To everyone who is celebrating the holiday: Happy Thanksgiving!

In honor of the day, here are 6 things for which customer experience change agents should give thanks: 

1. Poor customer experience. Forrester’s customer experience index (CxPi) shows that most industries do a poor job with customer experience; so there’s a lot of opportunity to make a difference. (P.S. I’m currently working on the next CxPi.)
2. Engaged employees. Employees don’t wake up in the morning hoping to make things hard for customers; they’re more than willing to get on the customer experience bandwagon. As Walt Disney said: “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
3. The customer’s voice. There’s nothing more powerful for gaining alignment inside a company than clear feedback from customers. That’s why it’s critical to create a strong Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Program.
4. Customer complaints. Every piece of negative feedback represents an opportunity for improvement. Don’t squander this critical asset.
5. Good customer service. Consumers really care about customer service; these interactions represent critical moments of truth. And those that care about customer service, tend to be much more loyal. So there’s a lot of upside in improving customer service.
6. Senior executive commitment. Customer experience transformation isn’t easy; it requires a multi-year journey. Sustaining the effort requires strong support from the executive team.

The bottom line: Have a great day… and be thankful!

Yesterday was a real “fun” day. When I arrived at the San Francisco airport at noon for my 1:40 flight, I was informed that the flight was delayed until 7:30 PM. After a few seconds it sunk in — I wasn’t going to make it home last night.

The agent didn’t really answer my questions about what had happened and told me that there weren’t any options on any airline that could get me home any sooner (although she didn’t seem to look very hard). She didn’t apologize and didn’t even seem to notice the enormous inconvenience to me.  

After I told her how horrible the situation was, she gave me some vouchers for free food. As a business traveler with an expense account, this gesture did nothing to dampen the prospects of my 6 hour delay. So I asked if she could at least give me a pass into the Admiral’s Club. She said that she couldn’t do that; all she could do is give me the food vouchers (compare this with my post about Ritz-Carlton).

It turned out that the delay was caused by mechanical problems; so it was totally American Airline’s fault. And the plane ended up leaving even later and I got home at 5:30 AM in the morning — about 7.5 hours later than scheduled.

 Here’s how I’d rate American’s customer service with my C.A.R.E.S. model:

• Communication: D
  The airline didn’t provide much information at all about the situation
• Accountability: E
  The airline didn’t try and do anything proactively to remedy the situation (like getting a plane quicker) or offer any options that lessened the inconvenience
• Responsiveness: D-
  The airline didn’t notify me in advance of the delay and didn’t try to rebook me on another flight. 
• Empathy: D
  The pilot was the only American Airline employee that apologized for the inconvenience.
• Solution: D
  A seven hour delay with no real attempt at remedying the situation for travelers is not an acceptable solution.

To put this in perspective, I’m a Platinum member of American’s loyalty program and am very close to reaching the Executive Platinum level (the airline’s highest level). So this is an indication of how American treats its best customers.

While American Airlines can’t avoid all situations where it inconveniences travelers, it certainly can (and must) do much better job with its service recovery process (responding to problem situations) and improve its corporate culture which is not very customer-centric.

The bottom line:  American Airlines does not seem to care about customer experience.

Before getting on my flight to Madrid, I picked up U.S. News & World Report. It’s not my typical in-flight reading, but the topic caught my attention: America’s Best Leaders 2009. Here were a few of the highlights from the issue:

• Jim Sinegal, CEO of Costco, shared his view on employee engagement:
  • “We try to give a message of quality in everything we do, and we think that that starts with the people. It doesn’t do much good to have a quality image, whether it’s with the facility or whether it’s with the merchandise, if you don’t have real quality people taking care of your customers.”
• Corey Booker, Mayor of Newark, shared advice that he follows:
  • “My mom used to say that who you are speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you say.” Also look at a previous post with this quote from Booker: “Life is about focus. What you focus on, you become. If you focus on nothing, you become nothing.
• Roy Williams, head coach of North Carolina, listed his three guiding leadership principles:
  • “(1) Everyone on the team must focus on the same goal. It’s my job to effectively communicate those goals to the team; (2) Emphasize those goals every day; and (3) Understand that although everyone has a common goal, individuals also have goals, needs, and dreams that must be cared for.”

The bottom line: These are great leadership lessons to follow.

I recently published a report called Sixteen Voice Of The Customer Recommendations. To uncover this advice, I analyzed the 40 nominations submitted for Forrester’s Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Award from earlier this year. I examined responses to the question: “What lessons have you learned that would be most valuable to other firms?“

The analysis uncovered these 16 recommendations across 5 categories:

The report included more than 50 snippets of advice in these areas. Here are a few of my favorites: 

“VoC collection, reporting, and action (and NPS, in our case) is a journey — culture shift, statistics, change management, etc. — it takes time, you learn as you go, the journey never ends. Take it in bite-size chunks, otherwise you’ll choke.” (Consumer electronics company)

“We have found the open-ended feedback from customer surveys to be even more vital to our actions than the analysis of the scores themselves. It is this feedback that gets to the core of the voice of customer and provides the ‘why’ to the ‘what’ (the score itself).” (Insurance company)

“You have to democratize the VoC feedback. When you put the VoC data in the hands of the organization, you enable them to make interpretations and to contextualize the voice of the customer into the business problems they’re trying to solve.” (Healthcare company)

The bottom line: It’s time to ramp up your VoC efforts!

In honor of World Usability Day (WUD) 2009, I’m publishing a second post today. As part of our annual Customer Experience Rankings, we get consumers to answer several questions about their experiences with companies. One of those questions is “How easy is it to work with this firm?“

For our analysis, we take the percentage of consumers that say the company was easy to work with and subtract the percentage that say the company was difficult to work with. Using this net score, we ranked 113 companies. Here are the top 25 firms from last year’s rankings:

We just got the data back from our 2009 survey, so I am about to start the analysis for this year’s Customer Experience Index rankings. Look for the results in early December.

The bottom line: Every company should strive to be easier to work with.

Welcome to World Usability Day (WUD) 2009. This year’s theme is Designing For A Sustainable World. Sounds like a great objective to me!

Why are Websites confusing, phone menus hard to use, stores difficult to navigate, and new products a struggle to configure?  Because usability is an incredibly underappreciated domain. That’s why I really like the concept of WUD. But it will only have an impact if a lot of people start doing something differently because of WUD. As Mahatma Gandhi said…

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.  

So here is something that you can start doing. For every decision that you make, ask and answer the three questions of Scenario Design that we’ve been using at Forrester for more than a decade (which I also endorsed for National Design Week):

1. Who are your users?
2. What are their goals?
3. How can you help them achieve those goals?

The bottom line: Let’s improve the world!

I just read an interesting interview in Forbes with Simon Cooper, president of the Ritz-Carlton, who provides some insight into Ritz-Carlton’s customer-centric culture. Here are some of Cooper’s remarks:

• We focus on three fundamentals. First, location–making sure we get absolutely the best location. Second, product–building the right physical product for what our guests want today and what they will want tomorrow. That’s the platform. Third, people–our ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. They animate the platform.
• We use what we call “lineup,” which is a Ritz-Carlton tradition… we want every single hotel, everywhere in the world, every partner, every shift, to utilize lineup, which typically takes around 15 minutes every day…That is a wonderful training and communication tool, where every department layers on the department message.
• Part of the lineup everywhere around the world is a “wow story,” which means talking about great things that our ladies and gentlemen have done.
• We entrust every single Ritz-Carlton staff member, without approval from their general manager, to spend up to $2,000 on a guest. And that’s not per year. It’s per incident… The concept is to do something, to create an absolutely wonderful stay for a guest.
• A culture is built on trust. And if leadership doesn’t live the values that it requires of the organization, that is the swiftest way to undermine the culture.

My take: As you may remember, I wrote about my less-than-ideal experience at the Ritz-Carlton in Puerto Rico. After I wrote that post (and complained at the front desk), one of the managers called me, apologized for our problems, and offered us a free dinner in the hotel’s nicest restaurant. It was a great meal; and it created a positive impression of the hotel.

As you can see from Cooper’s remarks, this type of customer-centric behavior is no accident. Ritz-Carlton empowers its “ladies and gentlemen” to deliver great experiences for customers. To get a better sense of how this hotelier operates, take a look at the Ritz-Carlton Gold Standards.

If you want to develop a customer-centric culture, here are some additional posts that should help:

• 6 C’s Of Customer-Centric DNA 
• Free Book: The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience
• Management Imperative #1: Invest In Culture As A Corporate Asset 
• Execs Need To Focus More On Culture 
• Tesco Showcases Strategy + Culture 
• Discussing Zappos’ Culture With Tony Hsieh 
• Joie de Vivre Engages Employees And Everyone Wins

The bottom line: A customer-centric culture takes purposeful leadership.

I’ve been helping several executive teams chart their customer experience journeys. The work typically centers around strategy, culture, organization, processes, and leadership. So I am almost always discussing the role of the executive team; which is a critical component of the journey.

Since customer experience journeys represent multi-year transformational programs, it is critical that the executive team have the appropriate level of commitment to the program. If they’re not committed, then they shouldn’t even start.

I often refer to the 8 signs of executive commitment from a previous post, In order to make that content easier to use, I created this free downloadable eBook: The 8 Signs Of Executive Commitment.

I’ve also turned the list into a self-test that can facilitate discussions. What’s your exec team’s score on the 8 signs?

The bottom line: Customer experience transformation requires strong executive commitment.

Yum! Brands (owners of brands like KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) identified three key initiatives across its brands: 1) selling more healthy items; 2) offering a greater variety of drinks; and 3) changing menus according to the time of day. But the company was not in a position to take on these bold initiatives. According to an article in the Economist:

The main obstacle to such ideas was Yum!’s corporate culture, in which different brands and operations in different countries had little to do with one another, slowing the spread of new initiatives.

When Yum!’s CEO Dave Novack visited its very successful Chinese organization, he noticed employees using terms such as “future back vision”, “bold request” and “action versus activity” which had created ”a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo.” It turns out that many of these ideas came from John O’Keeffe, a management consultant.

That’s why the company engaged O’Keeffe on what Novack calls the “biggest culture-change initiative in the world today.” O’Keeffe helped create Yum!’s “Achieving Breakthrough Results” program which was designed to be passed down from manager to subordinates across the company — starting with the company’s top 200 executives.

My take: Kudos to Novack for recognizing that Yum!’s culture is a critical element of the company’s performance. He’s clearly practicing the first of my 6 New Management Imperatives: “Invest in culture as a corporate asset. “

While CEOs can push some change into their organizations, corporate cultures determine the effectiveness of those efforts. In some cases, a corporate culture will accelerate results while in others it will dampen or even block the results.

If corporate culture is hampering your company’s performance, then it’s time to address the issue. Rather than continuing to waste money and time on partially successful initiatives, you should make the long-term investment in improving your corporate culture.

The bottom line: Figure out if your culture is an asset or an obstacle.

The Web is becoming an increasingly important channel for companies, yet online experiences leave a lot to be desired. Our research shows that most sites have poor usability and they don’t reinforce key brand attributes. That’s why I worked with Ron Rogowski (the primary author) on a research report that created a concept called Emotional Experience Design, which we define as:

Creating interactions that engage users by catering to their emotional needs.

Emotional Experience Design is quite different from today’s functional design:

To apply Emotional Experience Design, firms must:

1. Address customers’ real goals. People may come to a Web site to get service or buy a product, but that’s typically not the beginning or culmination of their journey. The mother of a newborn with stomach problems isn’t going to a site for information about medication; she’s looking for a way to bring comfort to her baby — and maybe get a little relief for herself. If firms want to engage customers, their sites must cater to these deeper customer needs..
2. Develop a coherent personality. Web sites can feel sterile — devoid of a brand’s human characteristics, which are often apparent in other channels. But firms need their online experiences to do even more than just reinforce their brands; the experiences should enrich them. How? By developing a coherent, consistent personality that customers can easily recognize throughout all interactions.
3. Engage a mix of senses. Over reliance on text and imagery makes many sites indistinguishable from competitors. Interestingly, most people can’t remember the content of Intel’s commercials, but they can easily imitate the Intel sound.While Web experiences don’t allow users to taste or smell objects, they can and absolutely should engage users’ senses of sight, hearing, and even touch.

The bottom line: It’s time to make emotional connections online.