Customer Centricity: It Was Inside [Your Company] All Along

Customer centricity has been talked to death in recent years, but despite their best efforts, many companies are still not getting the results they need, either for themselves or for their customers.

Unfortunately, many of those companies are going about it in a way that can’t really get them to where they want to be.

All too often, when a company wants to improve their customer experience, they rely on the same tried and true approach that works so well for everything else, from supply chains to Human Resources. They study the problem, define its component parts, and assign responsibilities to relevant departments complete with ambitious yet manageable goals.

It’s a highly efficient approach that’s doomed to fail.

If customers experienced each part in isolation, the old approach would work beautifully. But, of course, each customer has just one continuous experience that moves through and between departments and goes wherever the customer feels like going. And when their path feels fragmented and disjointed, attempts at customer-centricity feel like just another variation of:

“Our customers are our highest priority… thank you for your patience...”

To create real customer-centricity, the kind that actually works, you have to get back to your customer-centric roots.

All successful companies were, at some point, intensely focused on understanding their customers and adapting to their needs. It’s what gave them a foothold in the market and enabled them to rise above their competitors. Over time though, that obsessiveness tends to fade as the focus shifts to building the organization itself.  

To get back to those customer centric roots, you have to take your organizational structure out of the equation (for a moment) and take a fresh look at your customers and define what kind of experiences they’d love. Then, with that in mind, define exactly what changes need to happen in order to deliver those experiences.

It may sound like a daunting task, but you don’t need to overhaul your organization to start making improvements. In fact, you can make improvements at any time with the resources you have on hand.

Looking at indicators such as churn, support requests, social media comments, product reviews, or in-house research, pick one aspect of the experience you’d like to target. Chances are, somebody is already working on improving that particular stage, which is great, but many customer experience problems can’t be solved at the point where the customer actually experiences the problem.

In many cases, customer experience problems are rooted in events that happened much earlier in their journey, and those root causes are often masked by positive experiences that hit every KPI.

For example, who hasn’t been inspired by an exciting sales pitch only to find the product doesn’t live up to the promises?

That’s a pretty stark example but the same kind of dynamic can happen in countless subtle ways throughout the customer experience.

One that I see fairly often is when customers are surprised by contract terms when they hit the renewal stage. It’s a problem that’s created in the sales and onboarding stages, but it doesn’t become apparent until much later in the relationship.

For the area you’d like to improve, your goal is to make it as customer centric as it can be. And to do this, you’ll need to bring together team leaders from all relevant points in the customer journey and, armed with insights and data, brainstorm ways to fix the issue and improve the overall experience and to establish the processes that will actually make it happen.

It doesn’t stop there though. That’s just a meeting to talk about a problem, which is nothing new.

The important part is what happens next. It doesn’t even matter if you solve the problem on the first attempt. What matters is the lines of customer-centric communication and collaboration you just set up. As you strengthen these connections by working on this and other problems, your company will become more and more genuinely customer centric.

When it comes to customer experience, there is no end point. There is no moment where you can say “problem solved.” Customer experience is an ongoing and evolutionary process. Your company embraced this in the early stages to drive acquisition and growth. And, with the right practices in place, you can bring the focus back to the customer and drive the next stage of growth.

Cheers to a Happier 2018! Some Things That Made Us Happy in 2017

As we reflect on the year that was, and look ahead to what will be, we wanted to share some of what crossed our screen making us happy in 2017.

Radio from Around the World

Bringing the world a little bit closer, spin the globe to tune into a radio station and hear what they are listening to ‘over there’.

 

Panda

   vs.

Snowman

We love the perseverance of this guy.  

Three Ways:
The Old Fashioned

An old fashioned is a good standard, but to give a bit of a twist here are some tips.

When the Moon Obscured the Sun

A big event of the summer season was the eclipse. Here's the view we had in Seattle.

Generative Art

Generative art is compelling because they are most often highly ordered yet simple systems where the author cedes some control over the final product, this site gives a peek at some works we enjoyed.

Puppy 

    vs. 

Doorstop

Doy-yoy-yoyoy-yoing

12th-Century Iranian Poem
A Vision Of Solidarity We Need Today

The poem in this piece has a great introduction but it is a reminder from the past of how to bridge boundaries.

This Little Bird

Enjoying the simple things in life.

Gravitational Waves:
Ripples in Spacetime

Three billion years ago, two black holes  collided, sending a shockwave through the universe. Since then, life on Earth evolved to detect it right as it passed by.     

Comet Oumuamua

The first interstellar object ever observed in our solar system passed right through and didn't even hit us!

Startup Customer Experience: Building Customer Communities

I've been getting this question a lot from startups so I thought I'd share my two-cents:

“How should I start building a Customer Community?”

For a startup, a strong user community can be a powerful tool for engaging customers and getting in-depth feedback on product features and the total user experience. But, if it’s poorly implemented, a community can end up frustrating users and draining company resources.  

To get started building a truly great customer community, you’ll need to answer three big questions.

What is the primary purpose of the customer community?

Your community can, and should, serve multiple business needs, from enabling customers to support each other, to building advocacy groups to product development and innovation. But when companies, particularly startups, try to build it all at once, their efforts get diffused across too many priorities and it ends up underperforming on all fronts.

The most effective (and easiest) way to start is by focusing on one area that will drive the most value for your business and to build out your strategy and team to support this one value. Then, with a solid foundation, you can begin layering on additional functionality.

The team at CMX has created a fabulous framework to help businesses define how communities should fit within their organizations. The SPACEI Model outlines where in your business the community will bring value. One thing to note when applying this SPACEI model, clearly the Customer Support/Success term refers to a narrow definition of the term but any of these could be used for CS.

With the SPACEI Model in hand, bring together the relevant stakeholders to determine the top priority for the community and how you will use it to drive value for the company.

How will you incorporate community feedback into your organization?

Your community will become a key component of the customer journey. As such, it’s important to clearly define how it fits within their journey, how you will create built-in feedback loops, and how you will integrate that feedback into your organization.

Communities succeed when their members feel they are being heard and that you are acting on their recommendations. Creating a strong feedback loop with customers takes organizational commitment and, startups should not underestimate the time it will take to manage.

How will you measure success?

A well-run community can deliver tremendous ROI, from generating referrals to increasing customer lifetime value to diverting costs from your technical support teams. But to sustain and grow your  community, you’ll need the numbers to back it up.

To help ensure long-term success, the critical KPIs should be defined early in the planning process and woven throughout the design and implementation. As you’re determining your metrics, don’t get caught up in analysis-paralysis. The SPACEI Model has done a great job of identifying the most useful key metrics for each of the community types.  

For more details on the SPACEI model and key measurement criteria, head on over to the CMX Hub and take a look. Their website is full of great content around community. http://cmxhub.com/article/the-space-model/

Data in Different Forms: Customer Journey Tune-Up

About the Data in Different Forms Series

One of the unintended benefits of my career are the conversations I get to have with experts working in different parts of organizations, bridging needs to knowledge. These posts build on conversations with clients and friends. They come from different parts of organizations (data scientists, business analysts, software engineering, sales, marketing and customer leads). They often think of their customers differently. This is a place to share some of those ideas providing a peek into what is happening on the other side of the organization.

Part 2: Custom Journey Tune-Up

I've been having many conversations lately about customer journey mapping and ways to keep it alive within the organization.

For any organization, customer journey mapping is an essential tool for understanding how their customers interact with their organization and derive value.

Many organizations invest considerable money and labour in the creation of these maps, especially if they’re doing it right and including representative voices from across the organization.

However, those maps go stale if they’re not embedded within organizational culture and connected to ongoing business processes and tools like product road maps, service design, or churn management.  

One of the most effective ways to keep the customer journey map fresh is to implement customer journey tune-up meetings.

Your customer journey tune-up meetings should bring together representative groups within the organization for a structured discussion of how recent organizational changes, from acquisition strategy to product releases to service changes, have impacted the customer journey.

Each stage of the customer journey, from onboarding to engagement to ongoing retention, should be examined and both positive and negative impacts should be laid on the table.

To take the example of an organization that has made recent product changes:

• A recent release improved functionality such that queries of training materials dropped. Clients became more self sufficient with the tool = win!
• Another release led to deeper user engagement, and over time, this would likely track to higher retention.
• Conversely, another release led to an increase in support tickets which meant more education was needed to manage similar releases in the future.

In order to make this more data-driven, incorporate information you have available and have been actively or passively tracking: support tickets, changes in usage patterns, and actual churn data.

If you run a customer journey tune-up quarterly, you’ll keep the customer journey map alive and show the organization how product changes flow through and impact different parts of the organization, as well as showing customer interactions and outcomes.

Data in Different Forms: Using Sales Data to [Re]Shape Customer Relationships

About the Data in Different Forms Series

One of the unintended benefits of my career are the conversations I get to have with experts working in different parts of organizations, bridging needs to knowledge. These posts build on conversations with clients and friends. They come from different parts of organizations (data scientists, business analysts, software engineering, sales, marketing and customer leads). They often think of their customers differently. This is a place to share some of those ideas providing a peek into what is happening on the other side of the organization.

Post 1: Using Sales Data to [Re]shape Customer Relationships   

Ah, Sales data. Your company’s Sales leadership (hopefully) relies on it to drive priorities and tactics. But the same data can, and should, be used to drive decision making far beyond the Sales department. Sales data is just another form of customer data… and it’s a treasure trove of information on customer behaviours that can be used to drive business decisions.

Bill Kinneman: Sales Data for Innovation

Bill has been an early navigator of business intelligence with a deep history in e-tailing (Rent the Runway, GILT, now VP BI @ SLICE). As a data analyst, he is skilled at many forms of analysis but reminds us that there is foundational work that most organizations can pursue without delving into deep analytics.

Any organization trying to optimize services based on sales data has many tools at hand to start their analysis.

Here are some steps to consider with your own data:

1. Examine your sales data for spikes and troughs: If you’re just starting out, select a time period: last week? last 6 Wednesdays? this time last quarter/year?

2. Determine the triggers: You have obvious sources like what your business controls (sales, inventory), and the not-so-obvious sources for these anomalies (sporting events, weather events) that could be a trigger for changes in sales.

3. Test your hypotheses: Implement some service offerings or marketing pieces for different segments of your market to validate your ideas. You can start to filter out your hypothetical variables (for example, is something driven by a brand feature? An offer? A segment or demographic).

4. Uncover the stories: When it comes to gathering and processing data, you have almost too many options to choose from. If you are new to this, you’ll probably want to start with free or inexpensive ones like the ones from Google, Facebook, or Canopy Labs.

Following these steps, your sales data can guide innovation efforts for your organization. Let’s turn to another perspective on customer data, using this for informing how you service your clients.

Ray Poynter: Sales data for client management.

Ray is a recognized expert in research, and is most often cited sharing innovations in marketing research to help support business decision making. As the head of his own practice, Ray has used data to drive priorities around client management.

As Ray points out, you can “use sales data for managing difficult clients to know which customers you should be paying attention to.”

Difficult clients can be a challenge for any client services team. They can be challenging because they often change scope, or just have a personality that is disrespectful to your staff.

Ray’s team started to think about these clients, beyond numerical profitability to issues of productivity and the true cost of managing these accounts. Think about this in terms of your staff. If they are unhappy with a difficult client there is an emotional burden that creeps into the organization. And, if you lose staff, there is the cost of dealing with employee churn for replacing these team members.

The approach they took is one that many of us could follow:

• Look at the inputs you have around projects: timesheet information, billings, net margin

• Look at inputs from pre-sales: number of proposals that become jobs

• Gather some qualitative input from your staff to help assess emotional impact: Have them score clients by asking questions about clients (i.e. do they interrupt, how often do they contact you outside of scheduled meetings)

• Add in a record of broader impact: both timekeeping and record keeping

My own experience echoes Ray’s assessment, it turns out that the clients your staff does not want to work with may not actually be profitable (in both strict and broader definitions).

In Ray’s analysis, those that asked for unpaid extras were the least profitable and it raised many internal questions on whether they wanted to continue to pursue work with those clients, and certainly impacted scope management.

This data-driven approach helps you identify which clients are “…consuming far more than they are adding as clients.”

Sales data is a powerful and frequently overlooked source of customer data, but customer data and customer insights are all around you if you know where, and how, to look for them. In the examples above, we covered two effective and easily accessible approaches. The value hidden in your data doesn’t stop there though. It is a matter of looking around to understand how data can be found in different forms than how you often consider, and can be re-framed in service of your business needs.

Big Data: Stretch Before You Invest

A friend of mine, visiting my home, picked up the latest book I am reading and was a bit horrified to see that I had dog-eared my books (yes, oldschool hard-cover).

The book, Stretch by Scott Sonenshein, shares the author’s research and other stories about how organizations (and individuals) can do better by curbing their chasing mentality and embrace stretching.

For businesses, as Sonenshein points out, too many are chasing by operating under the belief that they need more to do more. But in doing so, they’re missing a huge opportunity to do more with what they already have.

Stretching isn’t about frugality, though.

It’s about driving better outcomes by embracing your resource constraints to drive innovation.

One of my favorite parts was when Sonenshein brought in Structuration Theory to explain how stretching functions within organizations.

If it’s been awhile since your last sociology course, Structuration Theory is a concept developed by the influential social theorist Anthony Giddens about how our actions shape the organizational structures we operate in.

As Sonenshein points out,

“On this view, we are never fully constrained by big structures because our actions, in part, create these structures. At the same time, we’re also never completely free from big structures because they always shape, even in the subtlest way what we do”

Structuration Theory may be intensely debated when applied to human behaviour, but it’s a powerful framework when looking at organizations.  As organizational theorist Martha Feldman puts it, we shape the resources available to us to create new things.

So what does all this theory mean for you and your company?

Just as your organizational structures can limit organizational success, you can modify those structures in some fairly simple ways to open up new possibilities for growth.

When working with client organizations, I find that one of the biggest untapped resources is the vast amount of data they’ve collected over the years.

That data is typically a goldmine. So why do companies so often let it sit idle?

Most of the time it comes down to those pesky structural barriers between different parts of the organization and how each of them treats data.

Even without heavy investments in big data, there is still a lot an organization can achieve by looking at available data sources.

For example:

• Better tracking of prospect (or lead) behaviour to understand the triggers that move someone through the path to purchase, enabling the sales team to focus their attention
• Combining sales data with other macro indicators (weather, holiday calendars, competitive launches) to develop marketing strategies
• Gathering customer usage data from the product team to build out better services to ensure their success with your products

This is not to say heavy investments in big data aren’t worth it.

Done right, they can dramatically expand a company’s capabilities and deliver tremendous returns.

If those investments are driven by the same old chasing mentality though, the results are likely to be a tremendous disappointment all around. But by staying scrappy and stretching to get every bit of value out of the resources you already have, you’ll make continuous improvements that get you where you want to be.