2. Do You Matter?
Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? Would the world be a darker place without you?
If someone took a poll today of your customers, constituents, followers, whatever, and asked if you matter to them, how do you think you would come out? If you ceased to exist tomorrow, do you think anyone would really care?
In other words, has your product, service, or brand established an emotional connection with your customers to the extent that they are invested in the interest that you not only survive, but also prosper?
In his book The Brand Gap (Peachpit Press, 2005), Marty Neumeier pitched this notion from a graphic design point of view. We would like you to consider the question in the context of a fully integrated definition of design.
Ask yourself questions such as "Who are you?" (which most people can answer) or "What do you do?" (you will probably get this one wrong). You might answer that you’re a manufacturer of computers. Well, we say you’re not merely a manufacturer of computers; you’re creating systems to help people get work done. In light of this, why does what you do matter to people? Better yet, why do you matter at all?
This is the deep soul-searching question we want you to ask yourself. Does your company matter to your customers and constituents? Really, honestly, answer this. Are you a positive force in their lives? If you disappeared, would their lives be diminished in some way? I think if you tell yourself the truth, you might even conclude, "Well, probably not." Will we shed any tears if Cheer laundry detergent is not on the shelves anymore? No, probably not. Will we shed some tears if BMW suddenly ceased to exist? Yeah, we might. If Apple ceased to exist? Probably.
Why?
This is an important question. You matter to your customers to the degree that they have become emotionally invested in your continuing success—when they want you to win. You matter if your customers believe in their bellies that their world would be a darker place without you. Using design to manage the customer experience supply chain is how you get to matter in this way that really counts.
Design is such a fundamental part of your life that we doubt that you go any stretch of time, even seconds, without bumping into something that has been designed. You might not be constantly aware of it, but we want to encourage this awareness.
People surround themselves with stuff and take its existence for granted. Every time you sit down on the toilet seat, somebody has designed that experience for you. Urban legend has it that, at one time, Herb Kohler personally had to sit on the prototype of every seat before he approved the design to go out the door. The point is that somebody has decided the shape, material, finish, angle, and height of the seat, and all these things define the start to your day. But we mostly take all this for granted and don’t even think about it.
It’s interesting—no, actually, it’s fascinating—that most people really notice design only when it’s bad. How many times do you hear someone say, "This fricking thing doesn’t work; it’s a pain in the butt." Really good design will many times be totally transparent to the user because "it just works." A design-savvy person will say, "Oh, this is really great design; it’s making my life easier. Someone has really thought this through." Developing an awareness of excellent design as the connective tissue that defines and ensures an excellent experience for your customers is a vital key to the future of your business.
© Kohler Co.
You have probably thought about design more than you realize. Surrounded by stuff, we’ve manufactured most of our world of experience without much use of conscious awareness. As you develop the level of design focus we’re talking about here, we believe you will begin to move this understanding from your subconscious mind into active awareness. You will begin to witness design as an active part of any experience, good or bad. You might even, as a business person, categorically dislike dealing with designers, but at least develop a love of knowing what the deal about design is.
By way of example, let’s say after a lovely flight from London in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class, you find yourself in the Washington–Dulles airport going through immigration. Having just been informed that if you fire up your mobile phone it will be summarily confiscated, you now notice it’s a total bottleneck at both ends of the facility. Everybody coming in one end is compacted into a tiny space, and then after being processed, people spill out into a second tiny space. As you stand there, you can hear those who have the energy left to be vocal proclaiming that the system basically sucks, and it requires no psychic ability on your part to figure out that folks feel abused and angry (and this is the capital of the United States).
As a design-aware person, you start to think about how wretchedly designed the system is. Somewhere, some group of architects completely failed to grasp their impact on a traveler’s experience when they laid out the labyrinth. The result is a design failure at work. If this was your company showroom or your store, and people had this bad experience getting into it because you hadn’t designed it thoughtfully, it would cost you money. If the Apple store had a dysfunctional layout and no one could see the products or play with them, people would walk out of the store going, "Forget Apple, I won’t buy their stuff."
In reality, a visit to the Apple Store at 767 Fifth Avenue in New York City is a shining example of a totally designed customer experience.
As awareness of good design grows, we believe that people actually care more about design than they realize. At the same time, we see that people leading organizations are beginning to understand that the quality of a customer’s experiences is the essential element of continuing success. However, grasping this and successfully implementing a wildly effective customer experience design strategy are two entirely different things.
In complete contrast to the Washington–Dulles travel experience, if you happen to travel to Dubai, it will be hard for you to ignore the majestic Burj Al Arab Hotel. People thought Sheik Mohammed was crazy when he built this. He reportedly spent $2 billion, a sum approaching 20% of the country’s gross national product (GNP) at that time. It’s an amazing icon and has come to symbolize Dubai, creating a message that anything is possible. Rooms start at $1,700 a night, and the place is booked for months in advance. Think about the power of design here, because they designed this experience and this shape. When you Google Dubai, you’ll probably see a picture of the hotel, you’ll know it, recognize it, and respond to it as an icon for opulence and luxury.
© Robert Brunner
At the inception of the project, it was easy for a rational mind to think they were crazy, building this hotel out on that sandbar and creating this really interesting but challenging and expensive-to-build shape. You could easily ask, "Why are you spending this money?" You can see the payoff now: Because it’s so iconic and has such draw, they can charge $1,700 a night and be booked up for months. This is a stunning example of experience supply chain design, in which you use design also as a marketing strategy. The design is so powerful that you don’t need to spend as much on marketing because the design is already doing marketing for you.
We want you to think again about design itself, with a renewed emphasis on an integrated design strategy—creating the total customer experience. What we’re talking about goes beyond industrial design, which conjures up images of factories, piping systems, and so on. Industrial design is essentially the development of objects for mass production, typically three-dimensional, physical objects or the interaction with them. Current training focuses on this type of design. We’re advocating a concept of product design that incorporates far more. The major disciplines of design are industrial design, graphic design, and architecture. You can start to make distinctions within these categories, such as interior architecture, landscape architecture, traditional building construction, and so forth. Product design, as we discuss it, occupies a gray area between industrial design (the design of physical objects and the associated interactions) and software design. A lot of overlap exists between those two areas, and out of that overlap, the idea of interaction design has really emerged as its own discipline.
Now, here’s the really important thing to note about interaction design: It needs to matter to you, but to your customer, it doesn’t matter, because good interaction is natural and should be totally transparent. Customers also don’t care about which disciplines were involved and who did what. They don’t really discern among the contributions of the industrial designer, the graphic designer, and the architect—to them, it’s what they feel that matters. Their desired experience is emotional, one that lives mostly just below the threshold of consciousness instead of in total awareness. You matter to customers only to the extent that you have become associated with this desired part of their lives.
Automobiles are a part of our lives for which we more actively think about design, way beyond just where they put the beverage holders. The Lexus division of the Toyota Motor Corporation redefined the customer experience in the luxury auto market. The quality of the experience became the luxury, and the other luxury brands scrambled to catch up. But nothing lasts forever if you fall asleep at the wheel.
Let’s say you’re a certified tree-hugger and decide to join the wave and get a hybrid. You look around and land on the Lexus Rx400h, the SUV hybrid (you need an SUV because you’ve got enough stuff to start your own world), which, from a technology point of view, looks like a fantastic car. So this seems like a good idea at the time. You take delivery and rapidly learn that the gas mileage is not what you were promised. Whenever you use the car, you have to use a touch-screen interface, not just for the navigation system, but for everything. It’s unbelievably badly designed, to the point you decide it’s dangerous.
The GPS navigation system’s user interface is insane. If you don’t use it every day, you have no chance of remembering how to use it the next time you really need it. And, of course, you can’t modify your route or your destination while the vehicle is in motion, and you conclude that stopping in the middle of a freeway to do so might be injurious to your health.
Because of your bad experience with the car’s user interface and the less-than-promised gas economy, and despite brilliant mechanical engineering and terrific acceleration, this vehicle becomes the least satisfying car you have ever owned. You might be a pretty technologically savvy individual, but you decide to trade cars again because it’s such a bad experience (read: design failure here). You spend too much time in your car to endure constant irritation. You paid a premium for a Lexus and a premium for a hybrid, all for the promise of a better experience. But the design is so poor when viewed from the owner’s total experience that your expectations have been betrayed. The failure is ridiculous because Lexus could easily have acquired the needed expertise to design the user interface really well.
And here’s where the experience goes from bad to ugly. You write to the Lexus division of the Toyota Motor Company to share your experience. You receive four surveys, two calls, and a couple e-mails—all because the company wants to tap your experience to improve its future. The inquiries are not about you and correcting your problem; it is about making the company’s business better. No solutions are offered to you. So how does all this feel? Having fun yet? You vow never to buy a Lexus vehicle again. The Toyota Motor Corporation no longer matters to you except in a negative way. By now you want them to lose. And do you keep these sentiments to yourself? No, probably not. You might even invent a new game called "How many sales can I cost them?"
So you buy another vehicle and you pass on the built-in navigation system. For navigation, you get yourself a Garmin Nuvi GPS device. It doesn’t even come with an instruction manual. If you want an instruction manual, you need to access the Garmin web site and download it.
The Nuvi comes with a quick-start guide, which doesn’t really give you much in the way of information. It tells you how to charge it, turn it on, and do a few other basics to get you going. But anybody you give it to can use it to navigate with no instructions other than onscreen prompts and the intuitive design. At this point, it’s beyond you why organizations such as Lexus wouldn’t outsource their user interface design to a company such as Garmin.
Time to change hats again. If you’re an entrepreneur, a product manager, or a CEO reading this, ask yourself, "Do we really matter to our customers?" If you are honest with yourself, you might say, "Here’s where maybe we matter, and here’s where maybe we don’t." This isn’t an inquiry you can or should shrug off. It’s as vital to your survival as oxygen. Are you connecting with customers on an emotional level? Are you even seeing the whole picture and getting accurate feedback on the customer experience without inconveniencing them with your data collection process? Do your customers care if you live or die? You definitely want that answer to be "Yes."
It doesn’t matter what product, service, or brand you think about. Do you really value and honor the experience of your customers with a design that encompasses every aspect of the way you do business? Let’s see how this can play out when service is a big part of the equation.
Consider, for example, the couple that has been a loyal GEICO customer for years. The two have perfect driving records, and every time a cute commercial airs with a lovable lizard pitching how warm and fuzzy the company is, they nod at each other and smile, "That’s our company." Then they move and make their change of address on the GEICO web site. However, the mail goes to their former address, so it’s delayed in reaching them. They send a check the same day they receive their bill. But before the company processes the check, they receive a letter announcing "NOTIFICATION OF POLICY CANCELLATION." That rockets them out of their matching recliners. They call the company 800-number and are calmed down by a customer service rep who tells them not to worry, that he will call the moment their check clears the system. However, while they wait to hear from him, they get an e-mail with the subject heading "NOTIFICATION OF POLICY CANCELLATION." They send a "shame on you" e-mail back to GEICO, and then they receive a form-letter note of contrition. When the customer service rep calls to tell them all is well, they say, "No, it isn’t." They have now been motivated to shop around; in a few days, they get a better deal from Progressive for the same coverage, and they cancel the policy they carried with GEICO for years.
There you have it. An emotional pebble in the road has resulted in a paradigm shift in which customers who felt good about their experience with a company (or, at least, not negative) did a total flip-flop. Now every time a GEICO commercial airs, they fantasize about strangling that bloody lizard. The commercials are designed to demonstrate that it, as a company, cares about you. But to the couple, all the company really seemed to care about was the money. No doubt a meeting occurred somewhere in the insurance company’s halls in which someone proposed that the company put a bit more teeth in its mailings to late payers; that person might never have realized that he or she was part of a design process that would ultimately impact whether customers cared if the company lived or died.
Now it’s about you wearing your entrepreneurial, product manager, or CEO hat again. How’s it going with your company? Do you matter? Go back to asking yourself the tough questions, and "unto thine own self be true" with the answers:
- Do your customers care if you’re around tomorrow?
- What kind of product loyalty do your customers have?
- Does your product experience make a positive emotional connection with your customers?
- Does your product or brand add value to people’s lives?
- Does everyone in your company realize to what extent they play a part in the total experience design?
- Do your customers come back because they want to or because they have to?
- Are they on the verge of a very Schwarzenegger-like, "Hasta la vista, baby" if a competitor or impetus to change comes along?
- Are you a valued friend to your customer?
The fine point we want you to grasp is that just having a connection is one thing; ensuring that it is positive and remains so is another thing. If you look at a company such as Microsoft, it obviously has an emotional connection with customers. The company matters in the sense that, to a lot of people in the world, if Microsoft shut down tomorrow, many people would be up a creek without a paddle when it comes to getting work done. But on the emotional side, is this connection energetically positive?
When Microsoft went out and talked to people about Windows so that it could really understand how its customers felt about the company, it found that most people thought about Windows and Microsoft in the same light as they think about the utility company, the phone company, or the water district. This might come as no surprise to you, but it was a big jolt to them: "They’re a necessity, but I don’t necessarily like them." You probably don’t like your utility or cable company very much—especially your cable company. But what else can you do? You want cable. You need a computer and have to work in the Microsoft Office world, so what else can you do?
Microsoft was now aware of how a lot of people felt, namely that "If a real, credible alternative was offered, I’d switch." Awareness is not everything, however. If your company has a culture that is consensus driven, you might find more internal roadblocks and log jams than understanding and willingness to pitch in and participate in designing a positive customer experience. That’s why it’s so vital for the buy-in to this all-encompassing concept to come from high up in the company—it must come from the top, or near top, and include a critical mass of aspirational members of the organization. Sometimes the transformation begins with the aspirational members who engage the senior team as advocates and champions of the cause.
When a particular track is established, big companies, in particular, have an even harder time changing, even if they "know" they need to change. Although this can become difficult, establishing the right and thorough design track is so important because you can’t revisit it as much as you might like. Changing direction is not always cost-effective, pragmatic, or even possible. Yet it’s something so vital to your company that it needs constant supervision. Catch-22? Well, let’s explore that.
If you have a direct relationship with your customer that doesn’t require the customer’s live involvement with your people, that’s very valuable from an economic point of view. One terrifying and real thing for companies such as Dell is that the minute they have to get a person involved with the customer, they lose all the profit on many products. Because the margins have become so thin and the volume so high, profit on that product is usually lost as soon as they have to answer a sales call or a service call. On a high-volume product, you might be making only $10 of profit. The expense of the equipment and employee to answer the call can easily exceed $10, which eliminates your profit.
Any company working with scale can verify this. Banks learned long ago that they often lose money on transactions that involve human interaction. And how do you resonate with your customers at an emotional level without excessive human interaction? You design it in. If you create a positive relationship between the product and the end user, you don’t have the expense of someone needing to explain, "Here’s why this is important, this is how you use it, and this is why it matters to you."
Some companies, such as Apple, have designed into the equation the feeling that you have the support of a live person if and when you need it. If you buy a Mac, you can pay $100 for 12 months of live support by appointment. And even if you don’t use it much or go into an Apple store that often, it’s a heck of a deal—for just $100, you can go once a week to a live person (a.k.a. a Mac Genius) who will teach you how to use your Mac and core applications to create items of interest to you. And you’re doing all this in a vibrantly designed Apple store buzzing with good vibes instead of some dingy classroom.
So you’re sitting there getting one-on-one attention from some user-friendly person who really does know how it all works, surrounded by goodies you want that you add to your wish list. As they say, "How cool is that?" Way cool—especially for Apple. Because on the way out, you buy a wall charger for your iPod for $29.95. And even if you know you can get a DVD player for less than that at Best Buy, it doesn’t seem to bother you. You have even forgiven Jobs for dropping the price of the iPhone by $200 after you had waited in line for hours and paid the original price to be an early adopter. Hmm, let’s see—I guess, by now, Apple matters to you so much that sometimes you’ll pay a premium for a continuing connection to the experience.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might figure out by now that this is the reason Apple’s market cap is (as we write this) approximately half that of Microsoft. And Apple’s market share of the U.S. personal computer market (and the operating system market) for the third calendar quarter of 2007 was only 8.1 percent. And if you use a Mac, you probably use Microsoft Office, so Microsoft still owns this market share. Yes, you care about building a design-driven company. You really want to matter to your customers. You really do want them to want you to live long and prosper.