Service objectives
The following list represents the Key Service Objectives (KSO) for the Appleton Greene Customer Experience service.Rethinking Marketing
The purpose of this service objective is to help companies rethink marketing from a customer lens, and develop a deep appreciation for the role customer experience plays in growing an organization’s business. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood management disciplines; it is often equated with selling and advertising. Traditional marketing views customers mainly as a source of revenue and profits. As a result, companies tend to focus more on their products, services, and technologies, and relatively less on customers’ needs and preferences, which essentially amounts to conducting business on the company’s terms. However, in today’s interconnected and digitally empowered world this company-dictating-to-customer attitude is not a winning strategy, and could even have harmful consequences for a company’s long term health. Today’s customers are more educated, more sure of what they want and what they don’t want, and hence less willing to have companies decide what’s best for them. They have a voice and want to be heard, and they want to have a say in the types of products, services, and communications that are targeted at them. They are not interested in being passive consumers of products and services, but want to participate in co-creating and receiving compelling and memorable experiences. Hence, there is a need to rethink marketing, shift its focus from product-centricity to customer-centricity. The goal of marketing should not be selling customers by pushing products and services at them, but serving customers with customized solutions and experiences. Because, customers are more than mere wallets – sources of revenue – that companies need to win at the expense of competition, they are long-term assets that they should serve and nurture, because it’s the single best investment companies can make in their own long-term wellbeing and prosperity. A number of case studies and examples from a variety of companies, industries, and countries will be provided and discussed to illustrate how companies at the forefront of this new marketing thinking and practice build strong and enduring handshakes with customers. Specifically, how champion marketing companies treat their customers as assets, and how they win against competitors by investing in listening, engaging, and responding to their customers.
Understanding Customers
The purpose of this service objective is to stress the importance of entering the experiential world of the customer, so companies can develop deeper insights and a greater appreciation for the types of experiences and interactions customers seek and value. Just like there is no such thing as an average customer, there is no such thing as an average customer experience. Valuable and compelling customer experiences are always designed for specific market segments and target markets, because different market segments and target markets one size doesn’t fit all. Consequently, before companies can design compelling and memorable customer experiences they must first enter the customers’ world to understand the socio-cultural context in which customers operate. This will include their experiential needs, wants, and desires, which flow from their chosen lifestyles and interaction preferences. For example, some banking customers prefer the inter-personal experience of engaging with bank tellers, others the experience of convenience offered by Internet banking. It is crucial that companies step out of their own operating world and step into the shoes of the customer. Because, what’s vital is not not what products and services companies have on offer, what matters most is what customers do with these products and services – how they use the myriad of products and services offered to them to make their own lives better, easier, and simpler. This is also the goal of customer experience engineering, to make the lives of customers in selected segments and target markets better, easier, more convenient, and more satisfying. Concepts, methodologies, and frameworks that companies frequently use to step into the experiential world of the customer, such as ethnography, observation, focus groups, prototyping, and survey research, will be presented and explained so that participating executives can develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the experiences different customer segments and target markets value and seek.
Designing Experience
The purpose of this service objective is to help clients transition from insights to implementation. In this phase, clients will use what they have learned about the experiential world of customers and translate that into a comprehensive portfolio of interactions and engagements with the customer to deliver compelling and memorable experiences to key customer segments and target markets. This phase focuses on the client’s world and takes them on a systematic journey that encompasses the following aspects. First, is company aspirations. Like customers, companies too have preferences for the experiences they would like to deliver, and how they would like the market to acknowledge them. For example, a leading Malaysian bank aspired to design and deliver F.I.R.S.T experiences to its customers – Friendly, Innovative, Responsive, Simple, Trustworthy. Similarly, grocery stores may have aspirations for providing “organic food” experiences, car and tire companies for “safety,” and hotels for “home-like comforts and experiences.” Next is organizational competencies. All companies have distinct competencies that they would like to deploy in the designing of customer experiences. Some companies excel at product design, others in touch technologies, and others in their highly trained staff. These competencies, and their flip side – constraints – will determine significantly companies’ abilities to design relevant and meaningful experiences for their selected target markets. Third is corporate assets, which includes the strength of a company’s brands and the size of their network of collaborations and alliances. Champion experience providers, like Disney, invest significant resources in building and maintaining strong brands, and in developing an ecosystem around their core offering – transportation, hotels, restaurants and tour companies – to provide their customers with an end-to-end experience. Compelling and memorable customer experiences do not happen by accident; they are intentional, and the result of investments in time, money, effort, and people. Case studies and examples will be provided to illustrate how companies that excel at providing memorable and meaningful customer experiences use specialized techniques and processes, like “Touchpoint Mapping,” “Customer Journeys,” and “Service Blueprinting,” to manage and orchestrate elements that comprise the design phase of customer experience engineering. These techniques and processes will also come in play in the “Delivery” and “Innovation” phases which follow.
Delivering Experience
The purpose of this objective is to acquaint clients with major vehicles for delivering compelling and memorable experiences, so there is minimal loss of value between how the experience is designed, and how it actually is received by customers. As the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; companies claiming they deliver the best customer experience counts for little, what the customer receives and experiences is all that matters. Two classes of customer experience delivery vehicles will be emphasized during this stage. The first relates to all visible touchpoints between the company and the customer where the customer has an opportunity to engage and interact with the company. These touchpoints could be as routine as company websites, or as complex as special technology interfaces, like “Apps” that facilitate mobile and densely packaged, single point of contact experiences. The second class concerns vehicles that align employee objectives with customer experience objectives. These vehicles could involve organizational structure, processes to support customer interactions, incentives, or some combination of all three. No company can deliver compelling customer experiences if their employees are not committed to delivering that experience. Gaps in customer experience designed and customer experience received can often be traced to misalignment in employee goals and customer expectations. This phase will also discuss the role played by humans and technology in delivering relevant and meaningful experience, and how best to deploy both. Because, despite the phenomenal increase in technology and the digitalization of business transactions, humans have not been become irrelevant in delivering customer experiences. The issue is not technology vs. humans, it is how best to couple technology and human beings to deliver the optimum customer experience, either remotely or proximally, across all touch points and through all phases of the customer decision making journey. Here again, a variety of case studies and examples will be provided to illustrate exemplary customer experience delivery practices. Techniques and tools discussed in the previous phase, such as customer touchpoints, customer journeys, and service blueprinting will also be used here to explain how companies can measure and detect where the company is meeting or exceeding customer expectations on customer experience delivery, and where it is falling short.
Innovating Experience
The purpose of this objective is to impress on clients the importance of ongoing innovation in designing and delivering customer experience. This section will explain and clarify that innovation is the sum of all activities undertaken by companies that make the day-to-day lives of customers better, easier, more convenient, and more satisfying. It will also explain that the reason why investment in innovation is non-negotiable is because the experiential world of customers is constantly changing. How customers consume music, how they learn and entertain themselves, and how they shop is not the same as it was in the past. Consequently, companies have to constantly be on the lookout for innovations that will keep customer experiences relevant, meaningful, and contemporary. Innovation is a key driver of business growth, since it plays a vital role in acquiring and retaining customers. The importance of planning and managing innovations to influence the end-to-end customer experience will also be emphasized, because shortfalls in customer experiences in one area can’t be compensated with overachievement in another. For example, companies may do a superlative job in innovating breakthrough products and services, which is bound to attract new customers. But if the company doesn’t complement its product innovation investments with commensurate investments in service innovation, customers may not be attracted to buy its products. They may choose to switch to competitor’s products because they offer a superior service and support experience. The techniques and tools encountered earlier for designing and delivering customer experience, such as customer touchpoints, customer journeys, and service blueprinting, will also be discussed in this phase as they can all serve as a basis for guiding the customer experience innovation efforts of the company. Finally, the importance of customers as collaborators in the innovation of customer experience will also be stressed. All customer experiences are co-created, because compelling and relevant customer experiences materialize only when customers interact with the company’s offerings. If customers don’t interact with a company’s offering, be it product or service, the experience potential inherent in that offering will never materialize. iPod and Skype provide excellent examples. MP3 players and videoconferencing facilities existed before the iPod and Skype. But the customer experience offered by these offerings was far superior, mainly because customers co-created experience value for themselves. They interacted with iPod and Skype in ways that went beyond how the two companies had envisioned customers using their offerings.