CHAPTER 14

Create Relevance

What time is the three o’clock parade?

Historically, that has been one of the most common questions fielded by Disney World “cast members” (employees) at the Magic Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida.¹ Why on earth would a Disney World guest need to ask that question?

The answer is, they’re really not asking that question. Even if they’re not explicitly saying it, what they often want to know is, When does the three o’clock parade get to me, where I’m standing?²

Disney World cast members are specifically trained to answer this question and others like it. They are educated in the art of looking beyond what a customer says and considering instead what the customer really means. That’s ultimately an exercise in identifying relevance— determining what information, services, or support is most pertinent to the customer, either over the long term or at a single point in time.

Relevance is, perhaps for obvious reasons, an important cornerstone of a great customer experience. After all, if you’re delivering an experience that has little relevance to your customer, then they won’t derive much value from it, and it won’t serve to strengthen their engagement.

Consider Costco, a company highlighted in the last chapter for its customer advocacy. Imagine if Costco invested millions of dollars to spruce up its warehouse stores, upgrading the flooring, enhancing the product shelving, and adding a little more polish to the facility. That would be a waste of money, because those trappings have little relevance to the typical Costco shopper. Costco customers understand that they’re going to shop in a warehouse. They know it’s not going to be beautified, and they’re fine with that because it’s not the surroundings that draw them into the store. Rather, it’s the affordable, bulk purchasing. It’s the chance to roam the aisles and discover a great new deal that they couldn’t have found anywhere else. Those are the things that are relevant to the Costco consumer, and the company engineers its customer experience accordingly.

Relevance resonates. From products that perfectly address customer needs, to location-based search apps that find a pizza place right near you (not just in your zip code), these are all things that show customers you have a keen understanding of their needs, their wants, and their aspirations—even if they weren’t able to articulate it in words.

In addition, relevance is remembered. When we encounter something that is distinctly relevant to us, it creates a degree of salience that helps cement the encounter in our memory.³ And as we learned in earlier chapters, strong recall of the encounter is an essential element for customer experience differentiation.

Reexamine What’s Relevant

During the height of the Great Recession—a time when the US economy was in a meltdown and every auto manufacturer was seeing their sales plummet—Hyundai Motors increased its market share by a remarkable 40 percent and achieved a level of brand prominence in North America that was without parallel in the company’s history.⁴ Hyundai accomplished this remarkable feat by making a small tweak to its customer experience, but one that greatly enhanced the relevance of the brand to its target market.

In late 2008, the US auto industry was in a tailspin. Carmakers’ fourth-quarter sales were down nearly 35 percent as the economy cratered, consumer confidence plummeted, and unemployment soared. Hyundai’s sales decline was even worse than the industry average.⁵ What was even more concerning to Hyundai and all the other automakers was that the techniques the industry had long relied upon during past downturns—financing deals, rebates, and other purchase incentives—weren’t bringing people into the showrooms.

As the turmoil unfolded, Hyundai decided to talk to auto buyers directly. The company conducted a series of in-depth discussions with consumers in an effort to figure out what it would take to convince people to buy cars again. What they discovered would fundamentally alter Hyundai’s go-to-market strategy.

What the automaker’s executives came to realize is that even in the depths of a financial crisis, plenty of consumers were still interested in buying cars, and plenty of consumers still had the money to buy cars. The reason that people were staying away from the dealer showrooms, however, is because they were afraid.⁶

Consumers feared that even if they had the money for a new vehicle, they might buy it, only to then be laid off from their job shortly thereafter and saddled with car payments they could no longer afford. Remember, at this time in the United States, the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month.

In retrospect, that insight might seem obvious. At the time, however—like many game-changing business insights—this driver behind consumer behavior was not clearly evident. It was the “elephant in the room,” according to one Hyundai executive.⁷ Something consumers didn’t talk about, even though it was weighing on their minds.

With this new understanding of the auto buyer’s mindset, Hyundai shifted gears and began considering unorthodox ways to arrest, if not reverse, the sales decline. Instead of focusing on sales incentives, the company focused on fear mitigation. They tried to figure out how to eliminate or at least alleviate the emotionally charged worries that were keeping consumers away—because that’s what was most relevant to the consumer at the time.

The answer lay in an entirely new offering that the carmaker rolled out in January 2009 and dubbed the “Hyundai Assurance” program.⁸ It was an unconventional type of guarantee, where Hyundai basically said to consumers: if you buy a car from us, and within one year you’re laid off (for any reason at all), just bring the vehicle back and—no questions asked—we’ll forgive all remaining payments on the car.

This single tweak to their customer experience was a game changer. With the fear of job loss impacts removed from the purchase decision, consumers flocked to Hyundai dealers. In the first month that Assurance was available, Hyundai saw a 14 percent increase in year-over-year sales—compared to a 37 percent decline for the entire US auto market in the same period.⁹

A couple years later, in 2011, when the US economy had regained its footing, Hyundai ended the Assurance program. By that point, the carmaker had gained more than two points of market share in the United States and seen an over 60 percent increase in vehicles sold.¹⁰

Interestingly, by the time the program was sunset, only 350 cars had been returned under Hyundai Assurance, a statistic that belies the impact the program had on the automaker’s brand recognition and business success.¹¹ The fact that so few cars were returned under the program, despite its tremendous popularity, suggests that consumers’ perceived risk of job loss (and the resulting impact on one’s ability to make car payments) was much greater than the actual risk of that outcome. This underscores that what was really most relevant to consumers during this period was an emotional need as opposed to a rational one.** Car buyers were looking for peace of mind, not huge rebates or financing deals.

Hyundai was able to understand that because they took the time to reexamine what was relevant to their target customer. By immersing themselves in the customer’s perspective, they devised a customer experience innovation that addressed a not-yet-obvious consumer need. That served to strengthen Hyundai’s relevance in the market, paving the way for extraordinary growth despite the presence of stiff economic headwinds.

Keep Eyes Open for Adjacencies

Sometimes, the pursuit of relevance requires evolving the customer experience to meet customers where they need you most. That might mean branching out into related businesses or distribution channels (“adjacencies”), actions that should not be taken lightly.

This approach to relevancy requires some corporate soul searching. It’s about wrestling with the question, “What do our customers really care about?” That can be a thorny query to contemplate, if the answer points to something outside of your current product or service offering.

It’s an issue Hubert Joly had to face head-on when he was hired to be CEO of electronics retailer Best Buy in 2012. It was the ultimate turnaround assignment. Joly came on board at a time when the retailer’s profits had shrunk by 90 percent and its continued existence (in the face of the Amazon.com juggernaut) was far from assured.¹²

Joly is widely credited with not just saving Best Buy, but making it a formidable competitor to Amazon. Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had praise for Joly, calling what he accomplished at the retailer “remarkable.”¹³ During Joly’s tenure, Best Buy grew its sales for five consecutive years, dramatically improved its Net Promoter Score, and outperformed the S&P 500 by an over 3-to-1 ratio.¹⁴

Joly’s turnaround plan had many facets, but primary among them was rethinking how Best Buy could amplify its relevance to customers, in an era when practically any product sold at the store could be purchased effortlessly through Amazon. That led to some important insights around how to stay relevant in the marketplace.

For example, early on, Joly and his team recognized that people like to see pricey technology products, like big-screen TVs and smartphones, in person before buying. So they flipped the script on “showrooming” (the bane of all retailers, where consumers visited a store to see a product but then bought it online from Amazon). The company embraced what it called “showcasing”—giving consumers a place where they could touch, feel, and try out technology, all under the guidance of well-trained staff.¹⁵ The concept even led Best Buy to rent out space for “stores-within-stores,” where companies like Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and Google would showcase their wares.

That capitalized on another point of relevance for customers, the ability to conduct hands-on comparisons of competing products all under one roof. Best Buy positioned itself as the Switzerland of technology retailers, a neutral ground where consumers could personally see and get expert advice on products from rival firms, such as smart home devices from Amazon (Echo) and Google (Nest).

Later in Joly’s tenure, he came to another realization regarding what customers really cared about, an insight that was backed up by Best Buy’s market research: consumers’ most relevant technology needs centered around the configuration and integration of technology solutions.

“There is a growing gap between what the technology can do and our ability to understand it. And that can be overwhelming,” Joly explained in an interview with Time magazine.¹⁶ He capitalized on Best Buy’s 2002 acquisition of Geek Squad, a provider of technical support, installation, and repair services. For customers who didn’t just want to buy a home theater system, for example, but wanted someone to set it up for them, Best Buy had the answer.

But Joly went even further, recognizing that consumers sometimes don’t even know what’s possible with the technology they already have, let alone how new technologies can help address common frustrations and irritants. That led to the launch of Best Buy’s In-Home Advisor service—sort of a “Geek Squad on steroids.”

These advisors were broadly knowledgeable experts who visited customers’ homes to help them unlock the potential of technologies they already owned, or explore new products that could solve a problem they didn’t even know to ask about.¹⁷ Notably, these in-home visits, which could last up to 90 minutes, were completely free. In addition, the advisors were salaried employees—a compensation approach that, in contrast to commission-based models, sent a strong signal of customer advocacy. The advisor’s goal was not to close a sale by day’s end, but to develop a trusting relationship with the customer.

This consultative strategy, centered around solutions rather than product sales, resonated with Best Buy customers. The company has found that customers who work with an In-Home Advisor have higher Net Promoter Scores than those who don’t, and they spend more.¹⁸

Under Hubert Joly’s direction, Best Buy renewed its relevance to customers by reexamining what was most important to them. That led the company to recast itself from product pusher to solution seller—building on a business adjacency (services and consultations) that wasn’t a core part of the company’s identity in its early years. It’s an approach that other widely admired businesses have also used to great effect, and again, it all begins with one question: What does my customer really care about?

For example, IKEA (the world’s largest furniture retailer) realized that what its customers cared about wasn’t really the piece of furniture itself, but rather, how it would look in their home. That led to the advent of IKEA Place, the retailer’s hugely popular augmented reality mobile app (see Figure 14.1), which allows customers to see, through their own smartphone camera, exactly how a piece of furniture (or even a whole set) will look in their home, from all angles.¹⁹

FIGURE 14.1

The IKEA Place augmented reality mobile app.

Photo Credit: IKEA

In thinking about what their customers really cared about, Disney World realized the importance of a stress-free travel experience. That spurred new innovation in adjacent services, such as Disney’s “Magical Express”—where, using special luggage tags, the resort let guests skip baggage claim upon their arrival at the airport, get a complimentary motorcoach ride to their hotel, and have their bags automatically delivered to their hotel room.††²⁰

Sometimes, these adjacencies that help create a more relevant customer experience are revenue generators on their own, such as Best Buy’s product installation services. In other cases, they may involve complimentary services, such as IKEA Place, which don’t directly generate revenue, but most certainly help grow it by creating a more appealing and value-rich end-to-end experience.

Go into the Wild

Creating relevance in the customer experience, be it through the design of a business’s core offerings or its expansion through adjacencies, requires one critical piece of information: What’s important to your customer? What really matters to them?

As we’ve seen through the examples presented in this chapter, sometimes those questions can be answered simply by stepping into your customer’s shoes and looking at the world from their perspective. While that’s always a valuable exercise, it can have limited utility in some circumstances where, as hard as you try, it’s just plain difficult to divine what your customer is thinking.

That, of course, is where customer research comes into play, often executed via traditional tools, such as feedback surveys and focus groups. Those information-gathering instruments are no doubt valuable, but they both have an important blind spot: Sometimes customers don’t even realize what their needs are, or even if they do, they have trouble vocalizing them to others. Indeed, it’s not unusual for the one thing that’s most important to customers to also be the thing that’s most difficult for them to articulate.

This is why achieving relevance in the customer experience requires supplementing traditional research techniques with other means. The most brilliant customer insights, the ones that drive game-changing customer experience innovation, rarely come from antiseptic focus group rooms or dry market research surveys. They emerge, instead, from observing customers in their “natural habitat” as they go about their daily lives.

Nothing—not the most intense ideation session nor the most robust market research report—can compare to what you learn simply by going out “into the wild,” watching, listening, and talking to customers as they navigate through their day, as they use your products and services, and as they (sometimes) bastardize those products and services to accommodate their unmet needs.

Automobile manufacturer Chrysler owes its dominance in the consumer minivan market to this ethnographic approach to customer research. For more than 35 years, the company has been the US minivan sales leader, a position fortified over the decades by a tradition of customer-centric innovation.²¹ That approach was perhaps best exemplified by Chrysler’s 1996 introduction of the Dodge Caravan, the first US minivan with two sliding doors.²² Before Caravan, minivans were equipped with only three doors—driver and passenger front seat doors, and a single passenger-side back seat sliding door.

Whereas other auto manufacturers just asked consumers if they’d like a second sliding door (and didn’t sense much enthusiasm for the idea), Chrysler did something that was unprecedented at the time. They sent a team “into the wild” to see with their own eyes what minivan owners struggled with, but might never have thought to share in a focus group.²³

In a 2012 interview, Chris Theodore, one of the lead managers for the 1996 Caravan design effort, recalled his team’s approach to the project:

We really had a great time. We looked at customers. We visited customers. We videotaped customers at rest stops, truck stops and lumber yards. That’s where we came up with all the ideas. From cupholders to tissue holders to rollout seats to the fourth door, these were all things that we saw the customer needed but didn’t volunteer when asked.²⁴

As Theodore and his team witnessed firsthand, when you observe customers in the wild, you discover things that even the best internal brainstorming sessions might not reveal: Water bottles, juice containers, soda cans, and tissues strewn throughout the vehicle, with no apparent place to secure them. A parent’s struggle to install a child’s car seat without easy access through a side door. Or the inconvenience of a driver having to walk around their car to retrieve a briefcase or bag positioned right behind their seat.²⁵

The minivan Chrysler went on to develop was filled with innovative, groundbreaking features, born from the insights gleaned through those customer observation sessions. Ultimately, the 1996 Dodge Caravan won MotorTrend’s “Car of the Year” award (the only minivan ever to do so), and the vehicle cemented Chrysler’s position as the dominant player in the market.²⁶

No matter what business you’re in, who your customer is, or what part of the customer experience you deliver, Chrysler’s approach to cultivating game-changing insights can likely be applied to your role. A product designer can observe a customer configuring, installing, or using a new piece of equipment, just as Doug Dietz of GE Healthcare did with his MRI. A store manager can watch customers navigate the aisles and go through checkout. A billing specialist can watch a customer peruse and interpret an invoice. An internal software developer can spend time sitting alongside the call center staff whose systems they support.

These are all examples of businesspeople liberating themselves from the confines of their desk and putting themselves in a position where they have direct line-of-sight to their customers. It is an exercise that’s too often neglected in the business world, dismissed as too time-consuming or superfluous, given companies’ belief that they already know their customers well. Those firms would be wise to remind themselves of the statistics shared in Chapter 4, which showed the huge chasm of perception that exists between customers and companies.

Go into the wild, observe your customers, and if possible, have some in-depth conversations with them. It can be an eye-opening and often motivating exercise that helps crystallize what’s truly relevant to your customers, so you can engineer their experience accordingly.

The Pandemic Pause

While relevance in the customer experience is important to achieve at all times, it’s especially critical during periods of change and disruption, when external influences can reshape the customer mindset.

There is perhaps no better recent example of such a dynamic than the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Practically overnight, ordinary life was put on pause and COVID-19 fundamentally altered what was relevant to customers and employees. Cleaning and hygiene practices, for example—experiential details that, prepandemic, customers would have never thought about—assumed much greater, more visible importance during the pandemic.

However, with every crisis comes opportunity. Not an opportunity to exploit customers at their most vulnerable, which would obviously violate the Be an Advocate principle. Rather, an opportunity to refresh one’s relevance to the customer in light of the new circumstances and consequently strengthen their affinity to your business.

The pandemic afforded companies a chance to leverage all of the strategies described in this chapter: immersing themselves in the customer’s perspective, reconsidering what kind of experience was truly relevant to those customers, and exploring experiential changes and adjacencies that would help address new, emerging needs or concerns.

Southwest Airline’s middle-seat blocking policy (covered in the previous chapter) is a good example of this approach in practice. Some airlines questioned the wisdom of middle-seat blocking. One low-rated carrier called it a “PR strategy, not a safety strategy.”²⁷ Southwest, however, recognized that lower passenger densities made customers feel safer on the aircraft, despite the fact that it didn’t actually create six feet of social distance between all individuals (as recommended, on the ground, by health experts). Southwest used middle-seat restrictions to address a new emotional need that had become particularly important and relevant to pandemic-era air travelers.

Plenty of other business also elevated their relevance in the marketplace by responding smartly to pandemic-triggered needs. After all, it was from this crucible that many innovations and advances in “contactless” experiences were born: touchless self-service kiosks, remote work tools, virtual conference platforms, mobile ordering/payment, and curbside pickup, just to name a few.

However, one potential pitfall to be watchful for during periods of market disruption is the pursuit of experiential changes that address one point of relevancy at the inadvertent expense of another (i.e., solving one problem, but creating a new one). Telecommunications company AT&T navigated such waters in its response to the pandemic.

A decade ago, inspired by its partnership with Apple’s Steve Jobs on the first iPhone launch, AT&T chose to reinvent the wireless retail store experience, making it less about the transaction and more about the interaction. The company pioneered a new retail model for its industry, one that didn’t just focus blindly on pushing product, but rather, emphasized creating an enriching experience for its customers. As Paul Roth, AT&T’s then president of retail sales, put it in a 2013 interview: “We want people to say to themselves, ‘It feels good to be here. I would like to spend time in this store. I will find something that I didn’t know existed, but which is relevant to me and my life.’ ”²⁸

The company’s efforts paid off in many ways, among them an unprecedented five-year stretch as J.D. Power’s top-rated provider for wireless purchase experiences.²⁹ Fast-forward to March 2020, however, and pandemic-triggered lockdowns put AT&T’s retail store experience out of reach for many of its customers.

In contrast to Hyundai’s experience during the Great Recession, it was quite clear in this situation what was keeping customers out of the stores: they were closed. And in those few markets where the stores weren’t closed, people avoided them out of fear of contracting COVID-19. To be relevant in that environment, AT&T had to answer two key questions: How do we reach our customers, and how do we make them feel comfortable?³⁰

The answer lay with curbside pickup, a now familiar accommodation across the pandemic-shaped retail environment, but a new type of service when AT&T rolled it out—within just 10 days of its store closures. Customers embraced the curbside pickup option and the company could have conceivably stopped there, but it didn’t. Executives smartly realized that the curbside solution deprived customers of another aspect of the in-store experience that remained as relevant as ever: assistance with device setup.

Sure, there was a segment of customers who were confident that they could set up the new device on their own. For them, curbside pickup or even ship-to-home were fine options. But many of the people who came to an AT&T store to purchase a device did so because they valued the assistance provided in executing the data transfer, right at point-of-sale. As Kelly King, AT&T’s current head of retail sales distribution put it, “People are nervous about moving their contacts, their photos, their music. Having the assurance that the transfer happens correctly is one of the most important experiences in the wireless business.”³¹

So AT&T went a step further with its pandemic response, retooling a nascent capability that it had been experimenting with into a new, signature component of its retail purchase experience. Dubbed “Right To You,” the service offered customers in 50 major US markets same-day delivery to their home, along with personalized, one-on-one device setup with a certified expert. Customers could select their delivery time, as well as choose from one of three socially distanced setup options: meet inside their home with the setup expert, meet outside their home, or meet virtually via video/phone while the AT&T representative remains in their vehicle.

Of all the online purchase options available to AT&T customers during the pandemic, Right To You earned the highest satisfaction ratings. It’s easy to see why the service was so well received, as the company essentially leveraged several of the 12 Principles through its Right To You experience: It’s effortless (the business comes to you). It stirs emotion (replacing apprehension with assurance). It provides the perception of control (by giving customers the power of choice). But ultimately it all works because the experience is relevant. It provides customers with what they need (not just device purchase, but also expert setup), where they need it (in a safe environment, free of COVID-spreading crowds).

PUTTING THE PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE

CHAPTER 14 KEY TAKEAWAYS

•   For a customer experience to be good and memorable, it needs to be relevant, meaning that whatever the experience offers—products, services, information, and so on—must be pertinent in the eyes of the customer. Customers must derive genuine value from it, be it on a rational or emotional level.

•   Achieving relevance requires having a keen understanding of what’s important to your customer—their wants and needs, their hopes and frustrations. Revealing such information requires getting close to your customer, not just by asking them their opinion, but also by observing their behaviors in their “natural habitat.”

•   Relevance is important not just because it helps strengthen customer engagement, but also because it helps focus investment in a business. It enables an organization to orient its design and delivery of the customer experience around that which really matters to its customer.

•   Enhancing relevance can sometimes best be accomplished by addressing customers’ upstream or downstream needs. That involves looking for “adjacencies”—complementary products or services that magnify the value of your core offering to the customer.

** This also illustrates how the 12 Principles, in this case Stir Emotion and Create Relevance, can blend together to influence the customer experience. We’ll learn more in Chapter 19 about how the principles can amplify one another’s impact and collectively create a differentiated customer experience.

†† Citing the rise of convenient, on-demand ride-sharing services (such as Uber and Lyft), Disney recently announced plans to discontinue its Magical Express service, after a very successful nearly 20-year run. Even legendary companies are not immune to customer experience disruption, and must constantly adapt to an evolving marketplace.