I have recently been included in Brand Quarterly’s ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’ and they asked me an interesting question: “What do I think the next industry trends would be for the year?” I thought I would expand on my thoughts here and give a better explanation.

For those of you that do not know about this,  behavioral economics embraces the fact that often Customers make irrational decisions and as a consequence this affects what they buy. In short, you need to embrace the fact that Customers are irrational.

In our bland world everything is the same to many marketers who still only focus on the 4P’s (Price, Place, Product and Promotion)  and use this as a crutch. Marketers need to recognize that human decision making is far more complex than this. They need to elevate their thinking to a new level of  understanding and embrace behavioral economics to break through the glass ceiling that is engaging them.

Let us start with three simple questions:

1. What emotions are you trying to evoke in your Customers?
2. Do they drive value for your organization ($)?
3. Have you designed these emotions to be evoked in your marketing?

Not sure? Well you should be. To do your job effectively you should understand how emotions are evoked and design this into your Customer Experience or campaign. You therefore need to understand behavioral economics  and how to make the most of Customer’s irrationality. When you have mastered this I then suggest  you look into the whole area of predictive analytics and define how you can predict customer’s true behavior.

The last piece of the jigsaw is making this ‘live’ in an experience. Imagine that you have just designed a campaign that drives the customer into a store and they then have an interaction with  store personnel. How are you going to ensure that the emotion you want to be evoked is actually evoked during the ‘in store experience’? The answer is that the store personnel need to be trained on recognizing how the Customer is feeling when entering the experience. This is achieved through advanced soft skills training. This covers  recognizing Customer’s verbal and non-verbal cues (facial expression, body language, tone of voice ,etc.) in order to identify how the Customer is feeling. Then the store personnel can  implement their training to convert how that Customer feels,  maybe from ‘confused’ to one of the specific emotions that drive value for their organization.

Sounds far fetched? It’s not. This is what our more advanced clients are doing today with great success. One client moved their Customers from:

• ‘Feeling out of control’ to ‘in control’ by 25%.
• ‘Feeling Anxious’ to ‘feeling at ease’ by 10%.
• When Customers were asked, “Would you hire this person?” , a reply of ‘yes’ increased by 25%.

So, understanding that Customers are irrational, embracing behavioral economics, using this to predict their behavior and finally designing your experience and training people on how to convert customers emotions is the new world. Welcome to the new world of practical behavioral economics!

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Colin is proud to be recognized by Brand Quarterly’s as one of the ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’.

The post ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leader’ Reveals Latest Trend appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Consumers for the luxury brand can look forward to a change in their experience. According to Business Insider, the new experience is called a “guest journey” and the sales associate is now their “muse.”

However, the names are just the start of the changes. The associates (muses) are tasked with not just “making the sale,” but first and foremost to engage with the Customer. In other words, the muses must determine how the Customer wants the experience to go that day, and then deliver that version of it. Muses will now also greet the guest only, but they won’t show product unless asked specifically to do so.

I’ll be honest, today we are exploring the experience of an industry I know NOTHING about, women’s fashion. But I do know enough to see that there is a great benefit to making the Customer feel like they are on a journey—particularly when they are spending the kind of money they are at one of these shops.

Setting the Expectations As High As Possible

Luxury brands, more than most, have set an expectation in the minds of their Customers, and it’s as high as the prices on the merchandise. By revamping the Customer Experience to reflect the brand value of luxury, Kate Spade is joining the ranks of Apple and Lululemon.

One key for a luxury brand is called “aspiration.” When retailers of luxury brands talk about aspiration, they refer to the value the brand name implies in the mind of the consumer. Aspiration is what drives a woman that sees a Kate Spade bag in the window of the shop to figure out if she can stand to eat noodles for the next month to pay for it. Aspiration means that consumers pay a premium to be a part of the brand, and are thrilled about it.

However, to remain aspirational, a brand can’t be too popular—or too accessible. Michael Kors, an equivalent brand for women’s fashion (or so I’m told…) is suffering from too much of both, and it shows in their sales numbers. To maintain their aspirational status, Kate Spade is pulling back from discounting and flash sales this year, a gutsy move in an economy that is still in recovery mode for many.

They also want a younger vibe. Their millennial-focused Kate Spade Saturday Stores closed last winter, but the line will continue in the Kate Spade New York Stores. They have a great new campaign with actress Anna Kendrick, called #missadventure:

The Warm Glow of Meeting Expectations

All of these measures, from calling sales associates muses to hiring a spokeswoman that personifies their target Customer, Kate Spade New York is sending a subconscious signal to consumers. Eventually these manifest into a brand message that sets an expectation for the quality of the experience. And this brand promise will convince a young twenty-something woman to spend her rent money on a great bag. Buying it from her muse, who delivers the experience, I mean “guest journey” she went to the store to have will give her a warm glow—which is great, because she’ll need it when she has to sleep in the park next month!

All joking aside, the idea that your retail experience should reflect your brand values is a tenet essential to creating a great Customer Experience for a Luxury brand. And that’s something that Kate Spade New York is designing their experience to do—in spades.

What other luxury retail experiences deliver their brand promise in spades? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

Discounting a Luxury Brand: The Power of the Attention Cluster of Emotions

Bergdorf and the Subconscious

Apple: Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

Colin is proud to be recognized by Brand Quarterly’s as one of the ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Kate Spade Revamps Retail Experiences to Deliver Brand Values appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

September 1st, the high-end yoga-wear maker introduced their new Pant Wall. The new fits are arranged according to how they feel when worn, rather than the silhouette as it was in the past. The new pants range from Tight fit to Relaxed and include other fits such as Held in, Hugged or Naked.

I realize of course that I am not the target of Lululemon, since I would never wear yoga pants (you’re welcome!). They certainly wouldn’t have my size. And if they did, the sight of me wearing this is enough to put everyone off their food for a week! However, the last fit description sounds interesting, to say the least!

The new fit descriptions are designed to help Customers know which fit is appropriate for what activity. The new wall is in response to Customer Feedback that they were confused about how the pants should fit and sometimes bought them too big. The Pant Wall was designed to help Customers feel less confused in the store more satisfied with their purchase after they leave.

The Customer response to the change seems to be positive, according to analysts. They are upgrading the stock and forecasting a positive turning point the brand by the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley upgraded LULU, predicting that the stock will continue its success in earnings for 2016.

The VOC is the Key

So what does this story show us? It shows us two things. First, that listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is an important part of your brand strategy. Second, that incorporating what you hear in the VOC to your Customer Experience pays off for your bottom line, a.k.a. stock price value rising.

An important part of your success (a.k.a. stock price value rising), is having a few ways to keep in touch with the VOC. Lululemon has a few channels in place to listen to the VOC:

• There is the Ambassador program, designed to give local athletes and brand ambassadors a way to weigh in on the product lines.
• Then there is the heylululemon.com site (also called their feedback page) where they invite their Customers to make suggestions and submit ideas.
• There is the Guest Education Centre, where they answer all questions and concerns via email, live chat, or call center.

They also do roundtable research at the store level. One of my work associates emailed me recently regarding a recent experience she had with Lululemon. When she was invited to an event at the store, she thought it was a party with drinks and snacks and would feature an exclusive preview for new products. However, it turned out to be something much more rewarding. Here’s what she described:

“…Don’t get me wrong, there were drinks and snacks. However, I, along with about 10 other people, had the opportunity to not only network a bit, but also sit at a round table where we were asked about our lives and what inspires us, as well as our thoughts, likes, and reasons for shopping with Lulu.  Then, they offered us a chance to give feedback on our concerns and what they could change and improve (whilst notes were taken by the store and Regional managers of the brand). They also had new products we were given the opportunity to try on and give feedback as well. At the end of the evening, it was also a nice surprise to be given a gift card to shop with them again.”

All of these listening channels are paying off—and according to stock pundits, by next year or even the fourth quarter this year, quite literally.

It’s nice to see a brand remember what makes Customer Loyalty and Retention work. Lululemon had begun to lose their balance with their Customers coming out of their pose as the top Yoga-wear brand.  But by realigning their strategy with a Customer focus and listening to the VOC, they are once again finding their Customer Center, and positioned to take the top spot once more.

How are you listening to the VOC with your brand?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

5 Ways to Make a Great Impression on Your New Customer

When It Comes to Customer Experience, You Have to Keep Rolling the Dice

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in Customer Experience Lately

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Yoga Pants Can Realign Customer Experience appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

According to the 2015 U.K. State of Multichannel Customer Service Report published by Parature and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it’s not a moment too soon. It’s the law of Customer Experience Supply and Demand: they demand it so you better supply it!

How are companies blowing it? They evoke the wrong Customer emotions during the experience. According the report, the common complaints from those Customers surveyed included:

Feeling Hassled:

•      Feeling passed around between different agents during an interaction (23%)
•      Needing to contact a company several times to resolve a single issue (23%)

Feeling Frustrated:

• Not finding their information or getting resolution online (16%)
• Waiting on hold too long (15%)

Not Feeling Valued:

•      Navigating automated systems, feeling unable to reach a real person (13%)
•      Suffering impolite agents (9%)

All of these complaints correspond with feelings. That’s because over 50% of a Customer Experience is how a Customer feels about it. Organizations that fail to make a Customer feel a certain way during their interactions get dropped by them.  As the numbers show here not feeling valued and feeling hassled and frustrated are the type of emotions that facilitate getting dropped!

We know from our work with London Business School (that culminated in my bestselling book, The DNA of the Customer Experience, How emotions drive value, Palgrave Macmillan 2007) the emotions Frustrated and Valued are two that destroy and drive value, respectively. We normally establish how an organization is performing against a benched market research called Emotional Signature.

Customers are more demanding than in the past about the online presence of a company, too. Of the U.K. Customers surveyed, 92% of them expect a self-service portal on the website for Customer service, with 43% also saying they that portal to be mobile responsive. Sixty-five percent of these Customers also expect a response within 24 hours when they tweet about something to a company.

That’s just the U.K. For the U.S. Report, Parature and Microsoft Dynamics CRM,they produced this infographic:

It’s great that more companies are working on improving the Customer Experience for Customers. The thing about improvement is that it’s a journey, not a destination. Believe me, as soon as you think you have arrived, the destination gets changed again. Companies that didn’t even have a mobile site until last month shouldn’t relax now—they need to make sure it’s responsive to the online self-service Customer portal. Organizations that came up with great new live-agent systems at the call centers can’t relax until they learn how certain call protocols  employed by agents come across as abrupt or cold with Customers calling in for help.

It comes down to this: Customer Experience needs to move to the next level of Customer Experience. And there is always another level to reach.

Customers are a demanding lot. They want the best price with the most comprehensive service, and they want access to all of these things 24 hours a day, seven days a week—on their smartphone! However, the truth is, organizations better give it to them. In today’s competitive and global marketplace, if Customers don’t get what they demand, they aren’t in short supply to go somewhere else to get it.

Are you ready to move your organization to the next level of Customer Experience?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• British People Don’t Always Say What They Mean…Neither Do Customers

• The Unforgiving Brits: Unhappy Consumers in the UK Punish Poor Service More Than US Consumers

• The Value of Complaints

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Customers Want Better Customer Service…or Else! appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

For example, I recently purchased my new car. Having seen the adverts, undertaking the research online, and comparing various reviews, I narrowed my choices between a GMC Yukon or a Lincoln Navigator. Therefore, the next step was a visit to the local dealers.

Let’s take a look at my two experiences and see what we all can learn about fulfilling the brand promise for our Customers at the Customer Experience level.

First: The Yukon Experience
On visiting the Yukon dealer, my wife Lorraine and I were greeted warmly. We explained what we wanted and we were walked into the back area of the dealership to be shown the latest car, amongst all the puddles and dirt.

Brands and dealers are going to great expense to show the car off in the best environment.  However, this particular dealer was not.

The test drive was good as it enabled me to get a sense of what the car felt like. Therefore, we can learn that playing with the product is a key part of decision-making. Now that I had a better idea about this part of the puzzle, I needed to know the price.

When we returned from the test drive, I asked our sales rep, how much the car cost.  He said, “It’s clear that you are at the beginning of your buying process. I would prefer to give you a price when you have seen all of the other cars you intend to review.I want to be the last guy you talk to about the car you want.”  I told him that I understood that but from a practicality standpoint, that didn’t work for us. So I asked him again, how much?  He refused. I was amazed. I said, “If we walk out of the dealership without the price, we will not return.”  He said, “Okay.” So, we left–with a bad opinion of the representative, the dealership and the brand at GMC.

What we can all learn from this: I find this amazing I even have to say this next sentence. When a Customer asks you how much a product is, tell them. In this case, refusing to tell me a price showed me that the dealer representative was simply trying to coax as much money out of me as possible. This approach does not inspire trust for a major purchase.

On to the Lincoln Experience
Our next visit was to our local  Lincoln dealership. Our experience there was quite different.  The salesman informed us he was not paid a commission, which told us there would be no high-pressure sales techniques. When we asked for the price after the test drive, he gave it to us. However, he wrote it on the back of his business card, which I didn’t think was very professional.

What we can all learn from this: Paying salespeople on commission drives the wrong behaviors. But paying people on Customer satisfaction also doesn’t ensure success, as what followed was a catalog of errors.

What Happened Next?
After discussing the matter with Lorraine, we decided to buy the Lincoln. But the only “offer” we had received from our Lincoln dealer was written on the back of a business card. We asked for a more formal quote, details of what the warranty would cover, and the payments as we decided to lease the car. We expected this to be forthcoming, so we were surprised when we were informed that this wasn’t possible and he’d given us all the figures. I asked to read the contract as I am wary of car contracts and was looking for the loopholes. He said it was a standard contract, and he couldn’t email it to us. He did tell me that I could come “collect” it. Then he said a phrase that always means the opposite of what someone really thinks. He said, “With respect (which really means they don’t respect me), these contracts are signed hundreds of times per day.” To me that means he was saying I should just trust him and not ask such annoying questions! Lincoln is a premium brand; I expect a premium experience and this was now falling far short of my expectation.

Furthermore, all correspondence with the sales representative took place with his personal Yahoo email account, with neither the dealership’s name nor Lincoln as a domain name. This is a miss as it gives this premium brand an amateur feel, i.e., less-professional.

What we can learn from this: When a Customer asks you for detailed information regarding the transaction for a major purchase (read: expensive!), provide them a professional quote detailing what they are getting and what it covers.

Despite our frustration, we placed the order (reluctantly) as their price was the lowest by far of any other quote we received. However, we received no letter of confirmation or thanks for ordering the car–no sign of appreciation or documentation of any kind. We were quoted six to eight weeks for delivery. What followed next was missed dates and failure to contact us when promised regarding the delivery (We escalated the matter to Lincoln Navigator via Twitter, and that did the magic trick in applying pressure!).

When we picked up the car the salesman acknowledged we had issues but asked that we still gave him a high Customer satisfaction score as this is what he was bonused on it. He was clearly gaming the system. When the survey came through I marked it honestly. Some parts good, some parts very poor. What happened next was amazing. the salesman wrote to us complaining that we had given him a poor score! He protested that it wasn’t the dealer’s fault it was Lincoln. I explained they were one and the same.

Suffice it to say, we were not overly impressed with our experience at Lincoln either. Nor our subsequent treatment by their Finance arm in setting up the lease payments, another whole story in itself.

What we can learn from this: Do NOT game the system. When Customers give you a low score, do not write to them and complain! The finishing touches of an experience send us subconscious signals that let us know we just paid for a prestigious service from a prestigious brand. Without these touches (a formal quote, a contract delivery, a thank you note, or even a delivery date in writing), you lose some of the prestige promised by the brand which leaves Customer feeling disappointed with the Experience–and the brand.

Buying a car is just like buying any other commodity; it’s just more expensive than most! Therefore, the value lies in the experience that you have at the dealers. It is so sad to see how great brands can get it so wrong. The money  spent on advertising, promotion, product development, brand building, and infrastructure can be destroyed in the experience with the Customer.

What has been your best or worst car buying experience? What signals did it send to you? I’d be interested to hear your take on the industry in the comments below.

The post Destroying Brand Experience, One at a Time appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Maybe you believe me already, which is great. Maybe you are ready to do something about it, but you might have questions, such as:

• How do you create a deliberate emotional experience for your Customers that keeps them coming back?
• What emotions should we be trying to evoke?
• When it comes to forecasting, how do you use emotional data to predict the future?

And probably most importantly,

• How do you know if it’s working?

Let’s touch on a general answer for each question for now to get you started on your path to a better Customer Experience.

How to Create a Deliberate Customer Experience?

Many organizations think they have no control over how a Customer feels. They instead choose to create an experience that is rationally sound and efficient–although typically only efficient for the company, not the Customer. They look at their experience from the inside facing out. To create a deliberate Customer experience, it is essential is to take the Outside-In Approach, which means to look at the experience as if you were a Customer. You must see it as if for the first time, and note how you feel throughout each moment. This awareness helps you understand how emotions drive a Customer’s behavior. Additionally, you get the opportunity to change how these moments make Customers feel moving forward.

Here is a short video that explains in more detail how this worked for the Norwich Group in the UK.

What Emotions Should the Customer Experience Evoke?

Emotions play an important role in the motivations behind people’s behavior. When it comes to Customer Loyalty and Retention, some of these emotions drive value while others do not. We undertook years of research with the London Business School to determine what emotions are best for driving the behavior we want. After 50,000 participants answered 1.25 million questions about what they want and 1 million questions about how they felt, we learned there are 20 emotions that drive and destroy value in a Customer Experience:

The emotional engagement one feels with an organization is what we call an Emotional Signature.  First, you must determine what Emotional Signature you want for the business and then design an experience that evokes those emotions at the moments you determined in your earlier outside-in approach.

How Do You Use Emotional Data to Predict the Future?

Predictive analytics explains how some organizations hypothesize a future outcome based on existing patterns from data sets in the past. The concept here is that the data exists that can help all of us improve our operations and make better decisions for our Customers.

The predictions are only as good as your data. To use Emotional Data to predict future behavior for your Customers, you must have detailed emotional data to analyze. If you do have detailed data regarding the emotional state of your Customers related to your Experience, you would have a better chance of making sound predictions. If you don’t, you are just taking a lot of time to come up with your best guess.

If you want to learn more about Predictive Analytics, this article in the Harvard Business Review is a great start.

How Do You Know If It’s Working?

When it comes to measurement of your Emotional Signature work for your Customer Experience, a great place to start is with the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). The NPS® is a tool designed to measure the loyalty of your Customers. Research shows Customers with a High NPS® are less price-sensitive, spend more than Customer with lower scores and create higher margins for an organization. They are also responsible for the coveted “word of mouth” referrals of which every organization dreams of increasing.

Measuring an increase in your Customers with a high Net Promoter Score® is for the time being the best way to determine if your efforts to evoke the proper emotions during your Customer Experience are working. One of our great success stories was with Maersk Shipping Lines, the largest shipping container company in the world with revenues in the billions (with a b). Using our systems, they improved their NPS® from a -10 to a +30 in 30 months—a 40-point improvement.

To learn more about this particular case, please watch the webinar here.

Are You Ready to Get the Answers to Your Questions?

I realize this is tricky, that emotions aren’t very “Business-like.” However, the emotions you evoke in your Experience have a significant influence on your ability to retain a Customer. It is essential to recognize this and also to measure the ability of your Customer Experience to deliver the right emotions to generate the best results.

The answers to your questions are available if you are ready to know them. But be aware, it will require in some cases difficult change and for many organizations a different approach to business as usual.

What do you think? Are you ready to get answers to your questions about the emotions in your Customer Experience?

RICOH Canada had a vision: to be the most trusted brand with irresistible appeal in their market. Join us at our webinar , “Ricoh Case Study: How We Moved Our Loyalty Score by 34 Points in 30 months” to learn from CEO Glenn Laverty how their focus on a customer-centric approach improved their Net Promoter Score® by 34-points and grew their business 115%. Reserve your spot today!

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Apple’s Customer Experience Geniuses: Finding New Ways to Facilitate Empathy?
• You are Getting Customer Innovation All Wrong
• 5 Ways to make a Great Impression on Your New Customer

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Driving Value by Driving Emotions appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Emotions are fundamental to Customer behavior in your experience, too, whether you are in business-to-consumer or business-to-business. They affect what your Customers are going to do, and how they feel about your product. How they feel is what drives them to your store/website/call center queue. It also dictates whether they will return. We believe how a Customer feels about a Customer Experience influences over 50% of the Customers’ perceptions of the experience. In other words, what these little voices say in their heads have more influence than you may realize.

I will talk about these little voices when I give the keynote speech at the Clarabridge Conference in Miami. I was, therefore, pleased to see Disney’s new “emotion picture”, Inside Out comes out at almost the same time as my speech. The movie animates the little voices inside our heads.

The new movie is a “Disneyfied” version of our emotions. However, it does an effective job of communicating how emotions drive our decisions.

Obviously, I haven’t seen the whole picture, so I can’t tell you what their message is going to be, but rest assured I will be first in line to watch it! However, I can tell you that this dinnertime depiction is exactly the sort of thing my team and I teach our clients and write about in our books. Well, okay, our version does not include Lewis Black in a curse-free version (I’ll believe it when I see it), but it’s very close.

However, the idea of emotions in business makes some people uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as encouraging people to listen to the voices in their heads! Nevertheless, emotions have a place in business, whether or not they fit into the preconceived notion of what fits into a business setting.

The reluctance to focus on them in business is because emotions are ambiguous and nebulous. They are certainly not “black and white” like the 4 P’s I learned in my experience with emotions and Customers that they are complicated. They don’t always make sense and instead are irrational. We learned in our research over the years that there is a big difference between what Customers say they want and what they really want. We also learned Customers don’t always know there is a differencethemselves.

The basic question is this. Do emotions drive ROI? If the answer is yes, then which emotions drive most ROI? Back in 2007, I wrote a book called, “The DNA of Customer Experience: How emotions drive value” addressing the answer to this question in detail.

We contacted the London Business School and went to work. For two years. We asked all kinds of questions (4.5 Million) about the little voices in over 50,000 Customer’s heads, in 40 countries. We looked at 1.25 million answers about “what a Customer wants,” and another 1.25 million about “what the Customer feels.” What we learned was that there are 20 little voices (emotions) that drive and destroy value in a Customer Experience.

These are the little voices that we all need to listen to in our Customers heads. We call this the Hierarchy of Emotional Value, a key element to our Emotional SignatureResearch.

We use this as a guide to help us determine which of the 20 voices is talking through analysis of the actions of your Customers in your Experience. We like to identify where in the interaction the voice is the loudest and most influential. We also like to see that loud emotion be one of the positive ones, particularly if we are nearing the end of the moment.

When it comes to building Customer loyalty and retention, it’s essential to get down to what matters to those voices. You need to listen to what your Customers say matters to them (and often doesn’t), and also to what their little voices say matters to them (and really does). And maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t mention to senior management that you are listening to Customers’ little voices—maybe instead call them intuitive discourses analysis!

What does your little voice tell you to do about Customers’ emotions? Please share your insight in the comments below.

“Unlocking the Hidden Customer Experience: Short Stories of Remarkable Practices that Ensure Success”is designed to help organizations take their Customer Experience to the next level. This book focuses on what it takes to evoke the best emotions from your Customer Experience and the vital role of the conscious and subconscious experience with real-world examples. It available, for only $9.99!

Buy Now!

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

•  Why your Memory Matters More Than Your Experience
• How Emotions Generate $$$
• Discovering What Customers Don’t Know Themselves

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author offour bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Listen to the Voice in your Customer’s Head appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

The Naive to Natural assessment looks at nine areas of a company to determine how Customer centric the organization is with their Customer Experience. In our series of nine posts, this post looks at the second to last area of our assessment: Process.

The Difference Between Inside-Out and Outside-In for Customer Process

When we talk about process, we inevitably have to define the difference between aninside-out orientation and an outside-in orientation. So before I go any further here, let me explain that:

Inside-Out orientation refers to a process that is reviewed through the eyes of the company, looking out at customers as they go through, resulting in a process that is oriented on the needs of the organization.

Outside-in orientation involves walking the process as if you were a customer looking in at the organization through a Customer’s eyes, enabling a process focused on the needs of the Customer.

Obviously an organization that wants a Customer-focus needs to have an outside-in approach to their processes. Not only that, the most Customer-focused organizations match their process to the Customer Experience they are trying to deliver. Specifically, they match the emotional outcome that they are hoping to achieve with their Customer Experience, a concept we call the Emotional Signature™ of their organization.

Creating a Customer-Focused Process

Many organizations want a more Customer-Focused process but when they endeavor to create one, they fall short. There are certain requirements for this analysis and design to be successful, however, and they include the following:

1. Definite ownership by an individual or cross-functional team of the Customer Process. If no one “owns” the experience, it facilitates organizational silos or product-based processes that lack Customer focus. It is far better to have one group or individual who oversees the design of the experience, at least until Customer focus is so ingrained in the culture that this team is no longer necessary.
2. Belief that all the business parts affect the Customer Experience. From senior executives on down the chain, every employee needs to believe that how you collect bills to label shipments to transferring calls affect the emotional Customer experience.
3. Creation of a detailed Customer Journey Map that includes the emotions of the Customer at each moment. The typical journey map is usually insufficient. You must have a detailed map that has emotionally strategic goals plotted along the way. We call this type of map, Moment Mapping®.
4. Incorporation of the Customer into the design process. The most Customer-centric companies include the Customer in the design of the process to get their view of the changes.
5. Commitment to exceeding the Customer’s Expectations at every interaction. When you design the new process, each moment should be designed to exceed what Customer’s think is acceptable for that moment.

Organizations wishing to improve their Customer-focus in their process need to concentrate on designing a process that delivers a deliberate journey with specific emotional goals at each point in the process. To do this, it requires first a defined goal for the emotional journey for the customer. Then, it requires an extensive look at the current process with this goal in mind. Finally, it involves a design that creates transformational change to the company’s day-to-day operations.

Are you looking at your process from the inside or the outside?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Why Most Customer Experience Programs Fail

• Putting the Power of Your People to Work for Customer Centricity

• How to Make or Break Your Customer Experience

To learn more about Beyond Philosophy’s Naïve to Natural Model, please register for our Naïve to Natural Certification beginning February 2, 2015.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author offour best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Are you Inside-Out or Outside-In? Designing a Customer-Focused Process appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.