Customer Crossroads

Customer Experience - what it means, where it's going

When I first started in the consulting biz at the turn of the century, I had a passion for creating better customer experiences and wanted to help companies create them.  Building a boutique consultancy, I went looking for tools to help me -- models, mentors, and so forth.

I was really shocked to find almost nothing out there that felt really helpful.

So ultimately, I ended up creating my own model, to give structure and focus to the work I was doing with clients. After a few years of work and experimentation, I came up with the model you see here.

A fuller version, with more explanations, is available as a PDF here.

And my working definition is something I stopped messing with, because I basically think it still works:

Customer Experience Is... the internal response of an individual to their interactions with an organization's products, people, processes and environments.

Internal response includes the thoughts, feelings and emotions experienced and the rational, psychological and sensory benefits of the experience.

Since then, there has been an explosion of books, speakers, consultants and blogs focused on customer experience. Which is a really good thing actually. Because seriously, when I first started talking to executives about this customer experience -- unbelievable as this may now sound -- no one knew what the heck I was talking about.

And there is an enduring truth captured in this simple model: we understand a lot more about what goes on inside the heads and hearts of our customers, but we still cannot affect that directly. As a business manager, you can only work with your own processes, sequences, communications, people, environments.Those are your levers to make change. They are powerful levers, but you can't reach directly inside heads to muck around -- at least not yet.

Customer Insight is still the place to start

It is my strong belief that it all starts with the customer that informs my obsessive commitment to insight research. You have to try to go beyond counting up the things you can count, to experience the mysteries of another human being's experience of the world.

So probably the weakest element of this model for me, after many years in this work, is that I missed culture as an element of individual experience. Psychological factors certainly include understanding the hard wiring that comes from our biology, which we now call behavioral economics. But culture is always software.  And it does matter.

Culture changes and evolves. [My Dad watches Mad Men and sees reminders of the office politics of the "girls" in the "steno pools" of his past work in a major engineering firm. I watch Mad Men and see reminders of how we have indeed changed our ideas about what a woman can do and be in our society. And how glad I am that my career pinnacle was not the "steno pool".]

So when I am looking for customer insights, I now consider culture as well as the other dimensions of the model above.

Models, templates and systems abound

If you go looking for models of customer experience now, you'll find plenty of them. Which means it's all mainstream.

There are also a lot of consultancies offering templates and systems for you to implement to improve your customer experience. And these are very useful if you aren't working with much. [Technical term: you really suck at it today].

But I would argue that -- if you have reasonable systems in place today, if you have been working at things for a while, you need something a lot more than these template approaches offer to move you into the Zone of Goodness -- a place where your business starts to really benefit from the experiences you offer to customers. 

If you look around today, you will find that many people have embraced specific metrics, like Net Promoter Score, as a way to measure and manage customer experience. Voice of the Customer programs are present in all successful consumer companies of any scale.

We must be done, right?

>> More about where customer experience is going in the next post. Because this is long enough for one sitting!

Paper to digital: evolving quickly

There are more and more indications that we still want paper and handwritten things.  You can't beat it for portability. And there are few version compatibility problems with paper -- it pretty much works with all human readers.

At least two methods are now available to synch your actual paper to your digital life.

Livescribe SmartPen is one approach -- a digital pen can link to your computer and upload your notebooks into various forms. (My earlier post on SmartPen here, and a piece I wrote about using a Livescribe as a research tool is here.)

You need the pen, which is actually a small computer. And you need special paper. But you can then hook into a number of other sending and sharing methods.

Moleskine's new smart notebook is another. Image and more about this application here, on PSFK. For this one, you need an app designed to upload pictures you take with your phone into Evernote.

 

I have high hopes for continued developments in this area that will eventually make the paper to digital translation go easily in either direction.

 

Insights on a budget: How to do Marketing Research with no money: Part 2

In the previous post, I talked about how to do a few interviews on your own if you have a need for insights (and who does not need insights?) but no money. It's a common problem for small businesses and start-up businesses.

I do recommend avoiding some kind of high-tech thing in favor of just actually talking to people -- well listening to them mostly.

But, if you want to do this online, there are options. Some are designed for the DIYer, others say they can be used by anyone.

Here are a few that I know about. Not a complete list by any means. (Note that I am talking qualitative here.)

Option 1 -- use a free survey tool but ask only open-ended questions

This is actually a pretty good option. Think in terms of maybe five questions, and give people lots of space to answer. This is not about statistics, this is about using technology to get yourself a mini-qualitative study.(Seriously, forget statistics in this instance, just go for actual insights.)

If you think this sounds feeble, let me tell you that Jackie Huba (yes, that Jackie Huba) used exactly this method to conduct some of the advance planning for the Dell Customer Support Think Tank that I've been telling you about. She had about five questions, all open ended. It was a very effective approach.

Top tips: Be short. Rewrite. Rewrite again. Use plain language. Ask a "big" question. Leave a big space for an answer. 

Option 2 -- consider these other tools and resources

There are a few services out there designed to work for the DIY researcher. Full disclosure: I have not used all of these services, and I am not getting paid for this. (Maybe a drink at the next industry conference, she says hopefully?)

You can find a very good directory of online qualitative platforms on the Greenbook site -- the NewQual Directory, as well as lots of good articles about how this stuff works, written by some online experts, Jay Zaltzman and Betsy Leichliter.

Gut Check is a service designed to help you find respondents and complete -- fairly quickly -- small scale projects on fairly narrow topics, like testing an advertising concept. They will help with recruiting participants from their panel, or you can recruit your own. They provide a library of video tutorials and other forms of help.

ITracks is also a platform that provides leading edge professional grade tools to quallies. But they have a package called Reality Check that gives you the ability to do a quick concept test and get responses quickly. It's stripped down, but looks promising.

2020 Research has a suite of online qualitative tools. These are leading edge professional grade tools, but there's nothing stopping you from renting their platform, reading through their extensive resource base, and running your own project. There are a couple of articles on their site about the pros and cons of running your own projects.(I thought they had a tool specific to DIY, but I'm not seeing it there.)

BlogNog is an online research platform that has a lot of features, but they also promote it as a good tool for DIY research.

QualVu is an online video platform, that also promotes a DIY option. I'm not clear on how the DIY option is priced or handled differently than if someone like me was just to rent their platform.

IdeaScale is a tool that is designed to encourage the submission of ideas from a group of users, and let them vote up, vote down, comment and enhance the ideas. Depending on what you have in mind, it might work well for you.

There are MANY more tools, as you will see from the NewQual directory. Just like going to Home Depot, buying the power tools is actually the easiest part of the project. Just remember that carpentry adage: measure twice, cut once. 

Have you had experience with DIY? I'd love to hear from you on this. Was it a happy experience? Would you do it again?

Guerrilla marketing research: how to find information on a budget Part 1

My regular workout buddy is an outsourced marketing consultant. As we sweat it out in the cardio area we yak it up about many things. A frequent topic is the desire of her small business and start-up clients to get some kind of marketing research insights on essentially no budget.

Recently, she was telling me about a start-up who wants to get 30 interviews done across North America with various types of business owners, and has a budget of $5K for the whole thing. As you can imagine, a range of expressions crossed my face when asked for advice on how to do this!

It's a common problem, and I'm not unsympathetic. In fact, I keep thinking about putting out some kind of e-book on this topic, as I get the question so often. (What do you think about that, dear reader? Is this a good idea? What needs to be in it?)

What advice do I give?

For right now, here's what I usually say, or variations on this theme. (I'm thinking B2B here, because it comes up more in that context for some reason.)

1. A few really good in-depth interviews with the right people are better than a whole lot of interviews.

2. 30 interviews is not some kind of "random sample" or "more representative." The ONLY reason to do that many interviews would be to systematically cover a few people in many different categories. e.g. ensuring you have some people from each of six industries, for example, and subsets of "users" and "non-users" in each group. Or smaller and larger. Or more sophisticated / less sophisticated. Or some other dimension. (These are research design considerations.)

3. For business buyers in North America, regional location is only important because it affects industry, regulation, and access to solutions. Silicon Valley business is different than Chicago business because it's Silicon Valley industries, not because of the warm climate, unless you are talking about landscapers.

4. Research done with friends of the owner is dangerous, because they are anything but disinterested and unbiased. This is the worst kind of convenience sample (Yes, that's a real research term, and it means "people we could easily get hold of.")

5. You can get people to participate in research without a monetary incentive, but there really needs to be something in it for them. Examples of "something" include: a copy of the findings, a chance to network with peers and talk about shared concerns, a free meal in a nice setting, a chance to influence development of a new business concept, free stuff from the sponsor.

The reason professional researchers don't do it this way is that a) it's not fast/efficient enough and b) it's not reliable enough. It's not because it's impossible.

6. Assuming you have the right people to talk to, it's all about the questions you ask, and the environment you create, and how skilled you are at listening. You don't generally hire a carpenter just because they have tools -- they also know how to use the tools. If you decide to build your own deck, at least keep it simple. This leads to point 7 --> how to use the time in the interview.

7. Spend most of your time just learning about them, their business, their interests, what kind of solutions engage them. Do not start with a bunch of direct questions. Soak, soak, soak up the information about who they are and how they go about being successful. What are their pains? How do they deal with those pains today? This is always the key to developing good value propositions.

8. Plan to spend some time going over your notes in detail, and figuring out what the differences between people are, as well as what the similarities are. Going for only similarities is a very common newbie mistake that is made even by trained researchers.

9. Don't go all high tech, that won't substitute for a lack of finesse on 6 and 7. Just phone people up using that good old OLD tech, the telephone. If you are going to record the interview, tell them.

Planning help

I have a short e-book -- it's FREE -- that will help you think about what you are trying to figure out. Check it out. I get a lot of good feedback on it from people who take 30 minutes to work through the questions.

Your challenges

If any of this resonated with you, I would love to hear from you, either in the comments, or send me an e-mail with your thoughts -- susanabbottarc[at]gmail.com.

Dear Mr. Google - please can we have more like Scholar?

On some projects, I need to do a lot of secondary research. You could call it desk research.

The web has made some of this exponentially easier to do -- like figuring out interesting trends around the world. No idea how you would have done that kind of work in 1980, say.   

The web has also made some of it exponentially harder to do -- like finding authoritative information on a topic. You search something like "customer loyalty" and you could spend a year sifting through meaningless dreck. The only alternative was expensive library-type document repositories and searches, which took a lot of time, and weren't always that productive. [For me, a non-librarian, and never any good at that stuff in university]

Then [cue the heavenly sounds and light] I discovered Google Scholar. Where have you been all my life! Google Scholar lets you search for a topic and only gives you academic type publications. And you can sometimes get really good stuff about a single author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where is Google Tech Support?

So Dear Mr. Google, we want -- we need -- Google Tech. It would only give us authoritative answers on questions like "how do I install a new video card" or "what is the meaning of error 404". [I know these are feeble examples, but you get the picture.]

We have all, I think, spent time on the web trying to find an answer to a question that may well be simple, really simple, if you are a computer engineer. And has probably been answered somewhere in some knowledge base. But we can't find it. We get a bunch of *%^&$^%$* and you KNOW what I'm talking about here.

So I think the answer is Google Tech -- a search engine that looks only for authoritative things regarding technology questions and answers.

What do you think? Could you build it? I bet you could, you seem to be able to build almost anything. If you build it, we will all come, I promise.

Thank you Mr. Google.