud, card-carrying, antiestablishment members of Generation X, and therefore we have a deep appreciation and love for ’80s metal, early ’90s hip-hop, and grunge. Music is a universal language and a perfect example of the power and beauty of conquering dissonance when properly composed. It also proves that great results don't always require months' or years' worth of labor. When top talent is free to come together in individual expression but aligned focus, magic can happen. A musical example of this is the creation of the Guns N' Roses classic hit “Sweet Child O' Mine,” which was literally created in less than five minutes (see Figure 3.1).¹

Cognitive dissonance is the clash in an organization when two or more disharmonious elements or ideas try to coexist. In an organization, this is commonplace wherever the culture is weak or the objectives are unclear. In a digital world, this can be amplified in its negative impact because of the speed by which information (true or false, verified or unverified) can and will travel to each individual. To overcome dissonance as an organization in the digital world, an even deeper commitment to frequent (crucial) communication and to establishing a common language and framework from which everyone is operating is paramount.

The EMF was created after an inspiring nudge from Ethology founder and CEO, Jeffrey Pruitt. Pruitt's passion to help brands think about experience marketing and performance media at the strategic level, instead of just digital marketing as a myriad of tactics and channels, was the catalyst for building this framework. We enlisted Chris's colleague and VP of Customer Experience, Tony Quiroz (@TQ_AZ), to flush out our ideas around the initial EMF in late 2015 (see Figure 3.2). We are grateful to both of these individuals for the inspiration and insights they provided along the way to making this model a reality.

We will spend the next several chapters diving deeper into each layer of the framework, discussing what the EMF answers and avails on both a day-to-day basis, as well as in forward-looking planning cycles. We will walk through the pragmatic use of each layer and loop one at a time, but first, let's summarize the EMF with visuals and a summary description of what it will help you achieve and why it matters in the first place.

The Experience Marketing Framework

• The EMF (Figure 3.3) maximizes client/customer success by delivering reliability and innovation to the customer experience.
• Experience marketing is defined as the union of purpose-driven strategy, human-centric tactics, and data-fed iterations.
• A simple “learn, plan, do” approach quickly leads to reliability, which ensures the maintenance of market share.
  1. Learn the client/customer's business goals or consumer needs and persona
  2. Plan projects/launches/campaigns with a focus on measurable interactions.
  3. Do the work, release to market, measure, and iterate.
• Innovation ensures market share growth and arises from insights. Insights can occur while executing but will be generated more reliably by adding dedicated cycles of research to your operational procedure and road map.
• A complementary “discover, design, deploy” approach leads to more seamless onboarding of innovations and commercialization of key insights gathered while executing.
  1. Discover the most vulnerable/opportunistic touch points in your customer journey.
  2. Design by assessing what's feasible (technology), viable (business), and desirable/usable (human), and build on top of a data structure that will measure what's most valued as it relates to the problem you are setting out to solve.
  3. Deploy and iterate based upon the data loop to optimize for reliability.
• Vision guides strategy. Strategy is the art of applying insights to specific touch points in the customer journey, guided by business goals, calibrated by scope, and prioritized to a schedule.
• Success = a great customer experience: well executed, uniquely crafted, and sustainable.

  

The EMF helps organizations and leaders deliver on the two commitments (Figure 3.4) of reliability and innovation that fellow Wiley author Jeanne Bliss (@customerbliss) called out in her book Chief Customer Officer 2.0.²

The EMF is composed of three distinct layers, interdependent walls, and two loops. As we take a look below the surface, we notice how Purpose, People, and Process hold the structure together and contribute to key phases of Research, Strategic Planning, and Execution.

Fans of design thinker Jesse James Garrett and his groundbreaking work in the Elements of User Experience will understand and see the similarities in the EMF, as we attempted to build a framework that can allow an organization to think across the silos. The goal was to develop a unified approach to diagnose the problem areas in the journey map, realize insights into actionable innovations, and optimize the reliability, all while executing in real-time. In Garrett's model for UX (see Figure 3.5), the foundational elements were the marriage of user needs to site objectives. The EMF model for CX is also rooted in a foundation consisting of the proper alignment of customer needs and business objectives.

Customer Experience Is the Battleground in a Digital World

Customer experience is not about a specific data point in the journey of interacting with your brand or product; it's the entire thing. In a digital world, where loyalty to brand is rapidly being replaced by the end users' loyalty to their need in the moment, success is no longer predicated on push but is primarily related to pull. Great customer experiences will pull the market toward you, whereas empty or incomplete promises that get pushed out on top of faulty/siloed infrastructure will merely expose you. Like all structures built to last, you must have a solid foundation and a guiding set of principles. The EMF is no different and you can see the guiding set of principles in Figure 3.6.

In the next chapter, we will begin building your foundation for delivering great customer experiences guided by these principles. EMF will help you assess the forward-looking strength of your business model, value proposition, and competitive advantage as it relates to serving your customer's needs, and the conditions of the playing field on which you compete.

Takeaways from Introducing the EMF

• The EMF is designed to help you deliver great customer experiences in a digital world by providing a multilayered framework to turn insights into innovative solutions that deepen the relationship with your customer and are executed with reliability.
• The EMF is comprised of an Insights (Research), Vision (Strategy), and Success (Execution) layering. EMF enables a simple “learn, plan, do” approach in the horizontal operational plane while simultaneously allowing the vertical plane to enact regular cycles of innovation that “discover, design, and deploy” new enhancements to your day-to-day operation.
• Customer Experience is the battleground we all compete on in a digital world, and where customer service historically takes a well-honed “common sense,” customer experience requires a well-honed digital sense.