Customer experience – by the very nature of the term –
is a holistic construct of functional purpose and emotional perception. Because
many organisations don’t really understand the ‘experiential’ bit, they tend to
fall back on functional and rational aspects, striving for a generically good
service experience. And it is difficult
to elicit from customers what they want to experience overall and at specific
touch points. Ten years ago we developed
a tool, ConceptSnap® to overcome this and try to take the subjectivity out of the discussion. Never have we been called on to use it as we
are at the moment.
Developing impactful
experiences that go beyond process improvements and guiding staff by telling
them to ‘take charge’ and ‘treat the customer the way they want to be treated’
is difficult.
Process redesign is an
important job considering how many are still way below acceptable. Many
customer experience consultancies are now very good at understanding the
customer journey and improving processes, but the design of the actual functional/emotional
interaction proves far more elusive. ‘Treating customers the way you want to be
treated’ is the typical guidance given to staff when the managers don’t know
what to say. Using touch point specific feedback loops ensures continuity, but
what you get is sweet talking people that drive their satisfaction scores but
misread what customers really want - leaving the real opportunities to gain a
strong and sustainable competitive advantage undeveloped.
One reason is that the n=1
is prone to misread how customers want to be treated. That applies from top
executive to front line staff. All too often we hear ‘the customer just wants to
get it done as efficiently and friendly as possible’. The truth often couldn’t
be further from that.
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| Case Study |
ConceptSnap:
To overcome the difficulty
in understanding customers’ desires and maximise these opportunities, we
developed a tool called ConceptSnap. It allows you to take experience design
out of the functional and put into an emotional context. ConceptSnap is a
combination of image, attribute and emotion sort that provides a precise and
inspiring expression of the current and desired customer experience. A sound structure makes it easy to construct
experience flows and translate this into specific actions, language, tonality,
behaviours and messages.
The image sort is based
on 42 conceptual mood boards with
calibrated images. These allow customers to pinpoint the atmosphere and symbols
they want to connect with the experience. Starting with the images eases
participants into the next, more specific exercise, the attribute sort. The
attribute sort is designed to help customers precisely articulate what they do
and want to connect. In day to day life we use only a small percentage of the
available vocabulary. When asked, we fall back onto the most salient and easy
words – like innovation. Our system does away with that. It contains over 350 attributes that are developed based
on linguistic families and connect to colour psychology. That way customers can
tell us if they really mean ‘innovative’ or ‘ingenious’, ‘creative’, ‘bold’, ‘advanced’,
‘ahead’, ‘visionary’ or anything else. The third component is the emotion sort.
It combines over 170 verbal emotional
expressions with visual expressions to help customers define exactly what
they want to feel like and what they don’t.
Sounds easy, but ask
yourself, can you precisely articulate what you want your customers to feel when
they interact with you? Would everyone in the organisation say the same?
That’s where a tool like
ConceptSnap provides further strength. Not only can customers provide valuable
expressions of the desired experience, everyone in the organisation can do so,
too. In working with one client we conducted a ConceptSnap workshop with the
senior leadership team. At the beginning they considered it a waste of time,
feeling they were fully aligned and could express the experience they wanted to
offer customers. Very quickly it became apparent they were not that aligned and
it took them a while to agree on the exact visual and verbal expressions. If
the senior leaders can’t express the customer experience, they can’t brief it
into their team, can’t control it and reinforce it through their own actions.
Simple as that.
Quantifiable:
Working with small samples
externally and internally always has issues. And understanding qualitatively
the nuances of the desired experience across segments is way too expensive.
Internally, everyone should be part of offering a great customer experience,
but in the design only few can partake. That’s why ConceptSnap also lives online.
In just June this year over 17,000 employees and customers in 5 countries, across
4 languages provided their feedback and input for one brand alone using
ConceptSnap online. This means you can identify the biggest common denominators between customer groups, and
distinguish where needed and possible. Internally the opportunity to invite all
of your people ensures you can gather what experience your people feel they
deliver and what customer experience they would like to deliver. By finding
aspects of their input back in the design, they not only have ownership, but
intuitively understand better how they can bring the experience to life.
Indeed, the ability to
define your emotional and functional experience that way allows you to improve
faster, better – and as importantly specific to your brand rather than some
sort of service generic in your category.
