Author: Ian Finn

Customer Experience (and particularly the digital variety) is increasingly becoming a ‘hot topic’. And rightly so. As an increasing proportion of brands are switching on to the crucial role that customer experience plays (across the full customer life cycle) there emerges an ever-increasing appetite to ‘do the right thing’ for customers.

And doing the right thing for customers also brings undeniable benefits to business performance and the bottom line — no wonder, then, that Customer Experience is steadily climbing up the priority list of many a CMO and CTO. As noted in Forester’s report The Business Impact of Customer Experience, there are substantive commercial gains to be found in providing leading-edge customer experiences. Within this report, an analysis of US firms showed a +43% increase in business performance in the period 2007–12 for the firms rated as ‘CX Leaders’. Whereas the business performance for the S&P 500 group of companies as a whole showed an uptick of just +14.5% for the same period. Quite a difference.

So customer experience matters: both commercially as well to serve customers in ways that either meet or, ideally, exceed their expectations. And it matters particularly in the digitally-reliant world we are moving inextricably towards. When ‘online’, customers’ attention spans when interacting with brands are often shorter — and their attitude less forgiving than in other channels. Imagine, for instance, that moment when you’re sat on your sofa at home trying to complete the most simple of transactions (such as booking a hotel room via a bookings site). But the site is just taking far too long to bring up your selected choice (whilst it contacts back end servers that the customer neither knows nor cares about).

So if we have even less margin of error to play with in these digitally-connected moments of truth than in ‘traditional/ offline’ touch points, how do we ‘get it right’ for them?

The Four ‘I s’

Clearly much has been written on what makes a great digital customer experience. But I like to distill all this down to a simple, 4-element approach.

I call this approach ‘The Four I’s’. Here goes:

>Element 1: ‘Intuitive’:

It was Steve Krug, in his seminal book focussed on the online experience Don’t Make me Think who talked about the need for digital experiences to be ‘as expected’ for the user; and usable as a result. I would contend that this first element, of being ‘Intuitive’, is probably the most important of all four. Since this is about making your experience work in line with how your customers think. The most we should expect of our customers, in their busy and distracted lives, is just a bit of a goodwill from them towards our online offering — a tiny bit of time investment to ‘get to know’ a new online process or journey. But this needs to be intuitive.

Since if a digital experience is not intuitive, customers often have a tendency to give up and leave your digital experience behind all together…in favour of someone else’s that is easier to use. Take, for example, online investing. This is a product category where invariably (due to the complex nature of the service line) there is often a lot of information on screen for the user to decipher and engage with. So any digital tweak to make the customer’s online experience just that little bit easier makes for big customer experience gains.

I like the customer-centric approach that Hargreaves Landsdown have taken here, in the ‘intuitive’ area. Not only is their Stocks & Shares ISA/ Share Dealing platform clean and uncluttered and well laid out for at-a-glance viewing, but the ease of use starts from the moment you log in. No having to recall, unaided, the ‘second’ and ‘forth’ and ‘sixth’ characters of your account password here. These details are still requested (to offer secure access) but a welcome helping hand is provided to the customer. And it’s brilliantly simple in its execution: just a selection of ‘character masking stars’ taking the place of the ‘non-requested’ password characters, to help you recall your overall password. A little piece of helpfulness; but not everyone does it.

>Element 2: ‘Integrated’:

After ‘Intuitive’, the principal of creating ‘integrated’ customer experiences is right up there for me. Since there are few things more frustrating for customers than their feeling that the ‘left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’ is doing — within the brands providing their services for them.

Take, for example, a scenario such as looking to buy a new car. I’ve often had this experience myself where, having requested a test drive online, one of two irritating things tend to happen. Either: a) having seen a pop up box saying that my chosen dealer will call me ‘in the next few days to arrange a test drive’, the expected call never materialises (=immediate and catastrophic loss of customer trust/ good will in what is an emotionally-fueled purchase) or: b) when the car dealer has called me, they appear to lack all my personal details which I’ve already laboriously entered online — demonstrated by looking to reconfirm each and every field again verbally (= intense frustration for customer; brought about by ‘siloed’ customer platforms/ channels).

The way forward in this element is clearly about joining the disparate parts of the end-to-end customer experience together. Whether such disparate ‘bits’ of the overall experience result from different channels not ‘handing off’ properly; or having different back end systems across them… the goal should be to join these experience ‘bits’ seamlessly together. In order to create a cohesive ‘single customer experience’. Often, this requires more investment and thinking by brands at the outset; but the customer and commercial benefits more often than not offer a highly attractive ROI for doing so (see the key improvement metrics referenced in the Forester report, up the page).

>Element 3: ‘Interactive’:

This is an interesting one, and talks to the concept of having ‘two-way’ communications with our customers online…and at the appropriate points in the customer journey. It is also one which is often inter-linked with ‘Intuitive’ (since by being ‘interactive’ with customers we can often compensate in areas where things haven’t been as intuitive as they might be, for certain individual customers) and also with ‘Innovation’ (more of that later). So how can we interact effectively with customers during their digital interactions with our brands? For me, ‘interacting’ well with customers takes three main forms to help construct a better customer experience:

• ‘Help me’: whether initiated by the customer (such as clicking on a ‘chat now’ button, if experiencing some difficulty in the online journey) or smartly-triggered by the brand (such as an offer to chat appearing on screen when the customer has remained on the same page/field for a while), this is a pivotal moment of truth for both Customer and Brand. The key here is setting up our online journeys to intelligently recognise the most likely moments of customer difficulty; yet without being obtrusive or patronising. A key area of exploration for user experience testing, for sure.
• ‘Help me choose’: depending on the product or service (and its relative complexity) not all customers may have a ‘ready-made’ selection locked in their minds; or feel well-informed enough to make one. This is where ‘facilitative’ solutions within the end-to-end customer journey (such as Amazon’s ‘More items to consider’ feature) can provide that little bit of inspiration — when needed.
• ‘Make it mine’: this is about personalising experiences for our customers. But it’s about going beyond just requesting customers to opt into cookies, to then help us remember them a little better next time, on a superficial level. This is a key moment of truth to thrill customers with unexpected delights: such as providing an ever more personalised web page experience when the customer returns to our site. An experience based on all the insight organically built up about that customer through their various interactions with us: whatever channel those interactions took place in.

>Element 4: ‘Innovation’:

I’ve placed this element last for a reason. Not because it isn’t a key consideration for us — far from it. But depending on the needs of our customer base it may, or may not, be a relevant part of our customer experience mix. Innovation for innovation’s sake often risks serving the needs of our brand; rather than those of our customers. And could, therefore, potentially risk the simplicity and purity of easy-to-use and effective experiences — discussed under ‘Intuitive’.

Rather, the really meaningful role for innovation should be to address identified unmet (or partially-met) customer needs; when just ‘more of the same’ won’t solve the customer’s pain or problem. And something much more fresh and game-changing is needed instead.

For this element, I would highlight again some of the pioneering thinking over at Amazon: actually, an innovation that is still being innovated. If, for Amazon, the identified customer issue is a growing need/ desire to receive their purchases increasingly quicker (‘Same Day’; not ‘Next Day’) then contemplating innovations like direct-to-customer delivery — such as via air-bourne Drones — starts to make a kind of sense. If pre-existing delivery platforms (such those offered by third party delivery firms or even via their own ground-based delivery operation at some point) can’t fulfill a need for ‘same day delivery’, then full-scale innovation might be the ally to a new, great customer experience.

Wrapping it up:
So there you have it -my take on four critical elements for creating a great overall customer online experience. The type of experience that these days customers not only crave, but actually expect.

So what do you think? What are your views on what makes a digital customer experience ‘great’?
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>About Ian Finn
Ian Finn is a highly experienced Digital & Proposition Strategist and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) who has led digital improvement at some of the UK’s largest companies. A diverse career across a range of the UK’s leading B2C service brands means Ian brings an ‘end-to-end’ portfolio of marketing capability spanning Product and Customer Proposition; in addition to Digital/ Customer Experience.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or find me on Twitter (@IanFinnDigital).