One of the key questions in Customer Experience is ‘how can we redesign our experience to create more value-add?’ Too often however this is treated as a negative question, being turned into: ‘what can we do to eliminate non-value adding costs’, hence the popularity of certain LEAN and Six Sigma approaches. Yet the programme of activity required to transform your organisation at a touchpoint level is actually quite straightforward and characterised by 4 steps: Define, Create, Test and Pilot.
§ Step 1 Define: using Emotional Signature® organisations can easily identify those touchpoints that are driving or destroying value to the business. Critically this includes a measurement of touchpoints that may have a subconscious or emotional impact; touchpoints ill-considered in traditional research. For instance, do you think your customers will tell you straight how important tone of voice is or how they felt cared for? This is why we bring to bear specialised measurement techniques to tease out what really matters.
§ Step 2 Create: once we have defined those few touchpoints that count, we then seek to create new scenarios that might work for you. This is a creative exercise grounded in Emotional Signature® but also opening things out to consider how entirely new and unforeseen ways of doing things could change your business.
§ Step 3 Test: in this phase the creative scenarios are tested with customers and clients either qualitatively or using specialised but easy to execute quantitative techniques to determine which scenario works and gives you competitive advantage
§ Step 4 Pilot: finally we look at the actual implementation. Supporting the action from conceptualisation to realisation and measuring the response.
Too often firms fail in their Experience redesign because they look at things in the traditional way, failing to consider the psychology of the customer and clients they deal with.
§ Think about it, in your LEAN programmes (or equivalent) do you look at your customers emotions, do you really think about the value-add you are creating or are you just cutting costs: remember these programmes are actually supposed to be about value creation (remember the comments from Hamel and Prahalad (1994) who argue that re-engineering – when applied as a cost cutting tool – leads to ‘corporate anorexia, and that corporations ‘can’t shrink to greatness’.
§ In your current Touchpoint programmes, have you thought about how your customer, thinks and feels about you, looking at the things they don’t say as well as those they do! Indeed, have you gone beyond the research, looking at the range of creative possibilities open to you? And how you might design in and measure the response? Remember if your fundamental research fails then so will your touchpoint redesigns.
By Steven Walden | Published: March 31, 2010