How Our Team Gains Insights into The Moments That Matter

Dilip Bhatia
Nov 7 · 8 min read
I meet with our business unit CX leads, Kurt Trauth, Amy Ricketts and Geriel Thornburg May, weekly to discuss our work and progress.

As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Experience (CX) Officer, I have the pleasure of working with some of the smartest minds in customer experience. We listen to our customers, collect and analyze millions of data points and use our insights to create memorable experiences for them, and improve their experiences with us.

I meet with our business unit CX leads, Kurt Trauth, Amy Ricketts and Geriel Thornburg May, weekly to discuss our work and progress. I turned one of those meetings into a brainstorming session about the heart of customer experience — understanding the moments that matter most to our customers, and continually looking for ways to make their experiences effortless.

Dilip: I’m excited to sit down with all of you today and see where our conversation takes us. For our readers’ sakes — what are your roles within Lenovo?

Kurt: I lead the PCs and Smart Devices (PCSD) CX team. My team also has functions across the company, such as, communications and culture. There’s a lot of ways in which our customers can get to our products in PCSD, and depending on the device, there are different life-cycles and technical support.

Amy: I lead Consumer Insights for Lenovo’s Mobile Devices Group (MBG) and I’m also the Voice of Consumer lead. My team designs and runs a broad range of consumer research studies which is the foundation for CX. To ensure we’re acting on the user feedback — the voice of consumers — we established a series of ongoing user feedback review sessions that consist of cross functional teams from product development, engineering, service, quality and more. The main focus is to review user feedback from all touchpoints and action on hot consumer topics and/or provide feedback for the next generation.

Geriel: I lead customer experience for the Data Center Group (DCG). I also have a Worldwide Customer Experience research program. What’s unique about DCG is that it’s a business-to-business transaction. People don’t typically have racks of servers in their home! Also, the size of the purchase is a bigger decision, often times — a collaborative decision amongst many parties within an organization. So, the nature of the product drives a whole different decision-making process with customers.

Dilip: At Lenovo, we bring so many different people together; we hear and incorporate many different perspectives. But all of us are Lenovians. We unite on our vision, on our metrics, and on our focus on listening to the customer’s voice and perspective. What do you think?

Amy: We have a unifying vision: Listen to customers, learn from them and continuously improve their experiences. Both our CEO, who we call YY, and our MBG leadership team are very passionate about the consumer experience. In fact, Voice of Consumer is a regular topic at our weekly staff meetings where we share the latest user feedback update among buyers of our phones. We compare pre- and post-launch understanding and reactions and are now at the point where we can predict what will happen when a newly- launched phone goes to market; this is powerful.

Geriel: There are differences between phones, consumer electronics, and data center technology. But there’s a certain similar element to how you study and improve the customer journey. In the DCG, we want to make sure the quote experience is as simple as it can be, the product information is the best it can be, and our key customer relationships are as strong as they can be. By doing that, we think we can help our customers move toward true intelligent transformation. It’s really a solutions-based approach. That’s what I think unites all our business groups.

Kurt: I agree that we have a wide variety of the types of customers we’re looking at, but regularly we are all looking at ways to capture feedback from them on their experiences at Lenovo — in all three business groups. We all work together on how to capture feedback and get it where it needs to go. Combining customer voices with operational data is a significant opportunity to uncover insights. The business is used to working with operational data, but when we bring those two together, we can show how they connect. There’s plenty of data! What we must do though is narrow it down and focus on what really matters.

Dilip: We’ve been working hard on our voice of the customer program, and we’re finding some excellent insights. I’ve found that some of these insights really give a new perspective to a situation that you don’t get by only relying on internal operational data. What’s an example of how to combine customer data and operational data in a moment that matters?

Kurt: I think a perfect example is quality. Our quality team has a very specific way they measure the quality of our products — it’s the way they’ve always done it. But when our customers talk to us about quality, it’s in very different terms. What does it look like for a customer who is in warranty, or extended warranty, or out of warranty? That’s a key moment that matters. You’ve come to Lenovo, you’ve expected us to help you, and we need to make sure we’ve found the most effective way to support you — whether you’re in warranty or out. The data from that experience would be invaluable to people inside the business studying the customer journey.

Dilip: How do we surface that kind of customer data? How can we find the moments that matter most to customers? These are the moments that could make or break a brand’s relationship with a customer.

Geriel: We have a world-wide relationship survey that’s been running for almost 4 years now. It’s deployed in 26 markets, soon to be 32, and it’s in 9 languages. We also have 2,000 salespeople within Lenovo who make sure that every time we receive feedback from a customer, we route it to the right people in the business, quickly. In DCG, we require that 100 percent of surveys that are received are responded to, whether it’s a 10 or a 0 or anything in between. It’s in this feedback that we discover the things customers feel the most strongly about.

Kurt: We also have a variety of other mechanisms where consumers can talk to us about our products — online forums, on our sites or other sites, our various Lenovo owned channels on social media, and more. We study the journey from pre-purchase onwards — understanding how the customer makes their decision and what influences it and how easy it is.

Amy: And we have our research programs. We study everything, right down to the unboxing moment. There’s a lot of different types of research, and a lot of different phases of evaluating the user experience — for example, we survey our all of our buyers across 12 countries at 3 points during ownership — right after they purchase it, 30 days later, and then also near the end of its life, about 18 months in.

Geriel: I also want to mention, DCG research is primarily survey research at this point, but we are finding tools to better understand experiences our customers are having on our website, studying that based on customer behavior. So, rather than self-reporting on a survey, we’re aiming to observe and derive precise patterns of behavior — what customers are actually doing and what they desire. We’d like to have the capacity to expand into other methodologies, but primarily right now we are only doing survey research.

Dilip: Tell me more about this type of journey mapping and observing behavior. It’s a bit blue-sky, but what would you like to see in the future of customer experience?

Geriel: We want to use advanced journey mapping to help uncover when we should explore further — narrow down which moments matter most in decision-making processes. That’s both upfront, when you choose Lenovo as your data center product and services, and on the back end when you choose to re-purchase or when you choose us as a services vendor to support your equipment longer term. We want to hone our focus to know when it matters the most in the decision-making process.

Kurt: You know, if we can actually commit to understanding how customer data and operational data connect — to the point that you understand which characteristics of the customer experience we can look at operationally that tend to drive certain levels of loyalty — we can start to leverage insights about the customers’ entire experience without them having to tell us. We can model other customers that have never even responded to a survey in terms of what’s their likelihood to recommend Lenovo or who might be at risk. That’s very blue sky but something I think you have to start looking at, so we are not completely dependent only using customer feedback in CX.

Dilip: There are some fascinating opportunities in the future of customer experience.

There is plenty of data on customer experience. As an industry, we need to focus on narrowing it down to the moments that matter, to both the customer and the business — key moments in the customer journey that can make or break a sale, loyalty, reputation, and more.

Thank you all for joining me today.

Special thanks to Brian Lee and Joel Collins for contributing their photography skills to this article.

About the Author
Dilip Bhatia is Lenovo’s Vice President of Global Marketing, User & Customer Experience, PC & Smart Devices. As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Officer, Dilip drives the company to achieve its goal of being the leader in the PC, smart device, data center and mobility space. Start a conversation with him here, or on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Lenovo’s Chief Customer Experience Officer

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