Chapter 7

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How to design new and improved experiences

The new area of growth in customer experience is the design and redesign of customer-driven experiences – what framework exists to help teams to truly deliver changed and improved experiences? Using examples I will illustrate how teams can really innovate and drive improvements using expert facilitation and structures to support them. We will also consider the issue of ‘wow’ experiences and provide examples of how they can be deliberately built (experience by design) rather than be the response to failure, as is so often the case. Let’s explore the answers to these questions:

• How can you move from ideas into action by integrating outside-in thinking with the inside-out processes of the company?
• How do you truly innovate and design experiences that meet your customer expectations?
• How can you learn to think differently?

We have seen that by applying the tools and approaches in the earlier chapters that you can emerge with a prioritised list of improvement opportunities. The next challenge is to take opportunities that identify weaknesses in the experience and redesign those experiences to improve the customer experience and the customer outcome. This applies both to redesigning an existing experience or designing a completely new experience – for example, for a new product or service or perhaps a digital execution.

This is not about process re-engineering – that may be an outcome but it is not the driver – nor is it about Six Sigma or Lean process. This is about deliberately designing an experience that is optimal for the customer from the outside in.

At this stage it is critical that thinking is not constrained, and that means ignoring what might be seen as limitations on what is possible.

The ability to think differently relies on the freedom to reimagine how an experience can be delivered, including if it even needs to be delivered at all!

You start with a blank sheet of paper and begin by considering whether this needs to exist. If you confirm that it does you then look at how it can be delivered.

Part of the problem of doing this without some external facilitation is that you are sub-consciously constrained before you even begin – for example you will find people who at the outset consider their personal time to be fully allocated and see little point in adding something new that cannot be delivered. Others will simply say we have done this before and it didn’t work – it is easier for an external person to say perhaps what you did last time was wrong than it can be for an internal person.

The ability to think differently and challenge the status quo is one of the hardest tasks for a team or individual inside an established business. I would suggest that for this specific work around innovating and thinking differently, you need some external help – as your confidence grows you can then take on future workshops in-house. As I have said to many clients over the years, the last thing you need is a lot of people who think like me inside your company – at certain points, however, that thinking is critical to the customer experience work you do.

As an example of thinking differently, I am embarking on a global campaign to change airport arrivals. Over the years I have arrived at various airports around the world, often weary after many hours of travel, usually entering a new environment and just wanting to get out of the airport and to my hotel to chill out and relax. Sadly I have accumulated many frustrating hours trying to find my taxi drivers – I know he is one of the grey-suited faces holding a handwritten sign with my name on it but there are hundreds to choose from. The walk of shame when you have made a first unsuccessful sweep is stressful and by the second rerun the emotions are boiling over. This is happening as you read this book – it is happening at hundreds of airports every second of every day. Why? Because that is the way we do things, the smart ones even use an iPad now with the name in black and white on the screen – how technology has advanced this particular experience!

The solution is to think differently about this and view it from a customer perspective – in effect repurpose the question.

Q. What do I need?

A. To be able to find my taxi driver (an individual I don’t know) as quickly as possible in a crowd.

Q. How do you stand out from a crowd so that I can spot you?

A. Do something different to the other 150 taxi drivers.

Q. What can I do to stand out?

A. Hold a single balloon in the air, or if you have an iPad turn the screen bright orange – no need for misspelt names just the visual sign.

I tried this simple change on a colleague coming into O.R. Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg, who had to navigate its very busy concourse with all the grey suits and signs. She saw it even as she came through the doors, went straight over and was on her way within seconds. How did she feel? Relieved, not stressed, perhaps even happy! Check out the visual cues on the next page.

The cynic says, ‘what if people adopted this and there were five white balloons?’ Well, the law of averages says I will get it in three and that is already better. The reality is that anything can be used as a visual signal in a crowded environment, from a banana to a funny hat. Can you imagine how much more fun airport arrivals would be, not to mention colourful. Of course, from a business perspective it works too as you are reducing the frustration and extended wait time of a driver, and if you’re a hotel you are extending the hotel experience into the airport!

Just ask your taxi company to do it and we can change the way that this operates in thousands of airports around the world, impacting positively on hundreds of millions of experiences. This is an example of thinking differently and challenging the accepted norms in a way that costs nothing to implement yet has a tangible impact on customer experiences both rationally and emotionally. It is also about recognising that significant experiential improvements can be achieved quickly, easily and without incurring huge costs or making big investments – customer experience is about being agile and continuously improving.

What we are looking to do is to highlight particular stages or interactions from your analysis of the customer journey where there are opportunities to improve and where we know there is a high potential to influence the customer by at least meeting, and preferably exceeding, their expectations at that point. Having done this you need to apply structure and an approach that will produce an enhanced and potentially differentiated experience. Once we have defined that design, the business inside-out approach will be brought into play to work out feasibility, the necessary changes and to create an implementation plan.

Think about how difficult it was to execute the change to an internal process for the circular sign experience and the negligible cost.

Remember that visual non-verbal cues can be powerful when designing experiences

Are these wow moments?

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the issue of creating what are commonly called ‘wow’ moments. How many companies say we want to ‘wow our customers’? The definition of wow for me is something completely unexpected and something that significantly exceeds your expectations. The reality is that most wow moments are a product of failure somewhere else in the company that drives an individual to go to an extreme to recover this. We will all have examples of where that has been the case – for example, the insurance claims person who, having found that a family would be stranded and miss their holiday, hired a car for them with their own money! We are never quite sure if the stories are true or get embellished but we get the picture. It would make no commercial sense for companies to continually wow their customers except through their unfailing consistency in delivery of their experience. Think about it: something that is a wow one minute can quickly become the expected norm once we all hear about it.

My advice is that you can design in wow moments but they need to be very carefully timed and specific – they are often free to deliver, but are more about the timing than the cost of the experience.

Remember once you understand how to purposefully design experiences you can apply the same principles at a micro level without the need for big set piece sessions. Add it to your armoury of approaches to solving business issues and developing business solutions

Preparing to design

The process is: to collate inputs – run your experience improvement workshop – validate the outputs with customers – refine the ideas – engage with the internal processes to ensure that the changes can be deployed.

You need to engage in some convergent thinking that is pulling together a range of materials and creating some further inputs ready for an experience improvement workshop.

As inputs you have, as highlighted by your earlier work:

• your customer journey map
• your design guide
• your problem statement or opportunity.

You need to produce a design synopsis that details the considerations for the team that should include:

1. What the opportunity is – e.g. the scale, the competitive advantage created.
2. Where you are today – e.g. summary of the drivers for the change.
3. Other factors to consider – e.g. metrics, data/technology influences.
4. The design session plan – e.g. who is needed? For how long? What is the timeline?

To ensure that your workshop and its outputs are going to have real value to the business bottom line, consider as part of your design synopsis what the business benefits will be, what business relevant issues you will be addressing with your outputs – for example, improved conversion rates, better engagement, reduced cost to serve.

As additional inputs to the workshop stage you can put together a couple of documents that will act as a team brief around the actual experience if it already exists, or as a projection if you are engaged in a new build. This is an opportunity to bring the emotional content into play.

Next create your persona, or personas if you are considering more than one customer group that have different needs. As outlined earlier, you should focus on painting a picture of this person and their lifestyle so that the team can take on that persona.

One tip is to get a range of magazines and cut out images that you feel bring the persona to life – such as holidays, cars, house, make-up, fashion and so on. This is like producing a mood board when doing internal decorating and can be used as stimulus during the workshop.

Second, create a small template and detail out the customer’s needs at the rational level; then a section on the customer’s emotional needs; what outcome does the customer want; detail from your CJM the key interactions; detail who is involved in the delivery of the experience both front of house and behind the scenes; and do not forget those business benefits.

Finally collect any supporting collateral, including copies of marketing material, letters and other collateral that relate to the interaction today.

This material will be used as reference material by the design workshop team and also as stimulus material.

Preparing the design team

You should select a group of colleagues from across the departments and functions – for the design workshop you can have as many as 20–30 people involved. Just ensure that you have the right ratio of facilitators to participants – I would recommend a 1:10 ratio as the maximum to be comfortable that the workshop is effectively facilitated.

When choosing your team, look to involve different levels and ask your colleagues to select people that are worthy of recognition – this should be seen as a very positive role to be selected for. You also need people that will be willing to contribute in a group environment. This will be a two-day workshop and will require commitment for the entire time with little access to work and other priorities.

Remember that everyone in the design workshop needs to have an equal voice – make sure they do and that the experience is truly liberating

Find a venue that is preferably out of the workplace to avoid distractions; ideally this will be an overnight stay in a hotel to encourage work into the evening and then over dinner. Many good ideas emerge and you will be giving the teams some homework to do while they are at the workshop!

Once you have the team, you need to prepare them for the workshop – you need to get the team into the mindset of being customers. One way to do this is to encourage them to engage in an experience before the workshop and make notes on what they expected the experience to be like and what actually happened, picking up on what was good, what was bad and what might have been better. They need to base their feedback on the gaps between what they expected and what actually happened, and importantly think about how it made them feel.

Ask your participants to send in their thoughts and findings at least one week before the workshop, you then review the findings and create a digest for discussion at the event. The digest should look at where the experiences met or failed to meet their expectations, the emotions that they felt and what triggered them to feel that way, design ideas and lessons learned.

Here is a draft email that you could use to introduce the participant to the event.

Dear James,

As you will now know from your team leader you have been selected to take part in our upcoming experience improvement workshop focused on improving the way we introduce new customers into our company. We are both delighted and excited to have you as part of this cross company team. More details will follow shortly but in the meantime we would like to invite you to send us some feedback on an experience of your choice – it could be a meal out or a shopping trip, it’s entirely up to you. Before you go, think about and write down what you are expecting it to be like and how you expect to feel, and then let us know how that compared with what happened: what were the highs and lows, how well did it meet your expectations? Please send your completed experience notes back to us by 15th March.

Thanks and we look forward to welcoming you later this month in person!

The idea is to get the team to engage directly as a customer and to think about elements of that experience that they may not normally even think about.

Engage a visual artist for the workshop afternoon of day one and then day two – this is an approach I first saw used by the brilliant N’Lighten team in South Africa. The opportunity to bring ideas to life real time visually adds a huge amount to the experience.

Confirm to the participants the outline for the two days and that the dress code is casual – we want the team to feel relaxed and informal.

If you want to really give the team an experience, connect with the hotel and ask if you can arrange two different check-in experiences: one where the experience is good, the room is ready, the service is prompt; the other where the reservation can’t be found, the room isn’t ready and then when it is the bed is not made – use your imagination! During the session you can ask the team what they think of the hotel, and of course we will see very different responses before you reveal that this is all a set up to show how experiences drive emotions.

The experience improvement workshop

The first stage is to prepare the rooms for your participants; you will need a main room and then breakout rooms to accommodate the teams. Teams of six are a good choice – that allows enough breadth of knowledge and not too many that people’s voices are not heard.

Remember to mix up groups to provide different viewpoints and do not be afraid to change them during the workshop if the dynamic or knowledge sets are not working

This is the time to encourage divergent thinking so decorate the walls with enlargements of the design guide, the collateral, the personas, the business challenge and area that you are all going to design, and have the material in smaller scale available on each team’s table as reference material. If you are having more than one persona then you will need to allocate the personas to different teams – for example, VIP guest versus casual diner in the restaurant example.

You can prepare an agenda that lays out the steps but do not put timings on the sessions – this leads to expectations and you need flexibility to adjust as the time progresses. The only given is that you need to have designed a new experience by the close of day two. The skill of the facilitators is key here to ensure that you get the best possible outputs.

Get the team to begin to list down initially in groups and then in plenary the messages that the company is trying to convey and the messages that the customer is trying to hear. List these on sticky notes on the wall. You will find that there are often more messages than you had expected! The teams now have an additional piece of collateral for their design – how do we communicate these messages and when?

Remember make the workshop environment fun and stimulating, use videos to highlight wow experiences, make sure there are sweets and props for people to use, take frequent breaks

Now initially as a big team you can ask for early thoughts and ideas on the interactions you are discussing and designing. You can make this initial discussion more structured by asking the same question in different ways: for example, ‘what could we do for free?’ or ‘if we had £5,000 what would you spend it on to improve the experience?’ The idea is to get big ideas out on the table again to feed into the smaller group discussions.

Remember the sessions should be two-way and involve discussion – encourage the team to contribute rather than just broadcasting

You are now ready to get into the detail of design by breaking into groups. If you have different personas, ask the teams to be in the mindset of that persona. If you have a single persona then you have two choices. If the interaction is big enough to be broken into two parts with a natural divide, you can brief teams to look at the different stages, or you can have all your teams work on the same interaction/s. In either case it is great to get different takes on the same brief.

Remember to include all of the senses when you design – you can put up flip chart sheets to remind the teams to consider: sound, smell, sight, touch and in some cases even taste.

You may be thinking to yourself, ‘are all of the senses really important?’ The answer is yes! Think about your sense of smell and how that connects you directly to memories: perhaps new mown grass, or fresh bread. Hotels use a signature scent to connect customers to previous visits. Think about how a song coming on can immediately transport you back to a specific memory – it is these subtle additions to experiences that can have a significant impact.

If you have an overnight in a hotel, challenge the individuals to think about a new idea that the company could consider as a way of improving the customer experience – in this case do not constrain their thinking to the task in hand but to any aspect of the company’s experience where they see an opportunity. Start day two by getting the teams to collate their ideas on sticky notes, then stick them on the wall and have the teams review them and identify the best three ideas. This is some added value for the company and customer experience team.

The group design brief

What?

Design an experience that:

• is ideal for your persona;
• builds on your varied and collective work and experiences to date;
• is not constrained by anything;
• brings to life your experience and design brief and guide.

How?

• Create a design for the experience you are reviewing (a mini ideal state CJM map in effect) that records what is happening at each key moment, and records your customer functional needs, the emotional needs and outcomes, and detail how the redesigned interaction will address pain, where the critical points are, show where the messages will occur, and how.
• Generate new ideas and challenge everything from the need to do this to the channel used, and have you considered all of the senses?
• For example, the sense of smell as we have noted is a strong driver of memories – if you visit the upmarket Aesop boutiques and buy their products they are given to you in a reusable cloth bag (eco-friendly) and the bag is spritzed with their signature scent to remind you of them. The design workshop is about attention to detail as well as generating the big idea.
• Incorporate the messages that you have highlighted where you feel they are appropriate.
• Create a narrative that tells the story of the experience in the customer’s own words, including how they feel.

Here is an example of how you might write a narrative in customer language that describes that ideal experience, including a focus on the emotional state of mind and how the customer is feeling as they step through the experience. In this example you are sending a gift using a delivery service:

‘So I now want to send my gift. I’ve clicked the gift delivery button and it’s given me some choices: Register as a Guest or Open an Account. They both have simple explanations under each of the boxes telling me what each one means. Signing up for an account sounds a little bit too involved and will take me longer. I’m going to sign up as a guest. So I’ll select ‘Send as a Guest’. I am expecting this to be really, really, quick and easy like it is on other sites where I have done this. The next screen is asking me for my name and then my email address and a password – it has a box next to it telling me why they need it and what they won’t do with it like selling my information, sending me loads of offers I don’t want, so I am relaxed about sharing my address. That is it, ‘job done’ and I have a simple but nice message ‘Hi Alan a very warm welcome to the MET Gift Store. You are now a registered guest and you can send gifts at any time by entering your email address and password when prompted at the log-in screen. We are delighted that you have chosen to join us and just to say thanks here is a special service just for you – if you would like us to include a handwritten note with your gift just enter the details here! Now just click here to give us the other information we need to send your gift.

That has easily met and maybe exceeded my expectations – really quick, I didn’t need to use the help button and a nice human response with a special offer to use right away!

• Create a visual version of your experience design using your visual artist.
• You also need to show what will need to change ‘under the water’ to make this interaction brilliant and unique – this means identifying the tools required to equip those involved, considering if metrics need to change and what training would be needed.

Be prepared to feed back in detail to the group, highlighting how you approached the task, what your ideas are and what your recommendations are.

Remember to check how well the design ideas incorporate the messages that you have identified that the customer needs to hear and understand

This design stage should take up the afternoon of day one and all of day two allowing for around 20 minutes for each group at the end of day two to feed back.

Remember that external facilitation can be really helpful to avoid you dropping into a very company-constrained way of thinking and to keep up what I would describe as a crazy pace and energy level that forces ideas out

Feeding back

This is an opportunity for the teams to use their imagination on how best to feed back their ideas to the group and to get across their new experience. Don’t be constrained. I have seen teams create mini plays and acted out the new experience, some have created a cartoon-based visual experience, others even created dummy collateral.

Remember take lots of photos of the event, you can record simple interviews with participants talking about their ideas and the session. This brings the event to life for those you might be presenting to later

As each team has fed back their ideas to the group give the audience the opportunity to identify ideas or thoughts that they either like, love or want to steal. Get the audience to put their marks by those highlighted ideas: a simple tick for like, heart shape for love and the word STEAL speaks for itself. This gives a quick insight into how the ideas have been received – if you want to steal an idea it means you could use that straight away to make a positive change tomorrow.

The outputs

The customer experience team takes the outputs of the workshop and consolidates these into a report on the opportunities and ideas – you can also create a composite narrative that draws on the individual group work to describe in words the new customer experience complete with visual illustrations. The opportunities are broken into immediate ‘just do it’, and then a proposed hierarchy based on ease and impact analysis.

You may feel confident enough at this point to take the ideas to the sponsors and move into deployment. Many companies will insist on external validation to underwrite the ideas. This is easy to execute: you need to run a series of customer focus groups and take them through the key ideas, including the visuals as stimulus. You will emerge with a customer view on what will work and a potential priority to then feed into the sponsor sessions.

Inside out meets outside in

Once you have the approved set of ideas and your new designed experience, the final stage before deployment is to engage with the inside-out business processes.

You are asking the question: ‘what do we need to do to make this happen?’

Remember it may be that you have some staging posts in terms of the delivery of the new design that get you there in a series of steps. This approach is preferable where there would be a long delay to implement the full experience

At this point you need to assemble the right internal resources dependent on the needs of the design – this may include process, data, technology, legal. The point is to get the right players into the room to create the business solution to deliver on the experience. It is at this point that there is a risk that the experience will be significantly diluted – your challenge is to stay true to the principles of the new design and to look for compromise only where it makes overwhelming commercial sense. Even when you need to compromise you should be looking for alternative ways to deliver the same customer outcome in experience terms as the driver.

Next, agree a set of measures to provide proof points that the changes are delivering measurable improvements in the customer experience and to the business bottom line. See Chapter 8 for some pointers on how to approach this.