The single biggest piece of advice I give to senior executives setting out on the Customer Experience journey is to STOP.
Yes seriously, the vast majority of CX efforts are completely misaligned.
Customer Experience Efforts Misaligned
Don’t get me wrong the intentions are good. Unfortunately, it goes something like this:
Top Team are listening and decide they need to get with this customer centricity thinking.
Senior Management makes noises that the customer is THE thing the business must focus on.
The Executive engage the marketing guys to get with it and start pushing the message.
Functional leaders hear the noise and bluster. They start using the language, whilst thinking this is just more fluff and nonsense. They make the right moves for now but keep their heads down, hoever they know this will go the same way as so many other ‘strategic initiatives’.
Fundamentally functional heads carry on working with the out of date reward system that promotes industrial age thinking and practice.
The Executive see the repeating inertia i.e. results not coming through apathy and indifference and decide their business isn’t really an Amazon.
Top Team then reverts to just getting better at what we are doing, then when someone in ‘our industry’ proves it we will follow.
Functional leaders breathe a sigh of relief and invest even more in industrial age systems and training. The illusion of doing something, in this case, is actually worse than doing nothing.
The businesses failure is noted by customers who move to those who do understand and deliver Customer Experience success.
The company becomes another footnote in the history books. Talked about at business schools and picked apart because of the failure to get the new Outside-In customer-centric mindset.
ACXM Training Orlando 26th March:
for CX improvement consultancy and training, customer-centric culture transformation, the ultimate rockstar team building experience and rockstar keynote speakers.
Interviewed by Rockstar.cx on the theme of Outside-In. Here a few 2-3 minute chunks- do feel free to download and share, oh and sign-up for Rockstar.cx cos I know there are some excellent interviews coming up, the most recent with ex Zappos evangelist, Jon Wolske.
I was deeply honoured by the PEX community at the annual conference in Florida last month and received the Global Community 2018 Award. Needless to say (but I will) this is as much down to you guys and your great transformational work, so I graciously excepted the Award on your behalf. Thank you so much :
Outside-In is a regular theme during most of my keynotes, not least this last week here in Florida. A question asked from the floor related to the 30-second elevator test “can you explain to the CEO what this stuff is, why it is different, and how it reframes the work we do?”. I guess I was about to fudge and say this needs more than 30 seconds, and then remembered my two-slide explanation!
So, for those guys looking for a simple explanation, these two slides will do the job. I have put a bit of narrative in there also.
120+ in Florida at the keynote, 16 January 2018
Florida keynote to top team of major global industrial corporation
The old, industrial-age traditional way of doing business. We make products (and services). We look for the market to sell them in. We segment customers by circumstance and pitch our products to those segments. We add variations to the products to better fit certain niche segments. We build back-end systems and digital capabilities in this increasingly complex world. We are rigid, functionally oriented and abhor change.
The new Outside-In customer-centric way. We identify the customers we would like to do business with. We understand their needs (even when they may not know them themselves) and specific Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s). We categorise customers by need. We then create the capability to deliver to these categories the SCO’s (both products, people and digital). Progressively we manage new and existing customer expectations to deliver success without exception. We are agile, innovative and attuned to 21st century needs.
Let me know if this works for you.
Ciao, Steve
For the curious, the original slides came from a deck presented as a keynote in Sydney, Australia 3 years ago.
You can access that here: http://bit.ly/SydneyPEX
Google tells us that lean thinking and practice has had its heyday. However, the overlay of ‘digital everything’ makes processes more important than ever, so what are the leading Lean Six Sigma articles of the last 12 months?
5th: Why Lean Six Sigma is a necessity in every industry
Intelligence Quality Intelligence Quality is a Management and Business consulting firm that specializes in Lean and Six Sigma strategies.
“There is a false notion about Lean Six SIgma wherein it is a waste of money to incorporate the concept in the company, however, one fails to realize that like any other department, Lean Six Sigma is a necessary method that every industry must follow in order to rectify their financial curve.”
4th: 5 Process Improvement Strategy Trends of Future-Ready Firms | AccountingWEB
Dustin Hostetler
Dustin Hostetler is a Lean Six Sigma consultant and shareholder of Boomer Consulting Inc. As a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt with extensive experience working inside a large regional CPA firm, he has taken proven Lean techniques from the manufacturing floor and tailored them to bring groundbreaking value to public accounting firms
“The firms that have been comfortable with status quo, quite frankly, are going to be rudely awakened as the intersection of technology and process continues to change the game around them. I can’t help but think of companies like Blockbuster and Kodak that were at one time comfortable with the status quo.”
As a provider of LSS services and resources Scmula helps people ‘get’ techniques and approaches, tried, tested and proven.
“Lean Six Sigma is one of the most advanced and effective methodologies available for business process improvement and optimization. It is especially adept in battling a wide range of problems and inefficiencies. To help better understand and deal with waste, this approach classifies them into the 8 Forms of Deadly Waste. This classification is important because it makes waste much easier to uncover and then eradicate. It also helps you identify environmental improvement opportunities.”
One of the leading providers of training in the space periodically publishes ‘books most read’.
“What’s a good book to read if you want to succeed at process improvement? Is Lean Six Sigma all about manufacturing? Are there any about the service industry? Healthcare? Government?…”
“Do you ever walk into a store and know at a glance where to find what you need? Do you notice that seemingly long lines can often move really quickly? Do you find yourself wondering why things don’t go horribly wrong more often? Lean Six Sigma is at work!”
1. Design digital experiences around the customer needs, not around your customer mythology
Despite mountains of data customer insight remains an elusive animal. As a direct consequence, digital is frequently applied across existing processes without fully understanding customer pain points and the real Successful Customer Outcome.
Making invalid assumptions can irritate and permanently drive customers away. Take grocery checkout for example where retailers digitize an existing experience based on assumptions of customers wants. The resulting experience may still be fractured, with faulty scanners (they break a lot), long lines, and the more than necessary Associates to provide support for glitches. Not a great customer experience. If, however you develop an understanding of customer needs (even when customers do not know them) you may discover the checkout process is not required at all. Eradicating that process meets customer’s desires in terms of speed, convenience, and simplicity.
Amazons (i) checkout-less retail stores, walk in walk out enabled by scanning your phone on entry, scanning goods as you move around the store, and then scanning your phone on departure with automatic billing, provides just such an experience. In addition to improving the experience, costs are reduced and the customers come back for more and thereby grow revenues. In fact, this triple-crown benefit is a sure fire way of measuring any customer experience transformation.
2. Drive digital initiatives to simplify and improve convenience
Customer Research demonstrates the disconnect between what executives think customers value in digital, compared to working out their needs in a more objective and structured way. A technique such as the Successful Customer Outcome Canvas (SCOC)(ii) provides a step by step approach to articulating actual needs and aligning the experiences to deliver them. The resulting insight in terms of a set of objective measures based on needs allows the organization to question every interaction in the context of ‘does this contribute to the SCO?’ and if not, how do we remove it?
Uber(iii) are a terrific example of ‘one click simple’ with the apps user interface designed around understanding the overall Successful Customer Outcome and then delivering an optimum number of interactions. Providing this digital experience helps meet the customer’s desire to move efficiently, pay digitally, and provide feedback in the moment. Part of that ‘Successful Customer Outcome Canvas’ insight was in removing the anxiety of where is the car and how long do I wait? You can see the car and driver speeding towards you on the app.
3. Categorize your customers by need, rather than segmenting by circumstance.
Dealing with customers as segments (age, income, zip code etc.) misses the vital personalisation that digital excels at. By force fitting customers into standardized processes suited to segments creates friction and fractured experiences. Diagnosing objective needs may, for instance, highlight the digital savviness (or not) of a category of customer, and in doing so allow you to create a bespoke experience. Rather than industrial age segmentation, organizations that adopt Outside-In(iv) categorization meet and evolve customer expectations in an informed way with greater empathy and the resulting trust that “you have my back”.
Are you ready? Ask yourself these questions (be honest and not complacent!)
a. Are digital initiatives aligned to Successful Customer Outcomes with optimized touch points, or are they designed around internal functional considerations?
b. Is your approach to innovation Outside-In and not restricted to departments, internal specialisms, legacy systems, regulations and last century mindsets?
c. Are you tapping in-the-moment real-time analytics to understand what your customers are experiencing as it happens, and then course correcting those experiences as they occur?
d. How are you managing your customer’s digital expectations? Are you keeping them informed of developing digital services?
e. What mechanism are you using to incorporate new digital learnings into the customer experiences? And are those learnings (next practices) gathered from outside of your sector, or are they just industry best practices?
CEO BPG > Academy of Customer Experience Board > C-Level Advisor > BPM Author & Keynote > OPEX Judge > Customer Obsessed
Astute CEO’s (think Jeff Bezos – Amazon, Tony Hsieh – Zappos, for instance) see a direct connection between Great customer experiences and winning the triple crown, i.e., lower costs of business, greater revenue and enhanced service.
Customer Experience Efforts Misaligned
