CHAPTER 13

YOUR ROADMAP TO
WHAT CUSTOMERS CRAVE

As the adage states, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” This is certainly the case when you design customer experiences to grow your business and protect you from the competition. The bad news is one size does not fit all. Your roadmap needs to fit the unique and special needs of your business, your customers, and the market you serve.

With this in mind, I have created an action plan that allows you to ask the right questions so you can design the right experiences for your business. As you build your plan, remember that this is a dynamic process. You can’t create a plan once a year and assume it will remain forever relevant in our fast-changing economy. Rather, your plan is an ongoing process of gaining better customer insights, leveraging enabling technologies, and continually addressing societal and market changes. Some of my clients live in such dynamic spaces that they review their roadmap weekly. View your roadmap to what your customers crave as a continual, enjoyable, and ever improving process.

WHY CUSTOMER INITIATIVES FAIL

In one sense, airplanes are potentially explosive metal tubes flying through the air. Based on this fact, you might assume that statistically they would be incredibly unsafe. However, statistics show instead that based on miles traveled, traveling by air is safer than traveling by automobile.

How is it that airplanes are so unbelievably safe? The answer is simple: the preflight checklist. This one tool ensures that the pilot and copilot have checked all the operational and safety systems in the plane prior to takeoff. Most of these systems also have redundancy designed into them to significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic failure.

Statistically, the overwhelming majority of customer experience initiatives fail. The primary reason for this isn’t that those in charge didn’t perform the preflight checklist. No, the biggest cause of failure is that they never created the checklist in the first place.

THE PRE-CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE

In the spirit of the preflight checklist, we need to begin this somewhat linear roadmap by first setting up a solid foundation. These steps help you determine if you have the enterprise culture to act upon your roadmap.

Develop a Strategic Plan

As a management consultant, I’m absolutely shocked at how many organizations are attempting to achieve organizational growth and market mastery when they don’t even have a strategic plan. I recently worked with a $6 billion company that was more than 100 years old and its last strategic plan was created in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, this company was failing and desperately needed help.

In order to succeed at delivering an exceptional customer experience, you need to travel upstream to the headwaters of strategic success. This requires that you build out a powerful, actionable, and sustainable strategic plan that includes the following key components:

1. Mission Statement: The most successful organizations in the world have a well-defined reason to exist. Conversely, organizations with a vague or ill-conceived concept typically fail. I’ve had the honor of working with some great brands, and I have found that the best ones are mission-centered. In addition, the leaders of these organizations do an extremely good job of articulating their vision.

Therefore, a good strategic plan should begin with a mission statement. Personally, I like a mission statement that is short, sweet, and easy to brand to both the market and stakeholders. It should be uncomplicated and without industry jargon; it should also state how your business serves people.

In Chapter 4, I presented some examples of mission statements of great organizations like Google, Amazon, and Apple. These statements are all about a big mission to do good for others. This is particularly important as you try to attract and keep millennial talent. Millennials are not looking for a job. They’re looking to be part of an important movement.

2. Strategic Goals and Pillars: Downstream from your organization’s mission statement lie your goals, which directly serve your mission. In turn, these goals are extremely important because they are the target that your strategies are aiming for.

The extraordinarily talented executive team of the hospital chain for which I consult renamed their goals “strategic pillars.” What I like about this approach is that the strategic pillars don’t change every week; rather, they are hardwired into the culture of the business. The pillars essentially hold up the organization by giving everyone a clear, crisp vision of why stakeholders come to work every day.

Strategic, well-defined pillars also provide a wonderful way to articulate strategic initiatives by connecting the two together. I suggest you come up with no more than six and no fewer than four pillars or goals.

3. Strategic Initiatives: This is where the rubber meets the road. These initiatives are detailed tactics you use to serve your strategic pillars or goals. One of the biggest problems with strategic initiatives is getting them adopted by your stakeholders.

I was recently engaged by a multibillion-dollar company to help it build out a more intelligent enterprise strategy. I interviewed more than forty-five executives, and every single one told me the reason their strategies had bad returns was that every week there was a new strategic initiative.

One executive actually became angry as she told me that she couldn’t take it anymore. She explained that every week there was a new strategy, and before she had time to serve that strategy, another three-ring binder filled with even newer strategies was dropped on her desk. As a result, some employees began ignoring the initiatives because they were overwhelming and a new priority would soon show up anyway.

If you want a winning strategy, make your strategic initiatives count. Connect your initiatives to internal collaborative networks and build engaging games and social connections around your strategic goals. Successful organizations do not shove strategies down to the subordinates. Instead, market-winning organizations collaborate with their stakeholders and work with them to build out the initiatives. Once they have cocreated with the stakeholders who will deploy the initiative, they use social interaction, brainstorming, and game mechanics to significantly increase the returns on the strategy.

4. Measurements: Although last on our list, this is certainly not least. As I’ve stated, I am a big fan of presenting information and measurements using executive dashboards. These tools help executives get real-time continual information on how a strategic initiative is performing. They provide the feedback necessary to allow stakeholders to understand how their behaviors and activities are affecting strategic results. The best organizations use entertaining graphic interfaces that look like dashboards on video games. When using an executive dashboard, be sure to measure the right stuff: results, not activity.

A Few Caveats on Developing Your Plan

When developing your strategic plan, make sure it is designed so that you don’t punish failure, as it is the fuel of innovation. Most organizations have become far too risk averse. They don’t encourage courage because they don’t want anything bad to happen. Too many organizations don’t do great things because they have an obsessive focus on risk. But to succeed, we need to invent new experiences. Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before he successfully invented the light bulb. A progression of failures fueled his success. To go beyond the mediocre, it is often necessary to invent something new; risk is inherent in that. We need to see our mistakes as ways to figure out what to do right. It is essential that you truly collaborate with your team and empower them to innovate and create new ideas for improving strategic performance.

In addition, regrettably, most organizations begin the process of creating a comprehensive customer experience strategy in a silo or vacuum. In other words, the plan is completely disconnected from the overall mission, pillars, and strategic initiatives of the enterprise. As a result, these organizations are incredibly inefficient and often completely off target when building their customer experience strategy. It’s extremely important that you finalize your enterprise strategy before attempting to build a world-class customer experience roadmap.

The top 10 killers of enterprise strategy success are:

1.A weak leader

2.A weak mission statement

3.Lack of collaboration with stakeholders

4.A risk-centered enterprise

5.No digital means of collaboration, engagement, and game playing

6.No way for stakeholder to win in the game of strategy

7.A bad strategic vision centering on profit and revenue rather than on serving others

8.Lack of commitment by leadership

9.Fearful stakeholders who are punished for trying to do the right thing

10.No internal brand plan for strategic success

Develop Organizational Life Support Systems

You also need to build your organizational life support systems, including technology stacks, team members, research, tools, processes, systems, and methods. Figure 13-1 is an overview of the five steps that are essential to the creation of any organization’s successful strategic plan. It is based on what my company typically creates for our clients.

Figure 13-1. Strategy as a managed service.

HOW TO CREATE A PLAN TO GIVE
CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY CRAVE

Now that you’ve built your strategy, let’s create a plan to get you to your goal of becoming the leading provider of world-class customer experiences in your market.

Step 1:
Do the Research

Literally thousands of tools—including social analytics and data sets—are available to help you leverage insights. However, we’re concerned here with relevant data that will help you better understand your customer types. Before you begin the process of identifying your ultimate plan to move forward, you need as much relevant data as possible to come up with the best possible plan.

In Chapter 2, we examined the hypothetical NeoWash Auto Spa, where the owner actively observed the way customers engaged the car wash’s products and services. The owner conducted regular brainstorming sessions with his team for the express purpose of identifying customer types. They were quickly able to break their customers down into four easy-to-understand customer types, which in turn led to far better insights into what their customers hated and what they loved.

Active observation followed by innovation sessions helped them create the perfect car wash experience for all their customer types. This process also helped them create their journey map as they began to understand what mattered across the range of customer types at each touchpoint.

The more data you can glean prior to building your customer experience roadmap, the more successful you will be.

Step 2:
Collaborate to Innovate

As the saying goes, “Knowing ain’t doing.” Just knowing what your customer wants, hates, and loves isn’t enough. You need to take these insights and turn them into world-class experience innovations.

In the innovation world, we do this quite successfully through collaboration, especially with customer-facing stakeholders and other team members who have the inclination and authority to get the innovations moving.

To facilitate the process of collaboration, it’s helpful during brainstorming sessions to use what I call innovation prompting statements and questions. Here are some examples:

•Our customers hate to wait. How can we speed up our service?

•Our customers love value. How do we deliver conspicuous value?

•Our customers are constantly connected. What do our micro-mobile moments look like when people search for our product or service?

•Our service may not meet every customer’s expectations. What’s our action plan for turning upset customers into customers for life? Should we have a customer advocate with special training who can intervene when things go awry?

•People are multisensory. Have we looked at the smell, taste, sound, feel, and overall emotional experience of our business?

•Innovation occurs in other enterprises. How can we cross-pollinate great ideas from other industries to serve our customers?

•We sometimes do stupid things. What’s the dumbest thing we do and how can we stop doing it?

•Customers complain about different things. What’s our customers’ main complaint, and how can we eliminate it?

•We do a number of things well. What’s the best thing about our business, and how can we make it better many times over?

•We know this and this and this about our customers. What do we need to know about them that we don’t currently know?

•We are updating our analytic systems. How can we use them to get better real-time insights about our customers’ journey?

•We’ve got lots of information but it doesn’t reach all of us until our monthly meeting. How can we push out realtime dashboard data to our stakeholders so everyone can see the impact each of us is having on the overall customer experience?

•We created a new mission statement. Does our entire team understand it? How can we communicate it more effectively?

•We have successfully branded our business in our advertising. Have we internally branded the importance of a customer-centered business to our team?

I could create a list of 2,000 of these extremely powerful prompts. However, those presented here will help you quickly answer the most critical questions for mastering the customer experience in your industry.

CONSTRUCTING A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
IS NOT A ONETIME EVENT

One of the core messages of What Customers Crave is that creating exceptional customer experiences for all customer types, across all five touchpoints, via both digital and non-digital means, is not a onetime event. You must constantly live your customers’ experiences and then use collaboration and innovative design to make them better and better.

I travel all around the world visiting companies in just about every industry category imaginable. Interestingly, I can put each of these companies into one of two buckets: (1) organizations that want to check the customer experience box and then move on to the next strategy, and (2) organizations where customer experience is truly part of their DNA. For these latter companies, creating customer experiences isn’t just an annual event. They talk about these experiences, learn from them, measure them, and live them every single day of the year.

I recently hired a fitness trainer who explained, “Getting fit and healthy is easy in theory. The problem is it’s hard in practice. I can give you the easy stuff—the science—but if you don’t do the heavy lifting, you’re wasting both of our time. The bottom line is eat less and work out a lot more. Not exactly new, but it works.”

Creating a great customer experience is easy—in theory. The only problem is that it’s sometimes hard to pull off in practice. You must understand your customer types and invent amazing experiences for each of them across the five digital and nondigital touchpoints. That requires a sustained focus, the right team, a commitment from leadership, and measurements that allow you to prove return on investment.

NINE THINGS YOU NEED TO DO
TO BUILD A GREAT ROADMAP

Below is a nine-point list of the things you need to build your roadmap. These are really all you need. When you have created each of the things listed here and continually connect them to your customers and stakeholders, you will lead your market in exceptional customer experiences.

1. Construct Team Architecture: Before you begin, create a team of customer-facing stakeholders and executive enablers who will give you the insight and authority you need to build the perfect roadmap.

2. Hold Five Fast Brainstorming Sessions: I have found that in only five sessions, you can gain the insights you need to take your amorphous data and turn it into an actionable customer experience roadmap. Schedule either weekly or biweekly sessions with your team. Your goal is to identify your customer types, understand their digital channels, and map their digital and nondigital touchpoints.

3. Begin Innovation Safaris: You must support these sessions with innovation safaris, which will take you and your team on an expedition into the real world of your customers’ experiences. There are two types of innovation safaris. One is digital and leverages social analytics to gain insights into what customers are saying about you, your products, and your brand. The other is non-digital. Here, you spend time watching your customers experience your product or service. These real-world insights are extremely powerful and provide practical data about how to create world-class innovations.

4. Cross-Pollinate Ideas: Innovation comes in many forms. Some simply involve repurposing ideas from other companies and markets. There is no shame in borrowing engagement strategies that are working elsewhere. However, plan on making them much better by customizing them to meet the unique needs of your enterprise.

5. Intelligently Implement Technology: Technology for technology’s sake is a joke, yet it is widely done. Once you’ve identified how your customers want to engage you and how you can measure and manage customer data, then and only then should you begin to select technology stacks. As I have warned several times, bad customer service cannot be improved through the use of technology. Technology is nothing more than a servant of a good strategy. Remember, “Choose wisely, Grasshopper.”

6. Talk to Your Customers—the Lovers and the Haters: Identify key customers. This includes those who love you so you can get an understanding of what they love so much. It also means those who hate you. Do the same with them so you know why they hate you. Meet with them in person. These gatherings give you real-world insights into how people feel about your business. (One of the hallmarks I want you to take away from this book is that the better we understand our customers, the more able we are to provide them with exceptional and relevant customer service. You’ll lose a few nights’ sleep over this, but if you’re willing to step up and act on these insights, you will positively impact your business and brand.)

Recently, restaurants have started to invite Yelp “haters” to dinner meetings to find out why they rated them so poorly. The benefits can be enormous, as you saw in Chapter 9. First, you learn why these customers hate you, and presumably, you will be able to change or stop doing whatever that is. Second, when haters see that you genuinely want their insights, they may begin to realize that you’re doing the best you can to improve your business. Then they’ll give it another chance, and more often than not, they will retract their negative ratings and share with the world the powerful and adult way you managed their grievances.

Cautionary note: Some haters just hate, and that’s it. But even if you assume their grievances are not justified, read their reviews and determine as objectively as you can if there’s something there you can learn from. Although you may not always like what’s being said, you must set up social monitoring so you always know what is being said about your company, product, service, and brand.

7. Make It Easy and Fun to Understand: As a corporate strategist, I have watched the strategic process of rolling out roadmaps for decades. Somewhere along the way, it became essential that companies have a formal process that everyone is supposed to follow. Hogwash! It’s true that how you lay out your roadmap makes a difference, so make it visual—for example, use icons—since that is the best way to communicate ideas and steps. Historically, roadmaps have looked like business plans—dry, boring, and hard to understand. Instead, build your roadmap graphically, make it fun, and make it colorful.

Your roadmap format should be as simple as possible, making maximum use of icons and graphics. If you want to make your roadmap matter, you need to communicate your goals from the janitor all the way up to the executive suite. Everyone needs to understand your mission, goals, strategic pillars, strategies, and measurements. That way, they will be able to participate fully.

Recently, I’ve noticed that organizations are creating infographics that act as strategic snapshots for their roadmaps. They are easy to understand and are actually fun to look at. In my business, we build roadmaps as graphically thoughtful Power-Point decks that usually include ten to fifteen slides. It’s not a bunch of corporate speak; it’s language everybody can relate to. The format reflects what we stand for, and this is how we are going to achieve it.

The best organizations are careful to bring in baby boomers, GenXers, and millennials to make sure their plan’s language resonates across generations. In creating your roadmap, there are a few things that it’s important you don’t do:

•Don’t use corporate speak when creating your plan.

•Don’t make it about profit and sales. Make it about an engaging mission.

•Don’t build a plan that doesn’t have an internal branding strategy.

•Don’t have unreasonable expectations of team members.

•Don’t mandate results without giving authority to those who must create them.

•Don’t be the boss. Be the community leader.

•Don’t start a customer experience initiative without your life support system in place.

•Don’t start a customer experience initiative without leadership commitment.

•Don’t be afraid to play well with others in the enterprise sandbox.

•Don’t forget to have FUN.

8. Don’t Go It Alone: Recently, when our dishwasher broke, I decided to fix it myself and save the $150. Turns out I don’t know how to fix dishwashers, and the result was a $750 bill. What did I learn? I don’t know everything! And there’s a chance you don’t know everything either, which is why it’s extremely important to fill in your competency and skill gaps. I’ve seen so many failed initiatives that were put together with duct tape and bailing wire. Bring in a great consultant or other adviser to help you get this right. The added benefit is that it will be less stressful and more fun.

9. Measure, Measure, and Then Measure Some More: A well done customer experience initiative always delivers an impressive return on investment. But before you embark on it, protect the project by proving to other leaders the need for continued funding.

Often, excellent customer experience initiatives are killed because they look like an expense item on a spreadsheet. You need to show the financial benefits, which you can do by measuring things like customer retention, customer referrals, the cost of new customer acquisition, and any other standard matrixes that prove your return on investment. Build out these measurements early on, as you will need to have the data in your quiver at any given time. You never know when an executive will want to see proof that the cool stuff you’re doing actually matters.

SHOPPING LIST FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SUCCESS

I’d like to leave you with some of my best tips for leading your industry in customer satisfaction, employee engagement, growth, and profit. So here’s my short list:

Hire great people—Bad employees bring their badness to work every day. In researching some of the best organizations in the world, I found that they spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on the nature and character of a prospective employee. This is quite different from what most organizations do with a focus on skills, education, and direct experience. Hire employees based on their nature and temperament, and train them to build their skills.

Be the best too—The problem with hiring great people is they expect you to be great too. Bad leaders and bad organizational cultures create organizational antibodies that spit out quality people and that include both customers and team members. Build a mission-centered organization that empowers teams to deliver amazing experiences by giving them the authority to make decisions that serve the customer. Do good for goodness sake because good people want to do good things. Most organizations blame bad customer experiences on frontline stakeholders, when in fact it’s customer punitive policies and destructive cultures that ultimately destroy the customer experience.

Encourage courage—Innovative organizations develop a culture that encourages their teams to take smart risks. The fueling force of innovation is failure. That’s right, to develop breakthrough and disruptive innovations that will serve your customer you simply need to be willing to take risks, and that requires business leaders to take the focus off risk and to put it squarely on customer innovation.

Know what your customers crave—Great organizations like Procter & Gamble were pioneers in the concept of touchpoint innovation. Because of their commitment to this approach they continually develop the best consumer goods in the world. Turns out that all exceptional customer experiences are driven by an organization’s understanding of what a customer loves and what they hate across a range of customer types. Some experts suggest that the overwhelming majority of organizations don’t really understand what their customers hate and love across a range of experiences. I know I sound redundant but the headwaters of success are to simply understand what your customers love and hate and then to go about the business of eliminating what they hate while bolstering what they love.

Complete the journey—There’s a lot of talk about creating customer journey maps with the idea of developing plans to improve the customer’s journey across a range of touchpoints. Unfortunately, most organizations are big on planning and short on deployment. In What Customers Crave I talk about the importance of developing uninterrupted customer experiences across the five customer touch points. It is critical that all five touchpoints are exceptional, as most organizations take swipes at this approach and by missing even one experience across the customer’s journey they fail as the customer will always remember not the best but rather the worst experience across their journey. Don’t just have exceptional experiences at one touchpoint as most organizations do. Deliver exceptional experiences at every touch.

Create the perfect blend—In a world of digital ubiquity our customers experience us in both physical and digital experiences. Unfortunately, very few organizations deliver exceptional experiences in both digital and non-digital customer environments. The primary reason this happens is that organizations have created departmental silos that rarely result in a blended experience that is communicating the same value, brand promise, and mission in these two environments. Connecting the digital and non-digital world in order to deliver an exceptional value to your customer is a requirement in the connected economy.

Develop core competency—In order to win in customer experience and customer service, organizations need to develop customer experience design as a core competency. I believe that begins with getting professional help in designing your customer experience roadmap and in training your executive leadership and team. As conspicuously obvious as this may sound, the organizations that deliver the best customer experiences happen to be extremely competent at customer experience design and deployment.

Be disruptive—The old days of incremental innovation are over, and they’re over for good. In a marketplace of hyper competition and rapid technological change, organizations need to go beyond incremental innovations and learn to be market-leading disruptive innovators.

Bring it all together—The problem with leading at innovation and customer experience is that it requires that you build out a functional ecosystem of tools, systems, processes, and technologies. The overwhelming majority of organizations do a fraction of what’s required to lead their market. Don’t take a swipe at customer experience mastery— bring it all together to create the machinery necessary to predictably deliver the best customer experiences.

This is going to sound corny, but I am going to say it anyway. Every day we wake up and go to a job, and if it’s a job that has a meaningful mission, where we get to make other people happy, we are living a meaningful life. After working with hundreds of companies over the years, I have seen beautiful people destroy their lives by working in organizations that mistreat their customers. Customer experience is more than just treating customers well. It’s about architecting a machine that serves others.

And isn’t that what we’re here for: to serve others, to live a life of meaning, and to make people happy? The most successful people I’ve ever met would quickly answer that question, “Hell, YES!”