Empathy Leads - Customer Experience Follows

For my final blog of 2014 I’ve decided to address, empathy, a fundamental essence of Customer Experience, by reflecting on the year behind me with no regrets and foreseeing the year in front of me with great optimism.  It’s rewarding every now and then to take stock of one’s entire career and how it has evolved.  I spent four years in the US Air Force, returned to work in the science arena, earned a degree in Chemistry and enjoyed several years as an analytical chemist, entering marketing and working with customers and publishing and speaking at conferences, getting into the field of laboratory automation and robotics and selling systems, managing training and teaching clients programming skills, becoming a training road-warrior for several years before landing in the role of Customer Experience Manager.

That last role of Customer Experience Manager is significant for me because it’s the profession I believe I was destined to be in and working toward along my entire career path.  It just took a lot of stepping stones for me to get there.  So now that I’m finally here, I want to share my thoughts about what I believe it means to be customer centric.  The old well-worn, often misused, and mostly misinterpreted term; “charity begins at home” I feel sums up the true meaning, intent, and starting point of customer-centricity—charity being characterized as a state of mind, a mentality of kindness, and benevolence.

As consumers we are on the receiving end of customer-centricity daily and we are also on the giving end as we serve others in both our work-life and in our private lives—the dual nature of customer-centricity. How we act and react to every aspect of life has an obvious effect on us and on others.  As a Training Instructor, for example, I always felt that I learned as much from students as they hopefully learned from me.  When I attend a lecture or any kind of training session, I feel I learn as much, if not more, about teaching techniques as I do from the subject matter itself—yin and yang, if you will. 

I’m not into New Year resolutions in the traditional sense as I feel they are more or less wishful thinking that is soon abandoned.  Having just left a full-time position with a B2B corporate giant after 17+ years, I’m feeling excited yet cautiously optimistic about 2015.  I’m also making a significant transition from being a practitioner of customer experience to becoming a provider of customer experience.  Consequently, my one thought and personal commitment for 2015 is to think about my intent and approach toward life by expressing more empathy on a daily basis to build a better me from a customer-centric provider perspective.

I share a couple of simple examples:

1. When that traffic signal in the distance turns from green to yellow, I will consider slowing down and stopping rather than pressing the accelerator to the floor-board to gain an extra 3 seconds of time in my day.  I’ll also hope that someone else in the same situation will consider the same for the sake of my safety.
2. I will chose to smile and with compassion inquire how the day is going to that cashier at Wal-Mart who may be nearing the end of a long laborious shift and who may have had enough of impatient and irritable shoppers.  

Emotions motivate individual behaviors which in turn can create either a positive or negative customer experience.  Being more customer-centric from a provider perspective, means being more empathetic toward those on the receiving end of our individual output.  As the total customer experience is the sum of all interactions, my aim is to slow down; think ahead; and ensure that my individual interactions are positive and embraced with empathy and understanding first—leaving judgment for last.

The One-Day University Experience—a Customer Perspective

This past weekend my wife and I attended what is called The One Day University.  This was our first experience and we committed ourselves to a full day from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM to learn from a variety of topics delivered by eight stellar professors all from different institutes of higher learning.  The four classes that I personally chose and that interested me the most were the following.

• 1.       The Civil War and Abraham Lincoln: What's Fact and What's Fiction?
• 2.       The Science of Happiness
• 3.       Everything You Must Know About Sleep (But were too tired to ask)
• 4.       Untangling the Web: Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always Has Been

This seemed to me like the most diverse set of topics and my primary goal in listening to these particular lectures was simply to absorb and remain completely open to thoughts and ideas as they relate to life experiences in general and to my work as a Customer Experience professional. 

It was intriguing to me that after having spent a full day in academic lectures that spanned such a wide array of topics that I could have emerged with insights about my own career and experiences on the receiving end of being a customer.  Let’s begin with the obvious.

I willingly signed up for this One Day University which was not free but was modestly priced.  The topics themselves were the biggest part of the draw for me, but price and perceived value set my expectations right from the start.  The professors / lecturers came from among the most prestigious Ivy League institutions—Harvard, Amherst, Georgetown, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Rutgers. One hour presentations followed by 15-20 minutes of engaging and solid Q&A.  Setting expectations is such a key element in the customer experience.  Get that wrong and the rest really doesn’t matter.

So how might Abraham Lincoln, the science of happiness, sleep or the Middle East, further relate to customer experience?  The following were my connections and takeaways.  Let’s begin with sleep. 

Sleep is a significant factor in determining your happiness and sleep is a proven predictor of athletic performance and clear thinking.  The reality is that sleep is a necessity and not a luxury.  The average person requires 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.  This resonated with my feeling about the reality of a positive customer experience—it’s a present day business necessity.  Treat it as some exception or luxury and suffer the consequences.

I learned that 50% of our happiness derives from our genes and so the other half we must create within our personal ecosystem. I also learned about the three main components of happiness—(1) meaning in our relationships with others, (2) engagement and anticipation, and (3) pleasure.  As I started thinking about this from a career perspective and knowing the undeniable connection between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, it occurred to me that happiness in one’s work is a combined responsibility between employee and employer.  Lose sight of this and you can see where customer experience can drop off and business outcomes can take a big hit as a result. 

Lincoln was President of the US during the “War of the Rebellion” or more commonly known as the Civil War—which was anything but civil.  Lincoln was a storyteller and we realize the power of storytelling within our own organizations.  At one point, in an attempt explain his views on the abolition of slavery, Lincoln told a somewhat deflecting story involving a group of clergy debating and obsessing over how they might cross a particular river when the eldest of them explained that there was no use in debating this since in his own experience he never crossed a river until he came to it.  That caused me to reflect upon how many times I might have engaged in a solving problem exercise long before the problem ever presented itself.  This is not to say that thinking ahead doesn’t have merit, but sometimes the pre-planned and rehearsed responses are the ones that come across as rather insincere.  As consumers, how many times have we heard the cliché “Have a nice day” coming at us within three hours of midnight?

The complexities of the Middle East are dynamic and countless for sure and that train of thought led me toward thinking about how complex and dynamic customers are as well.  As Customer Experience professionals we understand that our mission and work is never complete and it requires constant attention. But that’s what keeps us moving forward.  We believe that the ultimate goal of creating more rewarding and memorable customer experiences will lead toward better business outcomes and an overall better world for consumers and for businesses alike.

As a customer, The One Day University experience for me was a microcosm of the world in general.   Everything I heard and learned connected with me as a consumer and with my professional discipline.  I’m allowing myself to get more sleep now as an experiment to prove some of the facts I learned in that session.  I’m working on that 50% of happiness that is within my control.  I’m thinking of more stories that I can use to help give color to some of the more black and white topics I often have to work with. Not too small a set of outcomes for one day!!

A Customer Experience Vacation Story—A Week in Nice

My wife and I just returned from a week of vacation in southern France.  It was the first vacation in decades that we can both claim to have completely disconnected from our daily routine—no cell phones, no Internet, no car, no bills, and no thoughts about the work we both left behind and that we knew would continue to accumulate in our absence.

As a Customer Experience Professional, customer experience is always in mind and I naturally react to any and all personal experiences throughout my daily existence.  What sticks out as a highlight in terms of customer experience during this vacation, you ask?  Please allow me to elaborate.

British Airways was our chosen carrier for this trip and the overnight six-hour flight from Boston to London flight was uneventful except for the fact that we flew coach and seating was, shall I say, a little cramped.  I’m talking “knees meet chin” here.  Only the skinny can survive in coach seating.  Post-flight, my wife and I vowed to not consider BA on any future flights to Europe.

The return trip, however, was quite another experience.  For reasons unknown, when we checked in at our connecting airport, (London Heathrow) the agent told us that due to overbooking in coach they were upgrading us to “coach plus” which we figured was something like an extra inch and a half of space between us and the seat in front.  To our surprise and delight, these were seats to the left of the main cabin door, (always a good direction) wide enough to easily accommodate most average to wider-than-average Americans, and with distance enough to the seat in front that you could actually open a newspaper without smacking the person next to you in the nose—normal expected seating, in my opinion.  The seats also reclined and there was a foot-rest.  In comparison to Coach, you might have thought we were in First Class.  Needless to say, that experience brought us around to thinking that maybe we would consider flying BA once again, but how to negotiate what we would now think of as a normal seat might be the real challenge.   But the story gets better.

When we originally checked in at the airport in Nice, we surrendered one bag each which was checked through all the way to Boston.  Our baggage claim tags were attached to our boarding passes.  So when we lucked-out by getting the upgraded seating in Heathrow, we received new boarding passes.  The agent there discarded our old boarding passes and, unbeknownst to us, along went our baggage claim tags.  What could possibly go wrong there, you ask?  Please allow me to continue.

Upon late arrival in Boston, an airport notorious for taking up to an hour for bags to be off-loaded from plane to carousel, we waited and waited and waited—along with many bags streaming by with no people to claim them (what’s up with that?) and lots of people waiting to claim bags that were not there.  Mine finally arrived but my wife’s did not.  I won’t go through the rest of the process but you know how that works, except that we had no baggage claim ticket and that created extra work. 

We arrived home on Saturday night and my wife’s bag was delivered to our home the following Tuesday night around midnight via courier—for whom we left the light on and a small tip for his service.  A little note of appreciation was left by the courier for us.

Unfortunately my wife’s luggage contained some critical (and not inexpensive) cosmetics that she needed in preparation for an early Tuesday morning client meeting.  Not knowing when her luggage might arrive, off she went to Lord & Taylor on Monday in pursuit of replacements.  When my wife explained her predicament to the customer service rep on duty, she was completely empathetic and began offering little added extras (lagniappe, as author Stan Phelps would say) that more than made up for the inconvenience and expense of what had originated as a problem with lost luggage.  My wife was even offered free samples (in flight compliant sizes) at any time she planned to travel again in the future so that important and over-the-size-limit items would not have to be relegated to checked baggage.

What CX lessons have we learned from this?  Customer experiences are immediate and fleeting and are often determined in the moment by single individual employees.  The BA agent that took our old boarding passes for example and tossed them out along with the critical claim tickets attached likely did so inadvertently without thinking.  BA was having major baggage handling issues at this time due to a computer malfunction so we were not alone.  Getting an upgraded seat (representing normal and reasonable comfort) was nice and unexpected, but it doesn’t mean that it would ever happen again, since we are not frequent flyers on BA.  The “knees-in-chest” seating would be the expected norm.  The ticket price difference between BA and an alternate carrier would have to be significantly less for us to choose BA again.  Lord & Taylor just earned a new and repeat customer in my wife.  They win all 10 stars for exceptional customer experience this time.  The real takeaway: Consistently meeting and or exceeding customer expectations helps secure repeat business and customers for life.

The Case FOR Customer Experience as a Business Strategy

Being a Customer Experience (CX) professional and having studied and practiced the art and the science of this wonderful CX discipline for over nine years now, (all within one organization) I pause to reflect on what the net result is of all the hard and dedicated work that we CX professionals have accomplished thus far and what we are yet to accomplish. I’m reflecting and writing this latest blog on the eve of the very first Customer Experience Day (CX Day) declared so by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) as the first Tuesday in October from this point forward.

Regardless of the gains we feel we have made, I’m still perplexed at how many organizations still seem to struggle so much with the idea that CX should be a key and critical element within their strategic business plan. Those organizations that hold the customer supreme in their business strategy have discovered that it really is all about the customer. Product and technology are often short-lived. Competitors can quickly outstrip a technical advantage in a matter of months or even weeks. How are B2B high-tech organizations able to keep pace with their high-tech competitors? Investment in Customer Experience is what some organizations have recently discovered and here are some key points just published by UK-based Syngro that make the case FOR Customer Experience as a strategy.

Gartner's latest research has highlighted that more than 50% of CEOs now rate Customer Experience Management as their number one strategic investment. Like any high growth market there is a lot of hype over what it can achieve but the key benefits of differentiating on customer experience are now unequivocal: 

Profitability: 76% of consumers would pay 5% more for a better experience - 53% would pay 10% more and 10% would pay 25% more - Accenture

Loyalty: Experience is a more powerful driver of loyalty than price - 55% cite CX as the main reason for loyalty in banking, 47% in retail - Forrester Banking & Retail Report

Equity: Over a 6 year period, CX leaders outperformed the S&P 500 index by 28%. Those who had poor CX performance lagged behind the index by almost 20% - Watermark Investment Consulting

Consistency: In the UK, a £100 investment in the National Consumer Satisfaction Index fund in 2007 would have by June 2011 returned £159 whilst the same investment in the FTSE 100 would have returned just £94. 

Efficiency: A one point increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) has been proven to improve cash flow by 4% in major organizations - Journal of Marketing

Whether you are investing in CEM for the first time, or seeking to maximize the efficiency of your current program, there are some questions you simply must ask within your business, and be confident in the answers.

Key questions business leaders must ask to strengthen the CEM program:

• How can we develop measures that improve both CX and profitability?
• What must we do to ensure every employee knows their role in the Customer Experience program?
• How is the aim of delighting our customers reflected in our commercial strategy? Is this reflected by senior management? 
• In our reports to the City and investors, how confident are we that we can report customer experience with the same level of granularity and rigor as other topics? 
• Can we honestly say that our CX program is more than a defect-reporting mechanism? Does it create learning in the business? 
• Are we using customer insight to become proactive in becoming a better, more profitable company or are we stuck in a reactive loop? 
• How big is the risk represented by the way we currently engage with customers? Why are some customers loyal while others leave in a blaze of apathy?

Customer Journey Mapping - A Powerful Organizational Transformational Tool

Organizations that intend to deliver an exceptional customer experience must first understand what the customer experiences at every touch-point and, most importantly, this needs to be articulated by the customers themselves.  It is tempting to shortcut the process by adopting simply an internal viewpoint of the customer experience as representative of the actual customer experience. This doesn’t quite provide the mirror that needs to be held up within organizations.  As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are heading, any road you choose will take you there.” 

With this in mind, I believe those businesses that understand exactly what their customer’s experiences are at every interaction have a decided competitive advantage.  This is fundamental to the success of just about any business, except perhaps government agencies.  Having said that, I do recall that the Registry of Motor Vehicles in the state of Massachusetts over the past ten years has completely transformed the way it serves customers—who have no choice in the matter when it comes to renewing a driver’s licence or an automobile registration.  It’s not just about meeting or exceeding customer expectations, it’s also about consistency and ease of doing business on the part of both provider and customer—leading to more efficient operations as well as cost containment for the business.

Whether a business offers a product or a service and whether those transactions occur online or in-person at the point of sale, every interaction serves as an opportunity to augment or diminish the relationship you have with that customer.  Earlier interactions in the customer journey can be the more critical—awareness, engagement, decision-making, and purchasing—but the later stages—supporting, enhancing, developing, committing, and repurchasing are the more sustaining and serve to build and ensure long-term revenues.

Organizations that have not thought about customer journey mapping, might want to begin by asking themselves a few questions.  They might ask, for example: what is our overall customer strategy? Or perhaps more fundamentally they might ask: do we have a customer strategy?   Assuming they have one, another question they might ask is: what is the intended customer experience we are striving for? And perhaps further: does everyone in the organization know our customer strategy as well as the intended customer experience at each interaction?  They may consider also asking: how well are we executing our customer strategy?  This latter answer must be drawn from the customer’s perspective.

I look at customer journey mapping from a holistic and systems perspective.  Customer interactions can happen at any and every level within any organization.  Any employee that interacts with a customer is a stakeholder in the process of the business. The corollary would be a business operating in silos where there isn’t a cohesive and coherent customer strategy and where the customer experience is left to chance.  In an increasingly competitive and global business environment, organizations cannot afford not to consider the risks associated with “customer experience by chance” versus “customer experience by design.”  Mapping, measuring, and improving the customer experience is one of the most logical, fundamental, and essential frameworks that can  ensure that an organization’s brand promise is well understood and wholeheartedly supported at every customer interaction.  It’s a system where the ownership of delivery on that brand promise is felt and shared by everyone across the organization.

Customer journey mapping is a totally customer-focused concept.  It puts the customer and the customer experience at the focal-point of business operations.  Superior customer experience has often been described as the last frontier of competitive differentiation. Technology is a competitive differentiator for the moment, at best a moving target—very soon outpaced and replaced by the next and latest technological “shiny object” and unable to sustain most businesses over the long-term.  Organizations that realize this, understand the transformational power that is contained within the customer experience.  Measuring and evaluating the customer experience at each step along the journey, is how organizations can release that power.  It allows organizations to fully understand and describe their current and future desired state, identify the gaps, prioritize actions, and deliver transformational solutions that drive business results.

I Can’t See the Forest—the Trees are in the Way

As a Bank of America (B of A) customer over the last 15 plus years, [and having arrived here more as the result of acquisition than by choice] I have been a loyal customer in the sense that I have stayed and have not migrated to another banking institution.  Call me a creature of habit, but nothing has yet driven me to defect from B of A.  Like Starbucks, my personal choice when I desire a cup of coffee, they are everywhere I go and they are consistent if nothing else.

No here’s where it gets interesting.  My bank account with B of A includes a checking account, a savings, account and a line of credit account—covering me in the event I overdraw from my checking account.  I have successfully managed to go paperless with both my checking and savings accounts—two out of three—so far so good.  However, my poor little line of credit account must be an exceptional case because I cannot seem to find any way to make this account go paperless.

Most of the time, whenever I overdraw on my checking account, I replenish it within hours if not days and bring it back to a zero balance.  Nonetheless, when any transaction occurs, I get a statement like the one shown below in Figure 1 with a zero balance and payment due of zero.  I also get a coupon showing a minimum payment due of—you guessed it—zero.

Figure 1.

After attempting to go paperless using the relevant features on the B of A on-line banking portal and calling them numerous times to ask for this to be set up as a paperless transaction, alas I must admit defeat.  There’s nothing they can apparently do to prevent me from receiving these economically and ecologically wasteful monthly statements—each time arriving with a zero balance.  I actually once sent them a check for $0.00 and signed it—seriously, and to see if might help.  I don’t think B of A caught on to my frustration or my sense of humor.  I wonder whether this is endemic to only large bureaucratic organizations where it is often impossible to connect with a live human being to discuss customer issues in a logical common sense manner.  I can’t be the only B of A customer experiencing this.

For those of you working within large B2C organizations like B of A, does any of this begin to ring true? 

·         What channels of customer issue resolution do you have set up and offer your customers? 

·         Do they experience human avoidance by going though the looping phone tree that deposits you (pun intended in this case) right back where you started? 

·         Do your processes defy logic and common sense? 

·         Do you design your internal systems and processes around employee efficiency, organizational convenience, and workflow over customer expectations and ease of doing business?  

·         How does what I describe here help or hinder customer loyalty and customer advocacy? 

I’d like to hear similar stories from those of you either in B2C or B2B organizations where issues like this seem to go un-resolvable for years.  Just in case you might be wondering, I am not about to close my account with B of A and go elsewhere.  The rest of the experience I have with them is generally good, so this isn’t what I’d consider a show-stopper.  It would probably behoove B of A to save the costs of invoicing me and countless other customers for essentially nothing—not to mention the saving of few more precious trees in the process. 

Quality and Consistency Wins Business and Drives Revenues

I like pizza.  I think I’m among a majority of people who do.  And, pizza I would say is as much a commodity as coffee—although people certainly have their preferences and favorites for sure.  While I’m not here to debate the nutritional merits of pizza, I will admit that I have this craving I must satisfy every couple of weeks.  Therefore, pizza has been a regular element of my diet.  I don’t share this very readily or very often with my nutritionist.  I figure as long as I also consume my requisite daily intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, I’m in good accord.  Besides, pizza crust could be whole-grain, tomato is a fruit, and I’ll often have a veggie pizza.  So, in essence, pizza may be my best nutritional choice, every day…!!  But, I digress.

I’ll use my love of pizza to make a point about quality, consistency and the customer experience and tie that experience directly into business outcomes.  I live in the Boston area where, in the southeastern part of the state at least, “bar pizza” seems to have been born many years ago and still thrives.  Some call it Greek style pizza but it’s those small round ten-inch thin crust versions where there is no discernible crust roll around the perimeter.  Most of the time, these are only available at local taverns or, as they call them here in the Boston area, “baahs.” 

The closest “baah” pizza to me is located in Quincy, MA where I live and is about 10 minutes from my home. Let’s call this Pizza Bar A.  I was fairly attached to Pizza Bar A for about seven years straight—typically getting my pizza a couple of times a month as take-out, since it was so close to home.  Then I began to experience differences (and a degradation) in quality that depended perhaps on who was cooking that night, how busy they were, and what ingredients they were using, etc.  You really have to work hard to make pizza not enjoyable, but somehow they were mastering the art. Once it got to the point where pizza from Pizza Bar A was only enjoyable half of the time, my wife and I decided to look around.   

Our alternative source was found in a town about 45 minutes from my home.  Let’s call this one Pizza Bar B.  So, rather than going there for take-out and arriving home with a cold pizza needing to be reheated, we decided we would just eat-in.  Naturally, eating-in leads to ordering appetizers, drinks, and dessert.  Think up-sell.  Over time, for about a year now, we are finding that Pizza Bar B offers quality pizza that matches Pizza Bar A at its very best and, but more importantly, a consistent product that is unmatched, even though it cost a lot more.  Plus, the service is fast, efficient and just as consistent as the product.  They earn a 10 on the 0 through 10 rating scale from both of us for both quality and consistent products and quality and consistent services.

Now, let’s analyze the simple economics of this situation to see who wins in the long run.    The cost of a pizza at Pizza Bar A is $8 per unit while cost of pizza at Pizza Bar B for the same kind of pizza with the same toppings is $12 per unit, regardless as to whether this is take-out or eat-in.  Because we are eating in at Pizza Bar B, we are also spending a lot more because we are also purchasing beverages and appetizers.

Source	Visits / Year	Spend / Visit	Yearly Spend
Pizza Bar A	24	$18	$432
Pizza Bar B	24	$40	$960

Let’s also add the travel and time component to this analysis as well.  Pizza Bar B is 24 miles away whereas Pizza Bar A is only 6 miles away.  That difference of 18 miles is costing me an extra two gallons of fuel [at $3.50/ gallon] which is adding another $168 to my annual spend just getting there and home.  I’ll not include the cost of my personal time other than to mention that this would be a factor when you extrapolate this to any normal business situation. 

So there you have it.  The bottom line is this.  I will pay over 2.5 times more each year for a quality and consistent pizza experience—satisfying my desire for good pizza—value is king.   And I’m just one customer.  Pizza Bar B has a fairly large capacity and has been in business since 1955.  I’m now a promoter of Pizza Bar B and I highly recommend them to all of my friends and colleagues—even the ones that, like me, that were dedicated to Pizza Bar A.  So, imagine that some of them, let’s say a dozen of them, defect and start going to Pizza Bar B.  That means that Pizza Bar A could be losing somewhere in the vicinity of $15,000 in annual revenues just based on my experience and defection plus that of a dozen friends of mine to which I have spread the word.

Consider the very business you are in—whether B2B orB2C.  How consistent is your product, your delivery, your service and support, your service recovery, and your overall customer experience?  Are you even measuring those touch-points on a regular and consistent basis?  Is quality and consistency part of your organization’s experience design thinking?   How committed is your organization to quality and consistency at every customer interaction?  These are questions worth considering for any business and from a systems perspective, especially as they relate to organizational profitability, business continuity and sustainment, and future growth.