Chapter 4

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Where are you? What do you want to deliver?

This chapter looks at how companies can undertake a quick assessment of the current state of their customer experience, set targets for where they want to get to and ensure that there is the required alignment within the business both vertically and horizontally.

The first step in any customer-based work is to ensure that your company is very clear, top to bottom, on the actual experience that you want to deliver to your customers; you can then assess how well you are actually delivering that. By looking carefully, but quickly, at the customer interactions and at the resources in place today you can ensure that activities and resources align in delivering that experience.

So you need to understand your current level of maturity, what assets you have in place and where you want the customer interventions to take the business.

Many companies also lack some basic information on the actual experience that they want to deliver. For instance, you need to understand how or if your mission, vision and values connect to your customer experience and then you need to be able to align targets for where you want to get to and ensure that there is alignment within the business, both vertically and horizontally.

Having recognised that you want to move forward on delivering an enhanced customer experience as a vital component of your overall business strategy you will need to answer some critical questions.

• What is our current state of maturity in terms of our customer experience capability?
• Where do we believe we need to get to in terms of our customer experience capability in order to deliver on our business plan?
• Are we clear on what customer experience we want to deliver?

These may seem like simple questions, but if you think about your company today could you answer them with any degree of confidence? What you will also find is that even if you have a view on the answers it is almost certain that colleagues in different parts of the organisation will have different views. Different views are in part driven by your location, your daily activity, your position and department in the company and partly based on your personal expectations both in terms of what the company should be doing and what you have visibility of. Those that are closest to the end customer inevitably have a clearer view on the current experience. It is important to look for some alignment of these often quite differing views at the outset. In effect we must level set the views across the business and ensure that we all have a common start point. This is also an opportunity to do some foundational work, which will be very useful as the journey moves into planning, mapping and design work.

Remember a customer experience is not an input: it is the output of activities inside your company

Let’s consider how to answer the three questions in more detail.

What is our current state of maturity in terms of our customer experience capability and where do we need to get to?

There are two sources of information on where you are today, what your customers tell you and what your company tells you. Each will have a view on how mature the experience is, but from different perspectives typically your staff will tell you how it feels to deliver the experience and your customers will tell you how it feels to be a customer. You will also most likely uncover some conflicts of interest, for example between policies and procedures in place to ensure a ‘clean internal audit’ and what you actually say you want to do in terms of the customer experience.

Your company probably has a lot of information on the customer view through the reams of ongoing market research programmes, but is less likely to understand your colleague views. For this reason, and because it is key to engage the company at an early stage, I always recommend you begin with an internal view of maturity.

The first step is to agree through a simple online survey for colleagues where in the timeline of customer experience maturity your company sits today. I have found it useful to have a simple overall segmentation at this stage, with supporting information. It can be displayed as a four-segment circle that offers the options of starting, evolving, maturing or maintaining.

If the overall questions were about defining the stage in the timeline that you occupy, what other supporting evidence would it be good to understand and how would you check if there is alignment across the company in different departments and different levels?

You will often find that there are different views based on where you sit in the customer journey; for example, the acquiring and on-boarding of a customer may be well invested in as a business priority, but once a customer progresses over time the standards of experience may be significantly degraded. So the ability to segment the responses based on where in the customer journey the respondent operates can be very helpful.

To determine the answer to the single question of where we are in terms of our overall customer experience journey you need to gather data across a range of key areas. It is very tempting at this point to load a wide range of questions into a survey but you should avoid this, it will dilute the volume and quality of the responses and you will have many more opportunities to gather more granular information as you need it in order to define or support decisions about the customer experience.

My approach is to look at the key drivers of your customer experience and then to isolate a handful of questions that will act as a good guide to the current position. Ideally we are looking for no more than 10 questions at this stage; you can go deeper later.

Remember you can ask further questions at any point so do not overload surveys with questions that fall into the ‘nice to know’ but not going to be actionable in the near future category

The key areas for you to focus on at this stage are all high level and can be broken down into the following:

• Customer strategy – do you have one?
• Brand strategy – what expectation are you setting?
• Customer knowledge – what do you know about key needs?
• Business processes – how is the customer view included?
• Customer data – what and how is it used?
• IT infrastructure – do you have a consolidated view of the customer experience?
• Measures – what customer metrics exist and what do they achieve?
• People – who is engaged and how is that achieved?

The problem is that if you send a survey out asking about words like ‘strategy’ and ‘infrastructure’ it creates lots of confusion at different levels of the business, so the language used needs to work for different levels and departments.

Over the years I have seen various combinations of questions and language to overcome this very real barrier to getting meaningful feedback. My suggestions based on that are as follows:

1. The company clearly explains to all staff the importance of the customer experience that it wants to deliver.
2. The company sets clear expectations about the experience its customers should expect.
3. The company understands the touch-points that are the most important for customers.
4. The company gives enough emphasis to the injection of the desired customer experience into the key business processes.
5. The company uses enough customer data to guide the design of the most important touch-points.
6. The company makes customer information available through a single view.
7. The company has clear links between customer measures and customer outcomes.
8. The company uses customer feedback to identify and deliver experience improvements.
9. The company has behaviours, competencies and training identified to enable staff to deliver the desired customer experience.
10. The company spends enough time communicating direction and taking a visible lead from senior executives in terms of customer experience.

We are asking the respondents to describe the extent to which they agree or disagree with each of the 10 statements.

Offer a scale of 1–5:

1. Strongly agree
2. Somewhat agree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Somewhat disagree
5. Strongly disagree.

In each case, the questions should be followed by an optional free text box using the statement and a catch-all free text at the end for other comments:

Optional: Please describe why you chose this answer.

The free text is helpful in giving context to the scores and to see if consistent themes emerge that are impacting on the scores either positively or negatively.

A simple way to gather this information is to use an online survey tool – there are plenty to choose from and you only need basic functionality:

• ability to load questions and set a scale for the responder to use;
• ability to load basic information about the responder, e.g. gender, age, length of service, department, job grade, etc.;
• ability to have qualitative free text box responses;
• ability to perform simple segmentation of the data within the tool and output simple reports.

You could consider tools such as SurveyMonkey, KeySurvey, SurveyGizmo and others, all of which are easy to use and low cost.

When conducting these surveys it is key to be able to preserve anonymity to give you the best chance of getting honest answers. While you may not use all of the individual data, it is worth collecting at this stage in order to cover the future eventuality of someone senior asking a question that you need to be able to respond to! For example, is there a difference in view between those who are new to the company and those who have longer service?

One really great way to engage your wider internal team and condition them to receiving regular surveys on the customer experience is to ask people, as part of the first survey, to volunteer to be on a staff panel. You set the expectations at the outset: why join, what will it mean and what will I get out of it?

Remember if you set up an internal research panel this is a commitment and you need to use it regularly and feed back to the team

This an example of a draft email that you could use:

Dear Colleague,

I am really excited to announce the launch of the Company X Peoples Panel. We really value your knowledge and expertise and need your help to shape future decisions on behalf of our customers. It is really easy: all you need to do is click the link below and join our Company X Panel – we will be issuing short questionnaires once a month for you to complete. This will take no more than 10 minutes of your time each month and will be invaluable in shaping our future customer experiences. We will provide regular feedback on the findings and how they are contributing to our customer experience improvements.

This has the potential to begin to create an internal community and unleash some of that pent up capability – colleagues will self-identify an interest and you can, over time, add in other forums for them to discuss the customer experience on a more regular basis. You will get feedback in real time from a cross section of departments that will help to raise the profile of the customer experience across the company.

Next, select your audience: this could be an all person company survey or you may want to select individuals. If you choose the latter option you need to ensure that you include all senior managers (to avoid upsetting people!) plus a representative sample covering all departments and levels relative to their size. One way to do this is to determine that you want a survey of 30 per cent of the company and ask personnel to identify 30 per cent of the people from each department and across grades. As you can see, the better option is to make this an all company experience!

Having issued the survey, the next step is to collate the data from the responses and feed that back to both the senior team and respondents initially and then the wider company.

Remember the aim of the survey is to understand the current perceived state maturity and to use it to move towards a common view of both the current and the required future levels of maturity/competence

Evaluating the scores

At a simple level take the scores from across the question set and at a question level grade the answers. Where the average score is 1 or 2 you can place the company in the ‘starting’ stage; where it is 3 ‘evolving’; 4 is ‘maturing’; and 5 is ‘maintaining’. Then take the scores for all of the questions and create an overall score for the company.

The best way to feed the information back to the senior team is through a 2–3-hour workshop session – this can be the board or the board and direct reports. You present the information in two parts.

1. First take the senior team view showing the average score across each of the 10 questions. Provide a short digest of the qualitative comments to give context for the scoring.
   • Take each question in turn and ask the team to review that score and agree if it is right or wrong in terms of the current position. Discuss until they reach consensus – you will have different views in the room.
2. Then ask the question ‘what would it take for us to achieve our two-year business goals?’ Revisit each question and discuss where on the scale the results would need to be.
   • Review the answers and decide as a team where on the scale the company is today: is it starting, evolving, maturing or maintaining in terms of the overall company customer journey maturity.

Having agreed this then it is both revealing and fun to look at what the rest of the company said so create a side by side set of scores for each of the 10 questions showing the wider business scores. Highlight some of the qualitative feedback to give context around why the staff disagrees with the senior leadership view! You will find some, often significant, differences in views from the top to those across the company. Be prepared to break down the results into different groups or segments to illustrate where the key variances are.

Discuss the reasons why these variances might have occurred. If they are based on the wider company view ask the team whether they want to amend their final scoring – experience tells me that they rarely do!

In my experience most companies will find themselves in the ‘starting’ and at best ‘evolving’ stage. If not, then I suggest you look hard and challenge the evidence for a more advanced level of maturity. This is where the wider company input can be used to offset the usually ambitious and exaggerated view of the senior team.

The purpose of this discussion is to raise awareness that communication on customer experience may be an issue in the company.

Remember it is often the case that activity is in place or happening, but there is no visibility beyond the immediate delivery team

Now you have a leadership consensus on the current and future state at this high level. This provides a platform to begin to dig into the detail of the current customer experience.

You need to communicate the results of the discussions back to those who gave up their time to take part in the original survey and outline what the next steps will be.

This is all part of raising the profile of the customer inside the business. Get the CEO or a senior executive to sign off on the communication to connect the leadership to the customer messages

Remember communicate, communicate, communicate and use the word customer as much as possible

The next piece of the ‘where are we today?’ puzzle is to understand what activity is currently under way that is either badged or designed to directly impact on the customer experience. You need to know what the activity is called, what its objectives are, how and which customer it is designed to impact, when it is due to deliver and if possible the budget.

Create a simple spreadsheet to capture this information. This will be invaluable as we progress and identify opportunities to improve – as a simple step, check are they already in scope of an initiative, will it deliver in time, is there already budget available and other useful insights.

If you have a programme support office, this is often a good starting point to gather the information. If not, monthly reporting packs can be a source, or you need to talk to teams across the business to determine what is under way or in the planning phase.

Are we clear on what customer experience we want to deliver?

Most companies will have a mission statement, a vision and values along with statements about the brand and what it stands for. Very few of my clients over the years have been able to answer the following question: ‘Could you please describe the key characteristics of the customer experience that you want your teams to deliver?’

Ask yourself the question, write down the answer and see how that compares if you ask colleagues within your business. If the leaders cannot answer the question consistently what hope is there for the rest of the company?

As an example, what does this often-used answer actually mean: ‘We want our people to be passionate about the customer’? How does it translate into something relevant and meaningful within finance or customer service or the boardroom? How can anyone in the company be held to account if there is no clear customer experience delivery framework or touchstones that they can use to test their actions?

The actual customer experience that you want to deliver is derived from the business strategy, brand and company values, the mission statement and the vision statement. You need access to all of these documents as inputs to creating your customer experience design guide (CEDG).

Defining your customer experience

You should describe what the company would provide to its customers in terms of a customer experience. This is a qualitative statement – it should draw from the brand and corporate positioning and not be detached from them.

Remember that your mission, vision and values can be meaningless without a clear description of your required customer experience that, in essence, ensures alignment with the most important element, i.e. the people upon whom everyone depends: management to get paid, investors to get returns, bankers to get repaid, governments to get taxes, etc.

Remember, unless there is a clear linkage between the customer experience description and the rest there is a risk of disconnect

So firstly you need to collate the company mission, vision, values and brand positioning and the overall strategic plan statement.

You also need to be very clear on the purpose of your company to avoid being reduced to the level of tasks. For example, at Disney the purpose for all is ‘creating the magic’ – everything else is a task, from sweeping the road to parking cars, that together are designed to achieve that purpose. Too often we focus on tasks and not the purpose and then short-term tasks take control.

• What is your company purpose?
• The component parts of your mission, vision and values all contribute to the business purpose.
• The overall purpose is usually captured in the mission and vision and describes why the company exists.
• The corporate strategy describes the business ambition – where it wants to get to.
• The key strategic drivers describe what the business needs to focus on.
• The brand strategy describes the behaviours that will be cascaded from the senior leadership.
• The values will describe the employee values that will be role modelled from the top.

Your description of the customer experience you want to deliver and the customer design guide will underpin these and allow the company to define in words what experience it needs to deliver in order to deliver on each of those components and will provide the capability to deliberately design the supporting customer journeys.

Your description of your desired customer experience will become the ‘North Star’ of the customer experience: it describes the experience that you want to deliver and out of that you will then derive your CDEG which you will use to design your experiences. It will connect your strategic platform to the reality of what your customers will experience.

The customer experience team should complete this work with input from as many different teams as possible. The leadership, as this is a key plank of your customer experience strategy, must endorse this, as this will be used to define future experiences.

You need to be very positive in tone and refer directly to the experience that the company delivers. The best way to do this is to use the following words as the start point and then complete the sentence in a way that truly reflects the other elements as described above.

‘We insist that our customers will have an experience that . . . ’

Try not to use more than 10–20 words (excluding my introduction line) – the purpose is to think hard about every word you use and ensure that your statement has meaning.

Here are a couple of sample descriptions:

‘We insist that our customers will have an experience that is based on trust and is so simple that they can enjoy the life they choose.’

‘We insist that our customers will have an experience that makes an emotional and memorable connection by being passionate, inspiring, personal and unique.’

Having established and agreed your desired customer experience you need to consider some key words that will bring the description to life and that can be crafted into your customer experience design guide. I first saw a version of this thinking in a UK financial services business some years ago.

Define no more than three to five words that will bring the description to life at a more granular level.

For example, if we take the first description above then we might choose to use the following as the next level of detail:

• easy – consistent, hassle-free choices to suit the customer;
• personal – offering flexible, relevant service recognising our customer;
• trusted – honest, deliver what we promise.

In each case ask yourself: are these deliverable? Setting goals that are overambitious at this stage is setting yourself and the company up to fail.

Remember you can change the words and evolve them as the business matures

Customer experience design guide

The final part of this stage of plan preparation is to define the actual customer experience design guide. This is an articulation of how the customer experience will be brought to life and set out the challenges or ‘touchstones’ that you and colleagues can refer to when you are making decisions – you can use them to test if you are really staying true to your purpose.

For them to be useful at a day-to-day level they need to be easy to remember and easily applied so we are looking for no more than three to five very short, one-line challenges.

If we take the example above of the desired customer experience and the supporting words we can then see how the challenges can be connected in.

‘We insist that our customers will have an experience that is based on trust and is so simple that they can enjoy the life they choose.’

• easy – consistent, hassle-free choices to suit the customer;
• personal – offering flexible, relevant service recognising our customer;
• trusted – honest, deliver what we promise.

Easy – a common way to describe the word easy in a design guide is ‘make the complex simple’. This is often used in financial service companies where the complexity ranges from product information to the language used (e.g. derivatives, continuity insurance) to the actual paperwork.

Personal – this can be described as ensuring that you have a ‘human touch’ involved in the experience. As an example, an online-only retailer sent my gift item and included a handwritten note from the person who dealt with the order. This was a brilliant way to make an anonymous purchase personal.

Trusted – this can be considered as a way of ensuring that the customer promise set by the brand is always delivered so ‘always meet or exceed customer expectations’.

Remember when you are thinking about customer experience design guides you are wearing the customer hat and thinking, for example, truly how simple have we made this?

So we now have the agreed customer experience articulated and the customer experience design guide that together are the North Star and the day-to-day touchstones to use in the subsequent stages of the plan.

Desired customer experience

‘We insist that our customers will have an experience that is based on trust and is so simple that they can enjoy the life they choose.’

• easy – consistent, hassle-free choices to suit the customer;
• personal – offering flexible, relevant service recognising our customer;
• trusted – honest, deliver what we promise.

Customer experience design guide

• Make the complex simple.
• Deliver a human touch.
• Always meet or exceed our customer expectations.

We will see how these are applied in Chapter 7 on designing customer experiences.