Bring the human back.
How to make your organisation more customer centric in 9 steps.
The service economy accounts for almost 80% of the UK’s GDP, and 20 million people (2/3 of workforce) in the UK work in the service sector. In this new economy, the added value created by services is greater than that of products
But although 80 percent of organisations claim, “We provide great customer experiences,” the fact is that the number of customers who say, “I have experienced a great customer experience” is more like 11 percent. That’s quite a difference.
Against this sobering backdrop, it’s also claimed that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. It’s clear that creating a more Customer Centric Culture is key to compete. But how?
There is a widely used model that identifies the steps towards a more customer centric culture.
However many of these projects fail — why?
CEO’s proclaim customer experience being the number one priority, but it can be just lip service. On the ground, there’s not much change, it’s business as usual and technology still rules, not the customer. We believe one of the main reasons for failing customer experience is the fact organisations do not build their corporate empathy in tandem.
So what are the 9 steps?
Step 1: Work face-to-face with the end customer, in their native environment
The first step works towards building empathy for your customers. People are obsessed with surveys and magic pill CRM systems and data. There is nothing wrong with these solutions but nothing opens our clients’ eyes more than working face to face with their customers. And forget focus groups! Go into their homes, their places of leisure or any relevant environment for your project. This is very important.
Step 2: Prototype and iterate
Make sure you prototype and iterate, fast. Whether it’s prototyping digital products or life-size cardboard pharmacies, don’t be afraid to make and build.
One such case study is for Finavia, Finland’s airport operator. Helsinki Airport is a popular transit airport, with around five million transit passengers a year. Finavia wanted to support Helsinki Airport in becoming the leading transfer airport of Northern Europe.
So they tested 12 different kinds of new service prototypes chosen from 200 improvement ideas gathered from passengers. These included pop-up yoga classes “YogaGate” and midsummer (a popular Finnish holiday) celebrations, as well as technical services, such as digital boards on the gate buses providing information on what to do at the airport. All were live prototypes, quickly set up and quickly changed if they weren’t working. Nine hundred passengers took part across 75 days.
Step 3: Kill ideas that don’t work!
Don’t hang on to something because you think it’s a good idea; kill it if it doesn’t work for your customers. For example, for Finavia we tested prototypes of small local coffee stands at the gates, based on customer insights. But they weren’t used enough or not in the way that made them cost effective to provide. So rather than being precious about it — we axed the idea and concentrated on those ideas with the most potential instead.
Step 4: Build a training structure
You should be pretty close to your customers by this stage. But what about your internal teams?
It’s a pretty shocking statistic that 75 percent of organisational change projects fail due to lack of including the affected employees.
Customer understanding and empathy must be in the company’s DNA, along with systematic internal PR and educational initiatives.
We found this was such an important part of a customer experience project’s success; we developed our ‘Ambassador Training Program’ and currently have eight projects live due to the success of the initiative.
Step 5: Learn by doing
Once you have built this training structure, get them to learn by doing. The teams should also talk to customers, make prototypes and partake in empathetic activities such as role-playing.
Step 6: Create ownership and skills
As mentioned, meeting customers in situations like focus groups doesn’t deliver a great deal of real insights. Training your employees so they know how to do one-to-one interviews with techniques such as 5 whys and then how to create an affinity map with the findings not only gives them new, useful skills but they also start to take ownership of the insights and defend them internally against superficial quick fixes or misguided initiatives that can cost the company dearly.
Hire a third party to help you with this if needed, or organise it with your internal training and development teams if they are equipped to do so.
Step 7: Create a customer centric operating model
Now that you’ve worked with your internal teams, it’s time to look at the wider organisation.
Building a customer centric operating model is no easy task (and warrants it’s own blog post and more), but essentially you need to build the customer into the way your company builds products and services. Often these processes are dominated by technology or marketing processes. This makes it hard for the most willing employee to deliver customer centric propositions as the tools and governance are stacked against them.
Step 8: Eat your own dog food
I often say: “Eat your own dog food.” What do I mean by this? Well, if you work for a large telco, you never really have to experience what it’s like to get a phone contract or look at and understand your phone bill, you get a free phone and the bill is automatically paid. How can you understand your customers’ concerns if you don’t do what they do? Make sure you eat their dog food, the good, the bad and the ugly.
Step 9: Get to know each other, get out of your comfort zone!
You must experience what your customers’ experience. But also you must have empathy for each other. Organise cross-silo activities and events. Get to know each other and get out of your comfort zone. At Hellon we organise the Power Camp, an incredibly successful way for us to get to know each other better. Resulting in more effective working relationships and better project work for our clients.
When you’ve climbed these steps, customer understanding and empathy will be in your company’s DNA. You will build sound understanding of customer experience — it will permeate from the leaders down and to the experience customers have with you. The combination of a customer centric process and building corporate empathy for customers and employees will lead to successful change. It’s not a small program and lip service doesn’t work; you need to be ready for change.
This was written by Markus Hohl, CEO of Hellon London
