Customer Experience Improvement using Differentiated Needs Pyramid

The current wave of transformation in the industry is led by the combination of Customer Experience and Digital Technologies associated with it. Industry has already reaped significant benefits from ideas of Volumes, Global and distributed manufacturing (Low cost geographies), Process optimization, etc.  Now the industry has reached a stage where most of the competing products in any specific category look similar in specs, performance, price. The only ray of light for retaining and growing customers is through creating an experience which will compel customers to repeat the process again and again. As an old saying goes that “Satisfied customer will keep the satisfaction to himself but a Delighted customer will spread the story to others”, the companies are vigorously working on building a great customer experience.

The customer experience themes and actions have now moved from touchpoints to journeys; the responsibility to drive implementation has moved to the leadership levels in the organizations. Consulting organizations like McKinsey have built models around how these journeys should be undertaken by the organizations to reap the maximum benefits; Forrester Research have defined six disciplines for great customer experience i.e. strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance and culture; Wharton's Professor of Marketing Barbara E. Kahn has established an evolutional approach to customer experience as the third of four stages of any company in terms of its customer centricity maturity and so on…. There is a significant variability in this exercise as it depends on selection of journey which is determined by the interplay of strategy, business criticality, customer feedback, competition, organizational change required, etc. These factors are different for each company and thus each journey for each company is unique giving rise to anxiety and uncertainty of its success.

I feel, if one uses the good old Maslow’s Theory to create a differentiated needs pyramid while designing Customer Experience improvement initiatives/actions, the results could be effective and predictable. 

Briefly speaking, Maslow’s theory states that people are motivated to achieve certain needs and that some needs take precedence over others. Our most basic need is for physical survival, and this will be the first thing that motivates our behavior. Once that level is fulfilled the next level up is what motivates us and so on. The hierarchy includes Physiological, Safety, Belonging/Love, Esteem and Self Actualization in that sequence. There might be cases where some needs at higher levels get satisfied before lower levels but overall trend for large % of needs follows the hierarchy. The first four levels are called as deficiency needs i.e. they arise due to deprivation and intensity of these needs is directly proportional to the level of deprivation and the top most needs in the category of Self Actualization are called as Growth needs, which helps person in his/her individual growth. 

If we keep this hierarchy in mind and build a hierarchy of needs of customers for a product / service a company is offering, it provides a superior insight in to extent of change in customer experience in response to specific actions undertaken by the company. Let us take an example of grocery retail store and see how it works.

I have defined one such hierarchy for grocery retail and distributed various needs of customer in to various levels of the pyramid. 

For a customer, the physiological needs from a Grocery retail store would be something like, store should be easily identified by name signs and has basic things like parking, access, etc., the stores should have the most of the essential goods that the customer would be looking for, once customer enters stores, there should be a fair identification of isles v/s products to find the products easily and the stores should not be dirty.

Moving upwards to safety related needs, which cover physical, financial and other securities, would include things like detailed isle marking, properly stacked products easy to reach and remove, there are no boxes lying around and one can freely move around with no hindrance, clean and effective mechanism to keep it clean and finally you have a variety of products to choose from.  If all these things are present, then customer feels better than the store which can fulfil only physiological needs; and chances that he/she will come back are higher.

The next level of needs would include extension of products beyond Grocery, which is main purpose for customer visit, like cloths, furniture, gift articles, home décor, etc. or a restaurant, a coffee shop which could help shopper to spend some time relaxing after the Grocery shopping or some activities like cooking workshops, kids arts/craft workshop, etc. These things start building an emotional connect and satisfying multiple needs of customer beyond Grocery. This emotional bond plays an important role in bringing him/her more frequently to the store.

When we extend this emotional bonding through some highly specialized things like significant variety/choice of specialty foods like vegan, glutton-free, fat-free, sugar-free, organic, etc. or the whole store associated with any specific sport/sporting team or philanthropic activity or a gourmet restaurant, creates a CULT LIKE FOLLOWING with some of the customers. These customers are PROUD of the store and how it fulfills their needs; they visit often and strongly recommend the store to their friends and family.

The self actualization level for a store could be catering to customers by their specific needs in all the levels without being asked; if there is a shift in the needs, the store is capable to reflect and re-present themselves to their customers. Which is very difficult but could be aspired by grocery stores to achieve through latest technologies in AI/ML.

When an organization is building strategy and actions to enhance their customer experience, this Maslows hierarchy based mapping comes in handy. We should do a simple assessment for each action with respect to which customer need gets fulfilled. Depending on the level of the need which gets fulfilled, the impact on the experience and subsequent improvement in sales could be assessed. If the need at physiological level gets fulfilled, we may not see any significant change in the customer behavior, but if the need at belonging or esteem level, we can see tremendous impact.

So when we cross check our strategy and actions there in with this hierarchy we understand two important aspects

1                     Is there any types of need that are not being addressed? which means we may not reach desired level of customer experience.

2                     What kind of change we should expect from the customer after implementation of these actions.

Based on the result of assessment, the strategy and actions could be modified before implementation. This proactive approach will save missteps, wrong investments as well as miscommunication and ensure a significant positive impact on customer experience.

I have explained the concept with one example, the needs pyramid will be different for each company even if they are in the same industry segment. If each company spends energy to build such pyramid for their product/s, they can refine their strategy for improving their customer experience to give expected results.   

Next frontier of excellence in Customer Experience – Extreme Personalization

Customer experience is one of the things which is keeping C suite executives awake in the night. As a result a we see slew of initiatives implemented by various organizations in the hope of improving the experience provided to the customer in every interaction. Significant investments in technology and algorithms have been made and continued to be made in order to understand customer & their needs to build a great experience mechanism. Companies have used AI, Machine learning, IOT, Robotics and a whole lot of analytics platforms to come out with such mechanisms which will elevate customer interaction.   

Some of the areas where companies have worked are

·      Proactively identify the product customer may want to buy and build some special schemes around the same

·    Reduce the price points and increase convenience points through multiple aspects like efficient operations, Direct to customer, free delivery, same day delivery, order online and pick up at the nearest store, etc.

·     Provide a significant choice to customer and make return easy to reduce the hesitancy of impulse buying

·        Use social media information and create a product for specific groups and provide a special deals for specific group

·         Train the last mile employees to provide a great experience at every touch point with customer

·         Creating a powerful online channel to help customers buy from where ever and whenever they want to buy

All the efforts are towards making buying process delightfully rewarding to customer that customer returns to buy more as well as provides word of mouth publicity.

It is also important to note the temperament of the current generation; they do not want to go out to stores to have a feel of the product they want to buy but they are happy to order it from their mobile phone. There is no loyalty for a seller/shop, who so ever provides lower price, good return policy gets the deal. Although brand plays a role in decision making but convenience and price determines the purchase decision.     

Companies like Amazon, Walmart have leapfrogged in this art and are creating more and more mechanisms to engage the buyer meaningfully. I call these mechanisms as Gen 1 mechanisms which involve changing / optimizing/ improving everything around the product. The next step in this would be to include product itself in building the lasting customer experience.

The Gen2 of mechanisms will include the product and extreme personalization will be at core. Simply put, enable customer to define /design product of their choice and provide the delivery with the same efficiency and convenience we have built in the Gen 1 mechanisms.

One example, in today’s situation, if one wants to buy a Shirt , first you visit a website, you choose style followed by selection of either color or pattern from the list available in the size that fits you. Select delivery option and see the total price. Normally, person will check on multiple websites if the same brand and similar shirt is available on any other website and finalize the decision based on the best pricing.   The next generation of disruption is going to come from extreme personalization i.e. by allowing customer to design their product. If we translate this to purchase of shirt situation, then it will be something like this – you visit a website for shirt, every one does not have a great chiseled body and std sizes do not fit them properly so you provide your photograph so that your measurements are understood by the company. Then you can choose the cloth, pattern, etc. from a significantly large repository of designs and cloths. The website provides you with the picture of shirt with your specifications worn by you (using the photograph provided by you). If you like it, you can place an order. It will be manufactured to your specific size, design and shipped you efficiently. It is a tailored shirt purchased with convenience of sitting at home and price of a mass manufactured shirt and delivered to a destination of your choice.

  

It will be a 100% “made to order” scenario, but a completely automated to remove any manual work typically involved in “made to order” scenario. The technological development in terms of machine to machine connectivity and various facets of automation will allow us to share the order from a mobile phone to the shop floor which will manufacture the goods to the specifications provided using the raw material for specific order and then it will be shipped to specific address. This will create a significant impact on the entire industry as companies will not have any stocks of finished goods, no warehouses for finished goods, no worries as to how to take out the unsold stock, etc. The warehouses will only hold stock of raw material and you will have many automated specialized plants to manufacture specific category of products connected with the websites picking up orders. With 3D printing capabilities getting evolved, this can be enhanced significantly. It might look impossible at this juncture as it will need to dismantle the whole industry and rebuild it with new principles, but the competition will drive us to conquer this new frontier of extreme personalization to create that super duper customer experience.      

Nine Step process to Improve Customer Experience

As described in my earlier blog “Customer Experience and Organizational Excellence”, customer experience has a start (your current level) but no end point and it needs to be improved perpetually. If we do not improve the level of customer experience, it automatically degrades itself. The kind of experience we can provide to customer depends on how well we know the customer and our urge to provide customer with great experience during every interaction. Since it is proven that the top and bottom line gets affected directly by the experience a customer gets while interacting with our company directly or indirectly; it is natural that we want to give the best experience and the “urge” for the same is assumed to be given. So the manifestation of experience directly depends on how well we understand our customer. Do we understand their needs, wants and aspirations?, Can we really think like them?, Do we know how they will react or perceive us if we take a certain action? It is a complex, multidimensional, and nonlinear process due to multiple variables like changing environment, churn in customers, technology disruptions and competition to name a few. 

I have observed a nine step model in ancient Vedic literature to understand God (Nava Vidha Bhakti i.e. nine ways of devotion) and I feel that if we apply it to today’s corporate world, it provides us a great model for understanding our customer and provide a superlative experience during each of our interaction. I have presented the same in this blog.  The following diagram shows the real names of these nine steps and “Applied Names” when used in context of understanding customer.  

The first one is called “Shravana (Listening to/about Customer) Bhakti” which tells us to listen more and more about customer. Use any channel available at your disposal; be it reading print / digital media, go to different customer / industry forums, conduct some surveys, understand some success stories as well as failures etc. Everything collected predominantly from secondary sources. This gives us a level of perception where we can start visualizing what customer would expect from any interaction with us and we can start building our customer engagement mechanisms.  

The second and third forms namely “Nama Sankirtana” (Chanting about Customer) and “Smarana” (Remembering Customer behavior) are typically performed together after the one has achieved a specific level of perception about customer through secondary knowledge and listening about him from multiple sources. These two forms tell us that we should always talk about customer, keep customer in mind while taking any action or decision. Also remember customer’s behavior in different circumstances and situations, remember how customer has reacted to an intervention by us or competition.  This acts as a positive spiral refining our perception about customer and helps us improve our actions thus improving the experience customers would get in every transaction. 

These first three steps really talk about the homework that we need to do before interacting with customer in order to create a great experience during interaction. This homework prepares us for initiate a satisfactory transaction with customer.

We are now ready and waiting for an opportunity to provide a service to our customers in the most desired manner. The next three forms i.e. Pada Sevana (Waiting on customer), Archana (Worshipping Customer ) and Vandana (Saluting Customer) provide direction in terms of how do we create this opportunity. Pada Sevana (Waiting on Customer) tells us that be around your customer, visit places like trade fairs where your customer is present, observe your customer, take note of what customer is doing. This keen observation and presence will definitely get noticed and opportunity for interaction will present itself.  This when coupled with Archana (Worshipping Customer) and Vandana (Saluting Customer) the chances of improving the customer experience increase many fold. A simple thing like Saluting / celebrating success of an athlete in a large forum of budding athletes by a sportswear company brings this whole thing together. It creates a large group of customers at one place, it provides opportunity to interact and understand the customer base through informal interactions not related to any business transaction, it sends clear message that you value the customer as well as the success one of the customer has achieved and you are happy about the same. It also conveys that you listen to your customer and ready to do things which are not directly related to your business (go extra mile) if necessary.  A company can create multiple such opportunities using Archana (Worshipping Customer) and Vandana (Saluting Customer) to create a supportive background for a memorable customer experience when the actual business transaction takes place.

We have done a lot of hard work in getting ready for giving a great experience to our customer, we have done right things to create an opportunity to do so. I am certain that opportunity will present itself to perform a business transaction and thus provide superlative experience to customer. The next three forms i.e. Dasya (Serving Customer), Sakhya (Be friend to Customer) and Atma Nivedana (Complete Dedication) take us through process of superlative experience throughout the life-cycle of relationship with customer. In the initial phase of your business relationship, you serve customer without questioning, listen to the needs and service them without questioning and try and go beyond what customer is looking for. You fulfill anything that customer demands. This provides a very comfortable experience in the transactions and also provides a lot of insights about customer mindset. This triggers the next form I.e. Sakhya (be friending customer), which means you now start advising customer on what would be right for him based on your knowledge about customer, you start thinking for him and work for him for his benefit. This elevates the experience to a new level. The last one i.e. Atma Nivedana (Complete dedication) is the next phase where your thinking is changed in such a manner that there is no difference between you and customer and you deliver services in a manner that you feel would provide best customer experience without need for asking customer. The key transition that you find here is the extent customer has to drive the transactions and set the expectations. From Dasya (Serving Customer) to Atma Nivedana (complete dedication),  you find that need for customer to focus on what he needs in a business transaction reduces and he keeps of getting the same or more without asking which naturally ensures a great and lasting experience. 

A few questions come to our mind –

·         Are these steps sequential?

·         Do we have to do all these steps?

·         The environment, technologies are changing; so are the customer expectations, what happens to this framework?

These steps grouped in to three groups as described earlier and followed in that sequence. Most of the activities in a group are run in parallel. There are subtle differences, but they can run in parallel. This sequence is for a set/segment of customer/s once you start you can go to the end to ensure great experience. It is better to perform all the activities to reach the ultimate goal of superlative customer experience, if we do not perform certain activities, it may not give us the desired results.

The model has an inbuilt positive spiral to correct the changes which are happening in the environment and then modify the next steps on the go. We are continuously Listening to/about customer, talking about customer, understanding their feedback to firm up our understanding in order to prepare for next steps. This activity is continuous activity and any changes taking place in the environment, technology, customer expectations, etc., automatically refine our understanding of customer enabling effective next steps.    

We can use the two approaches described in my earlier blog, “Customer Experience and Organizational Excellence”, to implement various initiatives to ensure superlative customer experience.

1                     Reverse Planning for a Customer Experience thread

2                     Creating multiple pairs of supplier/customer within ecosystem

Leadership Circle

Have you faced a situation where many of the projects/ programs of the organization running on track because they are led by good leaders however these leaders were burning themselves due to lack of leadership / ownership type of support from the team under them and there are associates who want to lead but have no leadership experience and hence can not be deployed in leadership roles in projects. It is a time bomb ticking and one snap can lead to a major problem for a customer. You are looking for a solution to build the leadership capability at every level in the organization which is,

• Scalable to be used with large mass of consultants at medium to junior level,
• Has a good pull (It cannot be forced on to anyone),
• Is able to provide leadership experience beyond any theoretical knowledge,
• Is cost effective

“Leadership Circle” , which has inspiration from Quality Circle movement, is the solution for the same. 

  

Leadership Circle is a group people who want to become leaders in whatever work they are doing coming together. The typical size of a Leadership Circle is @ 7-8 people comprising at least one mentor. They meet once a week for an hour to discuss various topics like

• What it takes to become a leader,
•  See videos, listen to various leaders in person
• Discuss key learnings from various leadership books and how the team intends to use them or have used them
• Present various situations at their workplace and deliberate possible way to lead in these situations,
• Identify real projects to experiment the learning
• Execute the projects and present learning in the circle

There is no relationship between leadership circle and performance management system within organization. It is expected that results will automatically be seen in the regular work performed by these consultants and reflect in their performance review. This is a voluntary participation initiative and no special concessions accorded for participation.    

Key observations and experience from running Leadership Circle is collated in a few points:

• These are open and semi-structured meetings. The outcome depends on acceptance of this mechanism and participation. Typically the team participating in Leadership Circle is used to get the instructions from their leaders and execute them and not used to make decisions. Mentor needs to play a big role here to coach the team through different methods.
• One of the critical thing which takes a very long time is, to internalize the key aspects of leadership. It was very easy to describe what qualities a leader should have from various books, articles; however doing an introspection to check where one stands on each of them, accept shortcoming and consciously take efforts to build them, was very difficult for many. Mentor needed to take the team slowly on right path, once they understood how to inspire themselves to learn new capabilities; we have achieved a major milestone.
• Sometimes members are sensitive about identifying problems within them for the fear of adverse action from the organization as a result they find difficulty in their improvement. It is important from mentor’s side to provide that confidence that nothing disclosed in the circle goes in to any of the HR records. Once team gets this confidence, they start opening up and positive results start showing up.
• The success of this program depends on self-driven efforts by individual and each person progresses at his or her unique speed. There will be some drop outs and one needs to be prepared for the same.
• Providing some kind of experience of “leading” in everything the circle does is key. Devising simple rules like each circle meeting would be led by a different individual every meeting helped. He/she will have complete freedom to design the meeting and conduct the same within a base framework. He/ She will intimate others in advance if it is expected that team should be prepared in specific area for the meeting. Many members were confused how to do this, many of them continuously sought validation from Mentors, many were hesitant to establish protocol for their meeting. Mentors helped the specific individuals and after a couple of months this protocol started working nicely.
• Identification of projects for the team to experiment within organization was important and I want to talk about one project of conducting an organization wide competition. The project was assigned to one of the leadership circle team. They did everything from conceptualization, presenting the concept to management, get budgetary approvals, creating theme and detailed design for competition and popularize the same within the organization, generating some additional volunteers to help them run the competition, actually run the competition, identifying the right panel of judges, get the entries evaluated and finally organize a prize distribution for the same. This was a big challenge as none of the faces from this team were familiar to the larger audience (barring a small group of friends of each member) within the organization. Team worked hard, faltered a few times, mentors spent some good time with the team in terms of guidance only (no actual participation in any of the activities). There was significant hard work but the team had first hand experience as to when they own something, what all things they need to do to complete the same. Big change was observed in circle members in the way they started looking at things they are doing in day to day work life.    
• As a result of such successes, confidence levels of the members increased tremendously and aspirations for taking such challenges in professional life also increased. This was expected result and we were happy about the same.       

Many members were happy on personal level that they now understand what it really meant by “Leader” and they have experienced the same in some or other capacity. They also feel nice that they have a peer forum where they can discuss some problem they might be facing on the work front and find a solution.

This initiative is like a movement and takes time to provide results. However when the results come, they are really beneficial to organization as well as individual.

Keys for Success of Leadership Circle:

• Visible support from Management for this initiative. Teams put in efforts on their own to build their leadership quality and demonstrate them through various projects they undertake; this should be recognized and supported
• It is a voluntary initiative and the results depend on the drive each person has. So it is critical to have at least 5-6 persons out of 7-8 with passion to lead while beginning a circle.
• The success of this initiative depends on the “Mentor”. Higher investment from mentor’s side better are the results. It is important to have a mentor for this Circle from business (not from HR) who is somewhat recognized as leader within the organization at least at some level and understands that he/she needs to “mentor” and “not to lead” this team. A battery of good mentors is critical for success.
• Organization should help this initiative with identifying various projects that these teams can take and execute to gain experience of leading. There is always an apprehension to use any customer projects for experimenting so all the internal initiatives could be run through these circles and can bring in the experience portion to the team.
• Based on the observed performance, some of the team members should be assigned to some leadership roles within the project world to provide a clear signal that organization is serious about this initiative and if they find some good talent, they will pick it up for better roles. Few members do start aspiring for a better role as their confidence improves and there is always a risk of they looking out for leadership opportunities if not provided in-house. This aspect needs to be managed well and business leaders becoming mentors helps in this aspect.
• It is important to remember that the idea of this initiative is not to create more project managers but to create a leader who in any capacity can lead when needed and measurement of its success should be with the same yardstick. It is more like a movement and not a focused training.
•  Leadership Circle takes some time to see results and it is important to have patience from mentors as well as team members

Leadership Circle is the right movement that every organization should embrace to build the leaders within. 

Delivery Excellence a new approach

When any organization thinks about “Delivery Excellence”, it is always a top down approach and using a guiding framework like ISO, CMMI, ITIL, Malcom Baldridge, Deming’s principles, etc. Many a times a special department or authority is created to run this program. This authority creates all the necessary processes and supporting templates and tools. These are implemented through training, coaching, and auditing to ensure uniform progress and results across the organization. There are several measurement criteria defined to measure the progress along the way to final destination. There are external audits/ assessments carried out to understand the progress made and results achieved through an unbiased view. The whole structure works like a uniform machine and each person knows the expectation from him/her and performs to that expectation in anticipation of good results. I have observed that organizations try to maintain the highest level of certification/ assessment throughout and it is herculean effort on both employees and organization every 3/5 years to undergo an external audit. There is no roadmap beyond this certification for further improvement, there are still stray cases where things fall through the cracks but the life goes on.

In my earlier blog on Delivery Excellence on Auto Pilot*, I had discussed how to make this top down process more effective and lasting in terms of results. However I am going to discuss a different approach here which will remove all the pitfalls of the top down approach and provide a fresh outlook to achieve the delivery excellence.

Organization is made up of people. Each person is responsible for several activities and part of several teams for whom these activities are performed. These teams are also part of some larger teams and so on. Finally all the teams form one team at organization level which is responsible to achieve organizational excellence. In this new bottoms-up approach we keep the definition of excellence in mind i.e. “Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the entire activities one performs on personal and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is not end as to final level of excellence” and encourage each person to the following; we are sure to have a positive result

• Self Question* the way he/she is doing a specific activity and see how it can be done better and how it can help the team he/she is working for to achieve its objective
• Experiment* with new way of operation and see the results. If the results are encouraging, then implement the new way of working and share this improved way of working along with results with others in team. A new and improved way of doing a specific activity has been found and registered in the repository for reference by others in the organization. A small step in achieving delivery excellence has been taken and multiple such steps create a momentum necessary for big result
• Repeat this process from individual level to team levels up the hierarchy

One question comes to mind; - If everyone in the organization starts thinking and implementing his/her own improvements then will it not be chaotic and uncontrolled delivery?  The answer is NO

The definition of excellence guides the individuals that their improvement actions are required to achieve better results than their current level and thus all the new improvements will direct the results in positive direction. We can build a common high level metrics for each team (which we already have) and performance be measured based on the same. As long as we are able to measure the performance through these metrics, the teams can have freedom to do their improvement journey as per their thought process. Building certain individual metrics like Say-do ratio* and Ownership Quotient* will help teams to monitor themselves on regular basis. In the beginning, the process may look un controlled as there is a significant level of freedom available to the teams on ground, however it enables teams to contribute better in achieving overall results. Allowing people to perform* provides a great motivation and ensures results.

*- There are separate blogs for each of the idea mentioned here and can be referred for detailed information 

Customer Experience and Organizational Excellence

“Customer Experience” is the current battle ground for the industry to win new customers as well as retain customers and drive better revenue and profit. Simply defined, Customer Experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction includes a customer's attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy and purchase and use of a service. Forbes say that customer experience is the "cumulative impact of multiple touch points" over the course of a customer's interaction with an organization. It involves hard aspects like physical experience during interactions at stores to softer aspects like interaction over digital media, perception, social, psychological impact, etc. With the developments in technology, significant changes have been introduced in the way customer is engaged and experience is measured and improved. Significant investments are being planned in this area and many companies have appointed Customer Experience Officers (CXO) to spearhead the activities around it. One very important characteristic of the CX is; it has a start but no end point, it needs to be improved perpetually. If we do not improve the level of customer experience it automatically diminishes in terms of customer perception.

This characteristic is very similar to how we define Excellence;  i.e. “Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the activities one performs in personal and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is a starting point (where you are currently) but no end point / final level of excellence. It is a journey which typically has view of only next milestone or two and remaining milestones emerge as we move forward”.

“Customer Experience” and “Organizational Excellence” are two aspects which have similar characteristics and can be designed to feed each other in a positive spiral giving dramatic benefits to an organization

Author James Allen mentions that although 80% of businesses state that they offer a "great customer experience”, only 8% of customers express satisfaction with their experience. This throws light on the gap between what is perceived great by industry vis a vis by customers. This pushes companies to work hard on understanding customers better and provide them a better experience. One of the mechanism organizations can adopt is to drive organizational excellence initiatives based on the customer experience needs. This will improve the excellence levels of various activities performed by the organization and drive the customer experience automatically. This cycle of achieving higher and higher levels of Customer experience through different innovative excellence initiatives will drive the ultimate objective of better revenue and better profits. A quote by Steve Jobs, “You have got to start with customer experience and work back towards technology-not the other way round” vindicates the approach mentioned here.

There are two approaches to build Excellence initiatives which will be fed by the needs of better customer experience and move the needle in the right direction.

1                     Reverse Planning for a Customer Experience thread

2                     Creating multiple pairs of supplier/customer within ecosystem

1              Reverse Planning for a customer Experience thread

As we know there are multiple aspects / avenues where companies connect with their customers such as in retail stores, on web site/ mobile/social media, through service desk, through advertising campaign, special interest groups, etc. In this approach we pick up one thread and create connecting activities backwards till the raw material sourcing / design stage. Identify critical activities in the same which will have impact on the final customer experience. Analyse each one of them and identify initiatives to improve the excellence level of the organization unit performing these activities. The activity should be analyzed holistically from multiple angles covering People, Process, Technology. Each activity needs to be questioned as to can it be performed with higher level of excellence and what changes / amendments that need to be brought out to do the same. You get a comprehensive set of initiatives which are linked to a specific improvement aspect of customer experience.

Let us take a simple example: “Customer needs help in locating certain merchandise and wants to know some more information about it and she asks an employee on the floor of the store”. How do we enhance the experience customer gets during this interaction?

At the basic level, the employee on the floor must have the information about merchandize, where they are located?, how to reach there?, how much stock do they have in store right now?, are there any similar products which customer can consider?, are there any deals going on the product requested by customer or a similar product?, are there any related products that could be suggested to the customer?. We can assess each of the area and see what is the level of excellence we are working with, identify changes that we want to bring in with respect to people/ process/technology so that we can bring it to higher level of excellence and this have an opportunity to create a better experience. In this case, we can check

•         Is the information available with employee?
•         What is the mechanism of making this information available to the employee on the floor
•         Is it available to a few employees (category wise information distribution) or any one would have this information?
•         How intuitive is the mechanism to provide information?
•         Is the information accurate?
•         How current is the information?
•         How fast is the access to the information?
•         How easy / fast search capability available with person on the floor?  

Look at each and every aspect of information with focus of how are we doing today and is there any better / faster / efficient way to do it. Identify such areas as excellence initiatives and start implementing them

This experience could be further enhanced, if the person on the floor is well trained in engaging customer in an effective manner. Every up sell /cross sell happens through a better engagement.

The third level of enhancement to experience comes when you reach to the location specified by employee on the floor and you find your merchandise, it is not out of stock and has the same deal as mentioned by the employee on the floor. This leads to other aspects of business like store lay outs, stocking as per lay out, matching physical layout and electronic information, stock levels, logistics aspects of merchandise movement etc.  We have started the thread for customer experience for a simple transaction customer has with an employee on the floor and how it traces backward to various activities which need to be performed at a higher level of excellence in order to provide a better customer experience. Analyzing and creating excellence initiatives in each area will help improving the customer experience systematically.     

2              Creating multiple pairs of Supplier / Customer within the eco system

This approach handles the customer experience at a different level. Instead of picking up a thread and going back till the design stage, it works on a chain of Supplier / customers within eco system and improvement in the specific experience at each pair level will automatically improve the overall customer experience that the company can achieve. Some of the pairs could be

•         Customer and Store team
•         Customer and IT Team
•         Customer and Customer Service team
•         Store team and Warehousing team
•         Store team and IT team
•         Warehousing team and Planning team
•         Warehousing team and Production team
•         Production team and Procurement team
•         Production team and Design Team
•         Production team and Sales team
•         Sales team and Design team

Each pair has one service provider and one service receiver and set of activities through which they interact and customer experience of this interaction is noted. This interaction when analyzed gives clues for excellence initiatives to be undertaken.  

So, in summary, road to higher revenues and profits passes through the focused excellence initiatives around customer experience.