The Six Elements Of An Experience
August 16, 2010 6 Comments
Did you ever wonder why your company’s interactions weren’t quite working for customers? The answer lies in one of six areas that Temkin Group defines as its SLICE-B Model:
SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:
- Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.
- Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.
- Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.
- Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.
- End. The transition into next steps.
- Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
By separating experiences into these elements, you can more quickly identify critical opportunities for improvement. To help with this effort, Temkin Group has developed a SLICE-B scorecard with 12 criteria for evaluating any experience (Web, phone, store, etc.). You can use this evaluation methodology to:
- Evaluate your existing customer interactions
- Improve your design prototypes
- Embed into your requirements process
- Compare against your competitors’ interactions
- Learn from interactions in other industries
The bottom line: Customers want you to get SLICE-B right.
About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Matters® 
Very interesting model. I wonder, however: are all of the components of Slice-B created equally? Are there some that a company absolutely cannot fail at, and others where the company can afford to be only adequate?
To give you an example, I’ve worked with e-commerce sites who have had great success despite having execrable internal site search tools (Locate component) and weak Brand Coherence from landing to conversion. On the surface at least, it would seem that a weak performance on Locate and Brand Coherence would be significantly less damaging than a weak performance on Complete (the payment gateway returning an error message, for example).
Any thoughts on that?
Low cost airlines provide an interesting example of this – if a company is competing on price, then the experience can be pretty atrocious (think Ryanair) and the company will not lose customers.
Even is the experience is not great, in many cases the customer has no choice – either because this site is the exclusive retailer for that product (the low cost airline is the only one to offer that particular route), or the only one to ship to a particular location (the only one to fly to that destination), or has the best price and that particlar customer is price-conscious above all else.
Perhaps the relative weight of each component is tied to the importance each customer gives it – so it becomes really important to know your customers’motivations and understand where to concentrate your efforts?
This is very good information. These elements are key to a great customer experience. Especially websites. I am passionate about great customer experiences. That is why we support small businesses in providing great experiences to their customers.
This is a very useful information, something I can really use especially now that I’m starting-up a small business.
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Thanks for sharing this Bruce. This is a clean framework that is worth reviewing prior, during, and after any customer experience exercise.