{"id":12878,"date":"2014-08-06T16:31:04","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T15:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/?p=12878"},"modified":"2020-03-20T05:36:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T09:36:29","slug":"getting-customer-innovation-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/getting-customer-innovation-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Getting Customer Innovation All Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Forrester 2014 report<\/a> announces that \u00a0\u201cthe number of truly awful customer experiences is dropping like a rock. That\u2019s good news for consumers and business buyers alike. It\u2019s bad news, however, for the mass of companies that are now all “just average.” They\u2019ve lost their ability to use the same old customer experience<\/a> to grow share of wallet, retain customers, and get recommendations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Therefore the need to innovate and the speed of customer experience innovation is even bigger. \u00a0But who\u2019s job is it to innovate to improve your customer experience? Your Customer Experience department (if you have one)? Makes sense. Or your \u201cprocesses house\u201d? Or perhaps the \u201cproduct design\u201d team. That makes sense too. I\u2019m sure \u201cinnovation\u201d is even in the job characteristics of those employees.<\/p>\n

The question is: \u201cAre those people enough? \u00a0Are you happy with the state of your Customer Experience progress?\u201d<\/p>\n

[polldaddy poll=8243476]<\/p>\n

If you think \u201cwe could do better\u201d then perhaps you should hear what Jack Welch<\/a> says: \u201cInnovation is everyone\u2019s job<\/a>! Don’t let it be a buzzword that isolates 10 people in your company while the other 90 sit on the sidelines, waiting for the innovators to innovate.\u201d. Surely people will say \u201cwell I am not that creative, I am not Steve Jobs to come up with the idea about the new iPhone or a geek that does coding etc., or even what does my department has to do with customers or innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is that this is the wrong mindset. People think of innovation in terms or big ideas and big changes whereas the reality is there are a lot of incremental improvements that could be done along the customer journey. To use football terms in honor of the recent World Cup, this would mean that you could rely on an instant burst of brilliance from one player like Messi or make it a whole team effort like the German team.<\/p>\n

As Jack Welch argues, what the organization needs to do is to \u201cmake it their mission to reward every little incremental improvement their people make\u201d. \u00a0This means:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    there should be a clear and easy channel for people to submit ideas \/ or create prototypes and<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    people should get recognition for that <\/strong>(note I said recognition, it doesn\u2019t have to be monetary rewards all the time)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Let me give you an example. My partner works in a bank with customers. Every night she comes home and shares with me how unhappy their customers are and how often they release their anger on her. With me being a management consultant I see the root cause of the customer anger be a company policy in one instance, an ineffective process in another, a lack of training \/ guidance of how to deal with issues in a third instant, etc. But here\u2019s the thing, when I tell her \u201cwell why don\u2019t you post in your Intranet your idea of how not to get any more customers like that\u201d, she says \u201cWhat?! No one will listen to me. Why bother?!\u201d<\/p>\n

    So the company is missing a channel to get those ideas to improve the experience and has not provided any incentive for its front line employees to contribute with ideas to improve the experience.<\/p>\n

    The Key to Quality Customer Experience Innovation Ideas is\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

    True customer experience innovation starts with Empathy<\/strong>. We\u2019ve long been advocates of this but I\u2019m glad that an institution such as the Stanford.d.school coined the term.<\/p>\n

    There are 3 elements to developing more Empathy:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. \n

      Ability to put yourself in your customer\u2019s shoes<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

    2. \n

      Observing customer\u2019s behavior (i.e. Ethnography)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

    3. \n

      Talking to customers<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Whilst your \u201cprocess\u201d, \u201cproduct\u201d and \u201ccustomer experience\u201d teams could be trained<\/a> how to do this, if you think about it, the people in the front line are talking to customers and in some cases observing customers (or at least hear their stories) every day. However, they are missing the encouragement to put themselves in their customer\u2019s shoes and see things from their perspective.<\/p>\n

      I had a recent encounter with Bank of America that illustrates this. Whilst I was shopping at Amazon, Amazon offered me an incentive of a discount if I get their credit card plus it was coming with some points. So I took the Amazon.co.uk Bank of America MasterCard.<\/p>\n

      The thing is though that I have 3-4 other credit cards and I only use 2 of them. I did use the card once to activate it \u00a0and then paid the bill but since then it just sat somewhere buried on my desk\u2026 until recently\u2026<\/p>\n

      I received an e-mail saying \u201cWe have already contacted you to remind you about the arrears on your account. These now total \u00a350.00 and this information is being registered with the credit reference agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

      The title of the e-mail was \u201cImportant information about your Bank of America credit card\u201d. Now I clearly saw that e-mail but I wondered how is it that I\u2019ve missed the previous contact. I do get 100+ e-mails a day like most people. And I do have 2716 unread e-mails like most people but still I though I can distinguish the junk from the important e-mails like the one above.<\/p>\n

      When I called Customer Service and after several conversations with two Customer Service agents and a manager (Andrew) I was told that \u00a0\u201cWe have already contacted you to remind you about the arrears on your account.\u201d \u00a0was the e-mail I received about my statement. And then it all came to me\u2026<\/p>\n

      Here\u2019s what\u2019s in that e-mail:<\/p>\n

      I realized how I have missed the \u201cWe have already contacted you to remind you about the arrears on your account.\u201d. I receive e-mails where it says \u201cStatement Information\u201d (in bold) and then underneath it says \u201cBalance: \u00a300.00\u201d and this whole section is highlighted which attracts your attention.<\/p>\n

      [polldaddy poll=8243487]<\/p>\n

      This is where ethnography and putting yourself into your customer\u2019s shoes comes. Nowadays people get so many e-mails and are bombarded with information from everywhere so they don\u2019t read. People are skimming and scanning<\/a> for information. Designers know that so they try to de-clutter, play with fonts,<\/a> colors, highlight information to get you to \u201csee\u201d the message.<\/p>\n

      When designing \/ innovating you should also consider customer\u2019s habits and expectations.<\/p>\n

      For example with my Barclaycard and American Express inside the same e-mails I do get an actual spend data:<\/p>\n

      So my habit<\/a> is: I see \u201c\u00a300.00\u201d as is the case with my Barclaycard, I don\u2019t do nothing, I see \u201cI owe some money\u201d, I log-in to pay it. And if you are thinking, \u201cwell Bank of America don\u2019t show the spend inside for data protection or regulatory reasons\u201d then see this:<\/p>\n

      My Barclaycard commercial doesn\u2019t show my spend in there but is not misleading me either. To see it I clearly need to log in, whereas BoA shows me \u201c\u00a300.00\u201d but that\u2019s apparently just a nonsense picture as it\u2019s not actual data.<\/p>\n

      When I spoke with the Bank of America representatives and their manager they refused to see my perspective (i.e. how misleading their e-mail was) and insisted the e-mails saying Dear M. Dobrev and later Balance \u201c\u00a300.00\u201d in-fact meant \u201cWe have already contacted you to remind you about the arrears on your account\u201d.<\/p>\n

      That\u2019s a failure on:<\/p>\n