Customer Experience Matters

I sometimes incorporate quotes in my blog from different sources that I think are insightful. So I decided to mashup two of them — one from Jack Welch and another from Howard Schultz. Interestingly, they combine nicely to describe different management styles…

Four Unique Management Styles

The bottom line: Are you the type of executive that you’d like to be?

With so many people saying that customer experience is very important, why doesn’t it improve significantly? This venn diagram explains one key problem…

Not enough execs are fully commited and involved

The bottom line: More execs need to walk the customer experience talk.

In my quest to find new insights (and interesting material for my blog), I ran across this quote attributed to Pablo Picasso:

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction

Picasso may not have been thinking about customer experience initiatives, but his insights are right on the mark. Any major intitiative requires significant change – typically crossing over many organizational boundaries.  For these efforts to succeed, many employees have to do things differently. As Picasso’s quote highlights, doing something differently requires the destruction of the status quo. And, as companies often find out the hard way, many people aren’t ready to make that shift.

So what keeps people from changing? Often times it is because they:

• Don’t understand the initiative
• Don’t agree that it’s in the company’s best interest (they may — or may not — be right)
• Don’t think it’s in their own personal best interest (they may — or may not — be right)
• Don’t like the people running the initiative
• Don’t like change of any type

So if firms want their customer experience efforts to be successful, they can’t just focus on the new stuff. Firms need to also understand what’s being “destroyed.” These efforts must examine exactly what’s changing – from the perspective of the employees.

To try and overcome people’s resistance, large-scale initiatives should include:

• Broad-based communications. Have an explicit plan for regular communications with employees using things like newsletters, intranet sites, and roadshows. Make sure you communicate what is happening, when it’s happening, and why it’s happening.
• Front-line feedback sessions. Before you change what employees do, include them in a discussion about how the changes will be initatives. These types of discussions will help to fine-tune the approach and also raise the awareness of some potentially big obstacles.
• Senior executive commitment. It’s much easier to resist change than to make it succeed. So employees need know that it’s important to embrace the change. To create that type of an enviornment, senior executives need to demonstrate their commitment to the effort in a very visible, sustained, and hands-on way. 

The bottom line: To turn customer experiences into a work of art (don’t forget, the quote came from Picasso), firms must destroy a lot of status-quo. That’s why one of the principles of Experience-Based Differentiation is “Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.” If you’re not prepared to understand and deal with the destruction, then don’t bother starting the process.

Management insights aren’t just the perview of business execs and management gurus. Key lessons about customer experience can come from many different places. In this post, I’ll turn to a quote that’s been attributed to Mohatma Gandhi:

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.

So what can we learn about customer experience from these words of wisdom?

Firms need clearly articulated customer experience ”fundamentals.”

I think that Gandhi’s quote means that organizations start to fall apart when they compromise their fundamental beliefs. Over time, these compromises can undermine, or even eliminate, the core value of the organization.

Increasing profits represents a very clear mission for firms — everyone can understand the concept and most companies have an army of accountants tracking performance against this mission. But customer experience visions are often much less formed and not nearly as well tracked.

Without a clear vision about customer experience, firms will constantly feel the pressure to make decisions that optimize the well-defined goal (profits) at the expense of less-defined goals (like customer experience). It’s not that profitability is bad (I am a big believer in higher profits), but firms need to think of profits more as an outcome than as a goal. That’s why companies need to more clearly articulate their beliefs about how they create value — which more often than not involves interacting with customers.

The bottom line: Understanding your customer experience “fundamental” beliefs is critical to sustainability. 

I thought that I’d share with you one of the great things that I learned while working for GE (over a decade ago). In a training session, Jack Welch told us:

Deal with the world as it is, not how you’d like it to be

His words didn’t hit me as being particularly profound at the time, but I have really come to appreciate their wisdom. All too often, I hear executives discuss their strategies within the context of how they ”expect” the world to operate. They often believe that customers think about their company and its products more often than they actually do, that people and processes can be changed more rapidly than they can, and that their strategies translate directly into implementation plans — which all too often they don’t.

I’ve seen this problem show up a lot when situations are bad. Rather than facing tough problems, some executives find it easier to act like the issues don’t exist. Bad idea! You can’t make problems go away by pretending that they aren’t there. All that happens is that mistaken underlying assumptions end up driving bad decisions.

To apply this wisdom to customer experience, I recommend that you periodically (that’s my nice way of saying “often”) step back and ask yourself (as well as your staff): ”Do we have a clear picture of what customers really want?” But don’t just move ahead if the answer is “no.” In the long run, you’ll want to put in place processes that help you answer “yes” to that question more often (see my post on Experience-Based Differentiation).

I hope that you get as much out of Jack’s words as I have.