Chapter 5

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How to plan the delivery of an improved customer experience

What is the sequence of events that needs to take place to begin to drive customer change? How is this sustained over an extended period to effect real change to the culture of the company? This chapter focuses in on 100 tiny changes as my mantra for customer change – it will talk about how large-scale customer activities struggle to get traction in established organisations, and explore some simple ideas to ensure that change is monitored, measured and celebrated. It will discuss the role of the leadership and middle management in the delivery of sustained change in the wider context of the company, and discuss creating confidence to act.

When you set off to build your customer experience journey plan there are three simple questions that you can ask yourself:

• Where are we today?
• Where do we want to get to?
• Do we have a map that shows where we want to get to as a business?

As you now move into this more structured approach through the creation of a plan, you will no doubt need to adapt the tools and formats to your own company, so please feel free to do so.

Remember in Chapter 1 where we discussed how a focus on the customer experience is often a reaction to negative news? Well you must keep that in mind when you get started.

This is not the best state of mind to be embarking on a customer experience change plan as it is already positioned as a distress option. We ‘need’ to focus on our customer rather than we ‘want’ to focus on our customer. Psychologically this creates negative energy that can roll over into the poor execution of the strategy and a ready willingness to abandon the approach as soon as better trading times return. One way around this is to push the message that through listening to customers it is clear that they will respond positively to you focusing more on what they want and need.

Remember to be successful it is absolutely key to ensure that the early plan is based on delivering quick wins to create a positive response and build confidence – if the plan is based on deliverables one to three years out it will never come to fruition

Your mantra for change in the customer experience world is 100s and then 1000s of tiny changes

In any plan you will always have small changes and bigger more challenging components. Too often the focus is on the big change activity that will deliver through a huge, heavily governed programme with a delivery window perhaps two or more years out. We need to invert this approach to drive a successful customer experience improvement plan. We are looking for lots of small changes which may be as simple as changing the wording of a standard letter to adjusting an existing measure. We are looking for a plan that embraces as wide an audience as possible and is relevant to as many people as possible. It will be the sheer volume and weight of these tiny changes that will, over time, improve both the customer and colleague experience and shift the culture. Why adopt this approach? The reality of any large company is that you are always running just to stand still and the pressure for resources is always high. The focus of effort tends to be on a few large programmes that are designed to deliver significant change. Customer experience improvement does not fit this format: it is more dynamic and as such requires a different approach to deployment; it is about wide reach and cultural impact rather than a single-point fixed deliverable like a new system deployment; it is about shifting your mindset to think about who is actually in control, who it is that can make changes in the business, and how much control the customer needs to have.

As I said at the start of this chapter, when you set off to build your customer experience journey plan there are three simple questions that you can ask yourself:

• Where are we today?
• Where do we want to get to?
• Do we have a map that shows where we want to get to as a business?

These same three questions apply to your customer journey and you are going to be looking at this from two perspectives: outside in, which is the customer view of the experience; and inside out, which is the internal view of the experience. The outside in will lead and the inside out will follow with changes to the way the company operates.

As we saw in Chapter 4, ‘where are we today?’ needs to be considered from both perspectives. By understanding these two sides of the same coin you will be well positioned to move to the next stage of identifying where you want or need to get to. Without this wider understanding you will find yourself engaged in a bunch of tactical experience ‘fixes’ which may be individually valuable but will not gross up to substantive and sustainable change.

It will be no surprise to learn that where there is a strong and structured internal view on the customer experience the outside-in view tends to be better too!

Understanding the context

Beginning with the inside-out view on where we are you need to gather some basic evidence that will provide the start point for the forward plan. In Chapter 4 we described how to gather basic information on current state experience maturity and to gain alignment on that high-level assessment of both current and future state customer experience and a view on the current customer projects in flight. In addition you can now look at key documents that will further reflect the level of customer activity and give further context to the current state plan. Here is a guide on typical documents that you can use – they may be called something different in your company:

• the strategic plan, one to three years
• brand documentation, e.g. values, promises
• the marketing plan
• the market research plan
• the monthly financial reporting
• the company KPIs by department
• the internal investment appraisal terms of reference
• organisation charts.

These documents – combined with your customer experience description, your customer experience maturity outputs and your customer experience design guide – provide an ideal input to the plan.

Rarely will you need new inputs: the idea is to draw the customer experience plan from the already-existing internal materials. In effect you are consolidating what already exists but is currently fragmented by department, function or team. This is important because you are not seen to be adding to the business workload.

How to review the key documents

In each case you are looking for evidence that the customer experience has specific focus so that you can be seen to be objective in your findings. To do this you can simply highlight in the documents where there is evidence that the customer experience is being taken into account as a specific deliverable, consideration or outcome in terms of measures. You are also looking at some early and obvious opportunities to highlight improvements.

Remember start to build a list of the opportunities and issues that you uncover during this stage of the planning

This stage is about understanding the big picture, gaining knowledge and starting to connect the different teams’ engagement levels with the customer experience. Try asking these simple questions:

• Does the organisation have a team dedicated to the customer experience or is responsibility spread across a range of teams and departments? Who are the key players?
• Do the monthly company metrics connect to the customer? What, if any, actions are taken and tracked to show improvements month on month?
• Do leaders know the top five complaints and do they change?

The investment appraisal criterion is a key document to review. You are looking for evidence that when significant investments (capital or revenue) that merit review under the investment appraisal criteria are presented, there is a requirement to demonstrate the impact on end customers both during any change programme and after deployment. How many major IT infrastructure investments have caused massive disruption and damage to the customer experience even if only short term? Is the potential cost of this disruption highlighted in the business case, and are mitigating plans required?

This can be a simple and effective early win for the customer experience team. Through simple additions to an existing process you can have a significant impact on how the business thinks about investment in the future. This is not about stopping investments and development but injecting a customer viewpoint at the commercial level and beginning to influence the culture as a consequence.

You simply add a couple of key questions, for example:

• Can you demonstrate how you have assessed any potential impacts on the customer experience during this deployment?
• What will the impact of this investment be on the ongoing customer experience?
• What plans exist to manage short-term negative impacts on the customer experience?
• How will the impact on the customer experience be measured and monitored?
• Investigate and describe the upstream and downstream impact of what we plan to do on later interactions – how will what we do be impacted by earlier interactions?

As a further example, how connected is the marketing plan and campaign activity to the customer service team that will be delivering the experience? Too often do we see a marketing campaign launch that creates a huge spike in demand that the call centre is not geared up to handle. This creates a poor service level, poor experience and internal frustration and even anger! This is another quick win simply through ensuring that internal connectivity is happening,

This knowledge is particularly helpful as you engage with the business and you are able to demonstrate a solid understanding of current customer-based activity whether planned or in flight already. Nothing undermines your position and confidence in the customer experience team more than someone being able to say ‘we are already doing that!’

Remember one of the first steps in the planning of improvements is to realise how easy this can be rather than be daunted and build up an expectation of some huge programme being required

Getting yourself into the right mindset

We are all guilty of it: when we walk into the office we forget rather conveniently that we are all customers and we all have increasing expectations from the companies that service our requirements. We become the person that doesn’t answer the phone even though we know it might be a customer (or sometimes because we think it is a customer!) because we are doing something else and don’t wish to be disturbed; as managers we are often twice or more people removed from the real customer interface and those layers of insulation allow us to feign ignorance in terms of the consequences of decisions we may make or things we might do; we prioritise our personal or the company’s needs over the customers without a thought until things start going wrong and customers begin to desert – then we scratch our heads and wonder what on earth could be wrong until the slow-dawning realisation that customers who are not looked after will slip away, often under cover of the night and without even having the courtesy to say ‘goodbye’.

Yet you are probably among the most demanding and exacting when you are the customer – it is good to reflect on your own business for a moment and to think about the last time you tried out your experience and really thought about whether it meets the mark.

• Call the service desk with an imaginary complaint or query.
• Try and join schemes or just visit a frontline location and watch.
• Go to the call centre and do nothing but listen to calls for two days.

When we are customers we are constantly evaluating the service or effectiveness of the product we buy. In order to do this we are filtering a whole host of similar or adjacent experiences mostly unrelated to the product or service we may be interacting with, and we are constantly reappraising what is the norm and what is acceptable, what is better than acceptable and what is excellent.

The key point here is that we are using many different benchmarks. For instance, how quickly the best website pages refresh; how quickly the best broadband connection fires up; how in tune with me the best airline in-flight experience is; how good the best call centre experience is – these are the ever-improving tests being applied often unconsciously.

Critically reviewing what you are providing just using your own experiences will give you a strong indication of what your customers are thinking. Of course you are overlaying the positioning of your brand in that calculation, so if you are Singapore Airlines and renowned for world-beating service the expectation will be very different from a Southwest Airlines or easyJet flight. What this does show is that there is a direct link between the brand and the expectation and the service: if you set the bar low in terms of service frills because you offer the lowest price then customers will adapt and accept the logic; if, however, you are at the low-cost end and create an expectation through advertising that you are going to get high-end service then it is no surprise when customers complain.

Remember the old maxim of ‘under promise and over deliver’ is one that holds so true in today’s world – build that thinking into your planning.

Aligning the leaders around the customer experience

For any customer experience activity to work you will need senior leaders engaged and active in support of the activity. The past has told us that well-meaning individuals in the mid to higher levels of management will only ever achieve limited success. In Chapter 11 we talk about the organisational challenges and how to overcome them. The challenges are often not about the general belief that improving the experience will be good for business but simply that leaders are not used to managing the customer agenda and are unsure what their role will be and how to deliver while managing their already busy diaries.

Share your plans with the senior leaders and then be clear about how they can actively support the activity and start to role model the customer-driven behaviours.

Your challenge is to show the leaders of the business that they can ‘do this’ without major disruption. Give them some simple tasks that will start to bring the team collectively closer to the customer.

For example:

• Spend two hours a month with frontline staff listening to calls.
• Discuss a prepared digest of customer voice feedback every week in team meetings.
• Visit a key customer with the brief to ‘listen humbly’ to what works and what does not work for them today – feed back what you learned.
• Be prepared to talk at a meeting about how your role impacts our customers.
• Add the top three customer complaints as a standing agenda item at board sessions – challenge individuals or small teams to manage improvements and report back on their findings.
• Add a question into one-to-one meetings with direct reports about the customer, e.g. ‘next time we meet I would like you to have thought about what you do and how it impacts our customers’.
• Once we have identified where our role impacts on the customer ‘identify one way to improve that experience’.

What you are doing is raising the profile of the customer as part of the business strategy but also starting to show support for the customer activity and promoting conversation about the subject.

The customer journey map

We now have the right frame of mind and two out of the three components of the plan to create the conditions to thrive – we know where we are, we know where we want to get to. We have begun to list down opportunities, but now we need a map of our experience from the customer viewpoint. What is required is that outside-in customer view of the end-to-end experience to act as a counter point and to complement the internal process maps. We need a customer journey map or CJM (we explore in detail how to create a CJM in Chapter 6).

The most common challenge at this point is we have lots of different customers who are dealt with differently, so how can we map all of their different experiences?

My experience from doing this across sectors, geographies and industries worldwide is that the reality is that as much as you might like to think you do, you don’t actually. It would also be commercially crazy for most companies to have fundamentally different experiences. Every company has a backbone of infrastructure that has to work efficiently and we are all aware that building in complexity is expensive.

The simple answer is to map the experience that relates to the bulk of your customers and then down the track to create flavours of that core map that reflect different customer groups, e.g. business traveller versus economy.

What you will find is that there will be a few points during the experience where the experience varies and you can quickly map these out as variants on the core. For example, a high-value bank customer may be routed to the top of the queue in a call centre but they still largely get the same service when they are connected. It is these nuances that are important, as we will see when we work on the experience design.

During the mapping you will uncover additional opportunities for experience improvement that will add to your list from the internal document review.

Prioritising your opportunities

One thing is for certain: you will have more opportunities than time and resources to deliver them. So next you can take your list of all the opportunities, pull together a small team from across the business and consider which are the priority areas – and therefore the potential starting point for a deployment plan.

Remember one of the keys to success is some visible early wins that are delivered at low or no cost

A simple way to create a priority is to use an ‘ease and feasibility’ four-box matrix.

Along one axis we have feasibility using a simple scale of hard to very easy, and then on the other axis we have an impact assessment that reflects the impact on the customer, scaled from low to high.

Source: Courtesy of SuiteCX

Take each identified opportunity and using a sticky note place it on the chart at the appropriate spot – those that appear in the top right box will be the potential early wins as they will be easy to implement and have a high impact on the customer.

To make it easy to show visually in presentations later, apply a number to each opportunity and then you can use the number on the chart and provide an index to describe the opportunity.

Take the top right cluster and check to see if there are dependencies that will either cause issues or help you to sequence the initiatives.

Test the initiatives against your list of pre-existing customer experience projects inside the company – can they be injected into an existing team’s work?

Consider if you can further prioritise into what you might call Nike ‘just do it.’ and those that might take some cross team cooperation or further work to deliver. For example, a simple change to words in a call centre script may fall into the first category, while a redesign of an on-boarding for new customers will take more planning.

Don’t forget the other opportunities which you can build into the mid-term plan. So the next priority group that are high impact on the customer but harder to deliver will be bottom right; then bottom left and then top left.

Remember don’t just plan for the short term, set out a plan over an extended time period

The dos and don’ts of creating your plan for experience change – think differently!

Your job now is to create a platform for change which others use and execute for you. Imagine you are one of a team of five maybe ten people in a company with thousands – how can you hope to drive change yourself? Besides, to assume you can is counterproductive as once people and teams assume you are doing it all they will switch off and work on other priorities.

Mass participation is the way to really drive change and evolve the culture simultaneously.

Remember you are working in the world of experience so think about how to make your customer activity fun, engaging, attractive and how to stand out from the other internal activity

• Do always look at what you are asking for from the other end of the telescope – you will find people much keener to help out if they see benefit for them either personally or their team. If you are perceived to just be adding workload for which no direct benefit accrues then you are going to find it harder to get the levels of cooperation you will need.
  • So think hard about how you communicate what you want and how you can evidence that this will have positive outcomes from your colleagues’ perspectives.
• Don’t expect big investments ahead of the ‘return curve’ but do gain senior team support for your plan.
• Do give the senior team a role to play – ensure that they are actively aware of the plan and give them opportunities to support deployment on a day-to-day basis as well as getting it on their meeting agendas and one-to-one meetings with direct reports at appropriate points.
• Do ensure that you are able to keep track of the changes and record them, creating a list over time – it is very easy to forget how things used to be.
  • Keeping a physical record of every change, however small, will allow you to provide a positive review each quarter showing the level of change.
• Do plan in how you are going to keep your CJM alive – how will it be used and how will it be visible in the business?
  • One example of how to do this is to carry a copy of the map around with you to meetings and when ideas are being discussed use it to ask where and how the plans will impact on the customer journey.

Remember the opportunity for positive exposure to the senior leadership can be a powerful persuader when it comes to supporting your plan

• Do try to avoid huge programme governance and overheads, by keeping your list of activities seemingly small scale, delivered quickly and then moving on to the next deliverable opportunity.
  • You should be able to minimise the ‘programme police’ interference, or as I sometimes called them rather unfairly the ‘progress prevention’ teams.
• Do spend the time to fall in love with the problem rather than rush to a solution – give yourself time to think differently and explore a range of possible solutions.
  • For example rather than redesign a piece of communication think about not using it at all or delivering it through a different medium or even at a different time.
• Do try using the hothouse approach when it comes to a more involved change, such as a CJM stage redesign.
  • Bring in a team of people from across the business for an intensive period of activity and then allow those resources to return to their day jobs, while you and your team refine their outputs. This has the advantage of being able to be pre-planned for calendars and it allows you to pull in a wider team to improve knowledge and communication that in turn will continue to have a culturally positive impact.
• Do set goals that can be measured and achieved weekly, monthly, quarterly that all add up over time.
  • Look to find existing measures and repurpose them as customer measures.
• Do push on open doors in the early stages.
  • You need the support of colleagues and time spent trying to persuade sceptics is both time-consuming and emotionally draining. Find open doors and push on those to create success and momentum.
• Do look to use resources that are not necessarily already stretched – you will find that some key people seem to be in demand for every programme – they are almost too good at what they do.
  • Take the opportunity to give others air time – perhaps focus on a department that is not usually heavily engaged in non-core work activity, e.g. finance, or where there is a latent demand for activity in the customer experience space, e.g. the call centre.
• Do plan for periods of reflection at regular intervals (quarterly) where you showcase to the company the level of change achieved.
  • It is too easy to be caught up with the need to run faster, but the positive impact of looking back is underestimated. Build these review sessions into the plan, think about how you can present the information in an engaging way – perhaps a foyer display – plan to use meeting rooms to display customer experience information on walls, e.g. the CJM, and invite comments and questions, lists of changes, quotes from colleagues.

Remember the more that you can get people talking customer the better

Actively plan to engage the company

Your goal is to get the company using the word customer and talking about customers more and more. Use your social media; this is about subtly shifting the internal agenda. If senior leaders make statements about the customer experience make sure it is supported directly with evidence of what they will be doing visibly to encourage engagement. Customer experience has historically been dominated by ‘sound bites’ in the communication area, e.g. ‘we are going to be passionate about our customers’. What is required, however, is evidence of how to:

• Create an online resource centre, particularly if the business is big and complicated and perhaps international – this way you can use the intranet to make information, tools, videos and other content available 24×7×365.
  • You can load a virtual resource centre with a wide range of assets from ‘how to’ workshop guidelines to CJMs created by teams. It is particularly useful to act as a repository for team and individual ‘stories’ about their work and achievements in the customer experience space. Encourage teams to communicate with you about their stories of successes and their failures and publish these onto the intranet resource centre.
• Introduce internal rewards for contributions in the experience space – perhaps breakfast with the senior team to talk about exciting new ideas and how they can be implemented.
• As we have noted it is important to log all of the changes that actually happen as you go.
  • Create a list of the changes, however small, otherwise I can guarantee that you will forget a substantial number and when it comes to justifying the CE activity a lot of your positive evidence will be lost in the mists of time.
  • You will be surprised how much has been achieved so encourage others to tell you what they have done and when they have done it.
  • Plan in stages during your journey to take a time out and reflect and communicate what has changed.
• Include communication in your plan – how are you going to raise awareness of the activity and attract interest?
  • Create regular newsletter postings on internal systems like Yammer – let your imagination run riot to create an experience that will catch the attention of colleagues.
  • A formal communication plan is a good start point, however other more guerrilla tactics should supplement this.
  • Stimulate conversation by creating a digest of customer comments and circulating to a wide audience inside the company. You can create podcasts of customer calls from the call centre for colleagues to listen to on their journeys into and out of work.