How Great Products and Services Supply Great User Experiences
You are CEO of a company with 50,000 employees and you are so dedicated to the concept of customer experience driving the quality and value of your household products that in 1985, when a line of your company’s refrigerators were found to be defective, you had the workers who’d made them line up and smash 76 of them to smithereens. Hell, you grabbed a sledgehammer and smashed away at one of the damned things yourself. The public smashing of products that don’t make the cut appears to be somewhat de rigueur for Pacific Rim companies. You have been recognized by Financial Times as a turnaround specialist.
So what happens when you go on the Internet to a site,1 and you look at 25 reviews of a product you released, a Haier XQG65-11SU Front Load All-in-One Washer/Dryer, and the reviews read:
• Worst product, worst experience ever! Do not ever buy a Haier product.
• I’m a lemon. Do not buy this or any Haier washer/dryer combo unit.
• CUSTOMER SERVICE STINKS!
• Badly engineered, unreliable.
• The poor quality is mind boggling. A piece of junk.
This goes on and on like this, until, if you’re on a plane, you reach for the vomit bag. Your name is Zhang Ruimin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Haier, and you’re not having your best day. You reach next for your cell phone and start seeing what you can do about damage control.
All around the globe there are well-intentioned CEOs like Zhang Ruimin who do everything they can to seek excellence and drive that by listening to customers. But you can talk the talk and seek to walk the walk, but the bigger your company is, the harder it is to ensure that every single thing goes according to plan. Therein lies the rub.
You live and die based on the emotions of customer experience, but once they grab the torches and pitchforks and begin to storm the castle, all of your products are imperiled. If you are Zhang Ruimin, you hope you can put out this brushfire before it spreads. You have other products where the reviews are much better. Just how much has this one mess prejudiced the buying public?
The consumer horde can be somewhat forgiving if a brand it has grown to trust stumbles now and again. But, as with Tylenol or, in this case, Haier, quick and healing action is vital if you are to smooth the overall sense of customer experience as it relates to your product. In a larger sense, it is the task of any company that wishes to be truly design driven to watch the customer experience meter as if it is the barometer of your survival, and in many cases it is.
How do you let customer experience drive and permeate every aspect of your total company and all products or services, no matter how big or small your company may be?
Starting With Experience, Hopefully Ending With It
Richard Branson, Virgin Airlines, says, “I started an airline because the experience of flying on other airlines was so miserable.”
The driving force behind the design idea of the inception of many companies had to do with customer experience. Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera after his daughter asked, “Why can’t we look at the pictures right away?” The idea was good, at first. More than fifty years later, it could be made into a song to play at the funeral, where the photos were taken with digital cameras.
Getting how important experience is, and keeping that notion, is as vital to doing business for a design-driven company as anything you can grasp. Sometimes you can orchestrate everything to go your way. Other times you may have to go at the mission like riding a bucking bronco. The choice is up to you to do as much as you can up front, and that’s not easy or PCWorld wouldn’t have a list of “The 25 Worst Tech Products of all Time.”2
When the public is sorting through the good, bad, and ugly of products or services, you know where you want to be. But how can you ensure you don’t stumble? Well, the fact is that there is no one person or company with a perfect record in everything. There are examples, though, where they consistently aim to use customer experience to drive the design of products or services, and though focus groups and research are often used, they aren’t as effective as getting and staying on a gut-on-gut basis with customers. It’s not as hard as you might think because we all experience things ourselves. There is a silly line in the old but still funny movie classic Caddyshack where Chevy Chase gives golf advice by chanting the mantra: “Be the ball. Be the ball.” Well, it’s not so silly when you start aiming to “Be the customer.” That’s certainly how Steve Jobs is thinking when he is muttering, “Hey, I can’t use these damned buttons.” Or, “I can’t read from this screen. We need to fix that.” But even Steve Jobs or any person or company must keep fresh with that—constantly relearn and reapply and re-experience that, or they will slip from good to bad or ugly. It’s a constant, living approach for a business, and that’s why it’s a chore to get there, or stay there.
Being the Customer
Take a company like THX. If you have ever been in a movie theater, you have felt that company’s signature sound dopple in one of your ears, through your head, and out the other side. What a nice way to “show” how they work too, instead of just “tell.” The company does more than just certify the sound in theaters. As CE Pro put it, “If there’s one electronics logo that consumers across the world recognize, it’s THX. They see it on their favorite DVDs, electronic equipment, and even video games.”3 When the company is mentioned in relation to a product or venue, you expect a good experience. In a quite Pavlovian way, you are drooling for a rich sound happening.
The company began in the early 1980s when George Lucas was not happy with the consistency of sound in theaters. He was working on the third of his Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, and had put a lot of effort into the special effects, including sound, and didn’t want that work to be wasted. Stop and think about that for the moment. He’s a filmmaker, who should just be making movies, but he is motivated by having sat in a theater or two where he had a crappy experience, so he gets involved all the way to the delivery level of his product to the public.
THX was developed by Tomlinson Holman at the Lucasfilm company site and THX Ltd. (www.thx.com) has not rested on its initial laurel. The THX II Certified Car Audio System was recognized as one of the Best Car Audio Systems of 2006 by the editors of CNET. The company is expanding to home video systems and training programs, and in every instance it starts first with sitting down in the customer’s chair and getting inside that customer’s head.
How Do They Do That?
Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Let’s say you start with a personal experience you think could be improved, made current, or even approached from a different direction, and you say, “We’re going to design a superior customer experience; that’s the starting point.”
In the Harry Potter books and movies, there are magical ways to get around for wizards, and one is a portal. If you touch it you are whisked away to a far-away place, the other end of the connection. That’s how really well-designed products or services work: The product becomes an icon and a venue, a doorway or a portal, for a specific community to a unique experience, and that’s again where you start to create equity.
A product or service can equally be the portal to a negative customer experience. If your knees are jammed into your face and the flight steward is carrying some serious attitude and if you’re late and miss a connection and making a new one is a huge hassle and then your luggage turns up missing, then you have flown United. Well, let’s be fair. Any airline can take a pop when weather shifts, or when security at airports is tightened, or when any of a number of things that can go wrong do. But how they handle those and keep you moving with a smile on your face nevertheless all comes down to their being a successful experience portal or a bomb. It all loops back to: Do they know how a customer feels? Do they hire with that in mind so you don’t end up with a grumpy flight attendant or seating that has ergonomically sacrificed your ability to ever walk upright again? Do they steer all the factors they can toward being a positive part of your flight experience? Is everyone trained to make your travel consistently impeccable? And, if things go south because of some condition or event, are they are also prepared to make it right, quickly and pleasantly? That doesn’t always seem to happen with some companies, while it does with others. Customers notice. You probably have noticed, and it affects your decision process the next time you are making travel plans. You find yourself skipping over some better deals on a “flight from hell” to pay a bit more for an experience you can live with, maybe even enjoy.
Picture then how hard it is for someone like Zhang Ruimin, mentioned earlier, whose company puts out hundreds of products every year. This can go wrong, as it did with the washer/dryer mentioned. Then you are in a state of damage control instead of progressing forward. You can’t batten down the hatches and dive, dive, dive. You’ve got to stay out there and nurture your customer base back to that level of trust that was intended with each design.
Now, that was always hard enough in the past, but it is much harder today because of the media and interactivity of the Internet, as Haier found out when a majority of reviewers decided to let their teeth show when chatting about their experiences with the washer/dryer. The transparency of customer experience today is far greater than it has ever been, in part because of the power and immediacy of product review. Whole brands have nose-dived because of one product that was rushed to market and created problems that could be corrected—all this in an atmosphere where products must be rushed to market.
Add working quickly in an environment where customers can bite back along with all the other hurdles any product faces, and that’s the reason that doing everything right is so important and is so difficult. Doing it right means you work across a whole variety of organizations within and without your company. That requires a lot of alignment and focus and shared thinking. Very few people in most companies have the power to do that. The CEO is usually the one who does that, aligns the organization and suppliers and everyone else and says, “This stuff matters. This is how we’re going to do it. You’re empowered to make this happen, but I’m going to hold you accountable and responsible for everything that leads to the eventual customer experience.”
The concept we want to introduce so you can understand what to do and how to do it once you are prepared to make that leap is of an “experience chain” management style. This works whether you are dealing with a product or service and is not just about either of those. Experience chain management is about a careful choreography of a total company’s approach to driving every detail it can of a customer experience, from the supply chain to the management to the front-line employees to customer service and to the customers themselves.
A lot of the things that worked once are going to be challenged, and that’s why you are going to need to be design driven if you are going to survive the change. We mentioned that the experience chain is one connecting entity, from customer all the way back to the supply chain. One of the reasons that this whole idea of defining your customer experience and building out how it’s going to happen at all these points is harder is the fact that the way that the supply chain happens today is very different than it was five and especially ten years ago.
What’s changed is that there are so many entities involved. It used to be that companies really held very tightly to their supply chain and wanted to design all their own materials and develop all their own materials, and they closely held how it came in the system. So companies had a lot of infrastructure around development and manufacturing. That used to be how companies were successful; they really were great at that, they owned it, and it was proprietary.
The way it is today, it’s no longer everybody owns it. It’s all these other companies that you contract with and bring in, and then you hire someone to manage the logistics and it’s all leveraged and outsourced. In that scenario, how do you maintain consistency? Or strategic consistency is better; you don’t just want to be consistent, you want to be strategically consistent. How do you do that? You do that by defining very clearly what your customer experience and design language and everything is, and then have all your various partners and vendors comply to that and work to it. You run the risk of just ending up with hodgepodge by outsourcing so much. You have so many different viewpoints and methodologies coming into a process, that in the end it can affect what the consumer sees. It’s no longer something you know as well or own, but still you have to manage it. Doing it all and doing it well and being consistent and vigilant about change isn’t easy.
Endnotes
1 http://www1.shopping.com/xPR-Haier-XQG65-11SU
2 Tynan, Dan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time: These products are so bad they belong in the high-tech hall of shame,” PCWorld, May 26, 2006, http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125772-page,1/article.html
3 Archer, Robert, “THX to Launch Video Training Program: Video calibration training designed to provide installers with the skills to complete a home theater A/V solution for consumers,” www.cepro.com/article/thx_to_launch_video_training_program/K320, January 24, 2008.