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Road Map For Improving Customer Experience in Your Organization
Back in 2001, when I first started selling usability and 360 degree customer experience (CX) testing to companies through Web Mystery Shoppers, I made a huge mistake.
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The Logic of Customer Experience & Usability Testing
You see, I thought that the logic of why it was important to test these things would prevail. I mean, obviously if your customers can’t figure out how to navigate your website or use your shopping cart, or if your call center staff have no idea what the returns policy is, of course that is going to lose you business. Testing should be a no-brainer. My first client, the Royal Bank of Canada, agreed, but now that I think back on it, I hadn’t been trying to sell them. I had asked their top e-banking guy if I could take him to lunch and get his reactions to an idea I had for a business. At that point, the business was nothing more than an idea. Luckily for me, he understood the vision and bought into it.
Logic ≠ Sales
But then I had a series of rejections from companies that should have easily understood the value. I realize now that I was approaching it all wrong. Instead of telling them the value and making a business case for the testing, I should have started with a demo. Not of my software, but of theirs. If I had taken them on a walk-through of what it was like for a prospective customer to try to use their websites, far more of them would have bought in. A walk-through approach is a big part of what CX expert, Jeanne Bliss, advocates in her new book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine. Although we keep hearing about how customer experience and online marketing need to prove the ROI — and they do — before you get there you need to get emotional buy-in. And seeing how customers struggle is a huge part of getting that buy-in.
Help Your Executives See The Customers’ Struggle
Jeanne’s book is an indispensable guide for people who have been tasked with improving their organization’s customer experience. I highly recommend it. I won’t recap it all here (just read the book!), but there are a few things that really struck me, and that she and I discuss more in today’s interview.
1. The Power of Language
We’ve touched on this before at Frank Reactions (see for example, the John Deere interview) but using language that your audience is familiar with can make a huge difference to getting your ideas accepted. So Jeanne, for example, talks about:
* “Net Customer Assets” – Using that terminology with top executives helps them realize that customers themselves are assets. Like any assets, you want to make sure they are well looked after so they retain or increase their value.
* “Defector pipeline” – Sales executives are quite comfortable with the concept of a sales pipeline, but often tend to focus on customer acquisition and forget about the impact of losing customers. Just like the sales pipeline, there are predictable stages in the “defector pipeline”. Only here the goal is to stop the flow instead of inc...
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Back in 2001, when I first started selling usability and 360 degree customer experience (CX) testing to companies through Web Mystery Shoppers, I made a huge mistake.
Get your FREE Transcript Now!
The Logic of Customer Experience & Usability Testing
You see, I thought that the logic of why it was important to test these things would prevail. I mean, obviously if your customers can’t figure out how to navigate your website or use your shopping cart, or if your call center staff have no idea what the returns policy is, of course that is going to lose you business. Testing should be a no-brainer. My first client, the Royal Bank of Canada, agreed, but now that I think back on it, I hadn’t been trying to sell them. I had asked their top e-banking guy if I could take him to lunch and get his reactions to an idea I had for a business. At that point, the business was nothing more than an idea. Luckily for me, he understood the vision and bought into it.
Logic ≠ Sales
But then I had a series of rejections from companies that should have easily understood the value. I realize now that I was approaching it all wrong. Instead of telling them the value and making a business case for the testing, I should have started with a demo. Not of my software, but of theirs. If I had taken them on a walk-through of what it was like for a prospective customer to try to use their websites, far more of them would have bought in. A walk-through approach is a big part of what CX expert, Jeanne Bliss, advocates in her new book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine. Although we keep hearing about how customer experience and online marketing need to prove the ROI — and they do — before you get there you need to get emotional buy-in. And seeing how customers struggle is a huge part of getting that buy-in.
Help Your Executives See The Customers’ Struggle
Jeanne’s book is an indispensable guide for people who have been tasked with improving their organization’s customer experience. I highly recommend it. I won’t recap it all here (just read the book!), but there are a few things that really struck me, and that she and I discuss more in today’s interview.
1. The Power of Language
We’ve touched on this before at Frank Reactions (see for example, the John Deere interview) but using language that your audience is familiar with can make a huge difference to getting your ideas accepted. So Jeanne, for example, talks about:
* “Net Customer Assets” – Using that terminology with top executives helps them realize that customers themselves are assets. Like any assets, you want to make sure they are well looked after so they retain or increase their value.
* “Defector pipeline” – Sales executives are quite comfortable with the concept of a sales pipeline, but often tend to focus on customer acquisition and forget about the impact of losing customers. Just like the sales pipeline, there are predictable stages in the “defector pipeline”. Only here the goal is to stop the flow instead of inc...