Creatively Delighting Your Customer - A Story of Buying Online.

The online store is a common phenomenon these days. For some organizations, it is their main point of sale and reason for their growth. Remember Amazon? However, online shopping is not everyone's cup of tea. Some people prefer going to the regular brick & mortar establishments.

With this variety of customers, you would all have seen many innovations to make the improve the whole shopping experience whether it is on their online shops or the physical locations. One of the relatively recent changes that I have noticed is the ability to order online, but pick-up at an old-fashioned store location close to you. There is the obvious convenience of this facility and it helps the customer buy "faster" as they do not have to wait for shipping. From an organization's perspective, this provides additional marketing for their physical shop locations and thus helps with the inventory turn and shelf stock days. Both key indicators of retail store performance.

But can you use this convenience to really delight the customer? Customer Experience Management (CEM) is much talked about these days and it is really refreshing when you see real-life innovative practices that directly impact the very experience of being a customer. Specially when the are quite unexpected.

My friend ordered an iPhone 5 recently online at the Apple store. With the Apple Store app available in his existing iPhone, that was the most convenient method to place the order. Looking to get the iPhone quickly, he chose to pick it up from a nearby Apple Store (as soon as it was available in stock of course). Well, this is just the beginning of the creative methods to improve the experience by Apple. When he went to pick up his iPhone, as soon as he reached the vicinity of the Apple Store, he got a notification on his existing iPhone asking him if he is coming in to pick-up his new iPhone and if they should start preparing for his pick-up. Now, that is cool in itself. But wait, by the time he parked the car and was walking to the store, he got another alert that his iPhone was ready and David will be expecting him. And yes, as the note said, when he entered the store, there was a guy with "David" on his nametag waiting for him. Though David had never met my friend, he knew what he was there for, after the regular niceties, in a matter of a few seconds, my friend had his new iPhone in his hands.

Now, together with the fact that the process was so flawless, anticipating the customer, greeting him, knowing exactly what he is looking for and making sure that he quickly gets to it. All these are such key factors to the core of customer experience. All these were creatively put together to make the whole buying process from the Apple Store an experience worthy of a frequent flier walking into their most visited 5 star hotel. Is that an experience you will pass over the next time you shop for Apple products?

Have you also experienced such innovative ideas for taking the customer experience to that pinnacle where the organization just sets a new standard? What are your ideas and experiences?

Do Business Processes Strangle Creativity?

When discussing business strategies, whether these be for CRM, CEM, or just plain BPM, organizations try to understand and plan for every eventuality using processes. Flowcharts and call scripts are the answer to all conversations with the customers.

Lets look at the some basic customer conversations. Starting with product design and development, we rely on surveys and focus groups working on a scripted and finite set of questions. Marketing, sets up automated campaigns to generate leads. Sales scripts have always been infamous for stereotyping customers. Customer services and support processes are optimized using scripted IVRs.

Now consider this, the number of people which access to the internet was approximately 2.2 billion as of 2011, according to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/). Even if we consider the internet channel, which is just a part of the overall consumer ecosystem, that number means a potential 2.2 billion different conversations. How do you plan for and script more than 2 billion potentially different conversations?

80% of all these conversations may be predictable. With the consumer ecosystem shifting from a organization focus to customer focus, it means the customer demands will keep becoming more and more unpredictable. How do we adapt to this? Will we always just react to the customer demands then?

To handle the exponential growth in variety, we need to be creative in our conversations. Whether it is in product design, marketing, sales, services through any customer touchpoint. The challenge in front of organizations today is how to innovate in business processes to achieve a balance between scripting the predictable conversations and encouraging individual creativity in the face of those unpredictable ones.

How specific are your business processes? Do they cultivate innovation or spurn it?

Quality of Customer Experience

In a recent discussion in Gary Lemke's blog posts, the aspect of speed of CRM has been the center of attention. In today's post, the concept is linked to customer delight. Though I appreciate the perspective of the speed of the customer interaction being important to the whole customer experience, I believe that there is something more important than the speed that in a lot of cases results in more satisfied customers.

In my experience, the ability to satisfy the customer and ensure the solution is what the customer was looking for in the first place, is more important. If you quickly give the customer a pre-scripted solution which according to the organization should address the customer request, you will have statistically satisfied the customer "request".... but have you satisfied the customer as an individual?

Granted, in some cases, the individual expectation of the customer may match to the pre-scripted response. But as we all know, given the sheer number of individual personalities in the world, the individual expectations can be infinite. Please note, I am not talking about a utopian environment, which I believe is something that is again a statistical improbability, if not impossible. I am however implying that the focus on the individual needs and the aspiration to address that in a customer interaction goes a long way when it comes to customer experience, rather than speed.

Now, speed of the resolution has its own pluses. It ensures that the customer is not spending time on something which they  but it can't stand alone as the most important factor governing the delight of the customer. Speed must always stand along side your customer objective and culture.

To summarize, I would agree that the speed to achieve the customer's individual expectations in an interaction drives the delight of customer. Even if the speed is lacking in some cases, as long as the customer expectations are managed, the achievement of these expectations will still be able to drive the experience far better than the speed alone.

Organization Cultures - Is yours Customer Centric?

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed that employee satisfaction is directly proportional to customer satisfaction. Recently, while reading about customer loyalty and how each organization considers "loyalty" differently, I started thinking about organization cultures and how employees are a big part of it.

Like each culture has its own set of beliefs and traditions and thus its own way to define faith, similarly we will find that organizations, over time, develop their own culture. This culture does not always come from the top down, it sometimes flows the other way. Whichever direction the beliefs are passed, the culture has an impact on how the customer sees the organization. 

As customers, when defining a customer oriented organization, we say, the organization has a "culture of customer satisfaction". Well what does that mean? In my books, it means that its employees have an intrinsic orientation towards customer satisfaction. And as all followers of any faith, are quite passionate about it. 

Similar to its impact on the customer perception, an organization's culture also has a direct influence on its direction and growth. Consider this, if an organization has a well defined and functional culture, which postulates beliefs that the whole of the organization adheres to and works towards, you can expect to see this organization becoming successful quickly. On the other hand, if an organization with a varied set of beliefs, each one taking the organization towards disparate goals will see the organization fall behind as it tries to get its "act together".

So who are the prophets and followers in an organization culture. The employees of course. They are the ones who follow the beliefs and align themselves to the culture. They are both the followers and also the prophets. When they interact with customers, they are, in my view, prophecizing the organizations culture. The degree of their faith and acceptance of the culture is easily seen in their passion about the company in these interactions. The orientation towards customer centricity can also be determined by the customer perception and understanding of the organizational "beliefs". 

Try to look at your organization, you will see a set of beliefs that define your company. Are these beliefs customer focused? In my opinion that will tell you how customer centric your organization is "at its core".

360 Degree View of an Organization

In CRM, we have all heard of the 360 degree view of the customer. While reading a recent post by Gary Lemke, Over Surveyed and Under Heard, I was amazed at the statistics regarding sharing information with the customer. Only 1 in 20 organizations respond to the customer about the feedback they have given. For a customer oriented organization it is as important to share results of the feedback with the customers as it is to gather the feedback in the first place.

If you gather the feedback, but do nothing about it, in my books it says that you don't really care about the feedback and the process is just a formality.

Consider this from the point of view of the customer, they have gone through an experience with your organization (good or bad). I would go on to say that the customer has gone out of their way to provide feedback to the organization, since not all people are vocal and opinionated or active in social sites. The customer could just as easily have kept quiet and gone to your competitor with his business. Now, with this information in hand, if an organization does not work to change and ensure that the other customers do not face the same experience, well, then God help the organization. They are bound to see more customers having the same experience, some will be more vocal than others. Eventually, if not addressed, you can just imagine what the potential is here.

Granted, that as an organization, you may not want to spend money on making changes for each feedback from individual customers, but not doing anything at all about it is just saying that the feedback is rubbish. Well, is it rubbish? To be aware of the feedback and prepared when it becomes a problem is essential for an organization to adapt in a customer demand oriented economy.

Coming to the aspect of sharing the feedback internally and transparency with the customer. Organizations are typically afraid of losing customers if they bring out negative feedback into the realm of the internet. News flash people, the feedback is already out there. The real question is, what will you as an organization do about it. The best way is to accept the feedback and address it. Not only will this try to subdue the negative nature, but it puts you as an organization in control of the situation rather than just reacting to it. It helps you guide the customer conversation rather then just quietly sitting on the sidelines and waiting for collective customer experiences to build up and become an insurmountable obstacle.

In my humble opinion, a 360 view of the organization is as important for the customer as is the 360 view of the customer for an organization. At the end of the day, the relation between an organization and its customers is a two way street, you only get businesses coming up on the busy streets!