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The Vicious Cycle of Customer Experience (CX)

the_vicious_cycle_of_customer_experience
Ever wondered what’s going on after you’ve repeatedly had a bad customer experience with the same company?

How do companies allow themselves to come bottom of the pile in consumer research with the most complaints or the longest call waiting times?

Here’s why that happens and what companies can do about it

These are often larger known brands that rely on a large market to provide them customers. In today’s connected world a bad experience quickly spreads across social media and makes it into mainstream press faster than ever.

So how can these brands allow this to happen? We may think they don’t care, they’ve developed a culture that doesn’t respect the customer.

In the most part that’s not true, employees, managers and leaders want to be successful. The company wants to protect its brand and, in the age of the consumer, it knows it must provide the best service it can to do so.

So why does this keep happening over and over again?

Disruption

We don’t always see the same brands making the headlines, although some are more persistent than others. Generally those that are top of the consumer research ‘worst’ polls won’t be there next year, in fact they are often at the opposite end of the scale.

This shows that most of these organisations take the problem seriously and try to fix it. But how or why do they let it happen in the first place?

These spikes in bad performance are often triggered by a disruptive event. Something unexpected the company wasn’t prepared for.

For example, in a recent interview I had with the Operations Director of a leading energy company he explained that customer growth had taken them by surprise.

“We introduced some new, very competitive tariffs. We expected an increase but nothing like what we saw.” He went on to explain how they made headlines “The number of calls shot up and many calls were dropped due to the sheer volume. This in turn meant customers called in again and things just kept getting worse.”

It wasn’t just call waiting times that were affected. The increase in pressure on the team exposed gaps in their processes. The Customer Service Agents were no longer able to provide the same amount of care to each customer as they normally had time to.

A lot of balls were dropped and this led to a number of complaints making it into local and national press.

Another client I worked with in the telco industry suffered both internal and external disruption. Under two separate strategic initiatives the company created the perfect storm of ‘change fatigue’. The support desk at the centre of these two initiatives was barely able to cope when a major fault erupted on their network.

The call volume spiked and the disruption caused by the two change programmes meant they were unable to get control of the situation and bring the call volume down to a manageable amount over the short term. This led to a number of major customers threatening to move to alternative providers.

In both these cases the short term solution was to throw bodies at the problem. More Customer Service agents Were hired to clear the call volumes and bring things back to normal.

What went wrong

As business returns to normal the old habits return and things carry on until the next major disruption. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and carries on as they were.

The real underlying problems were acutely obvious just as things got out of control. In those moments immediately before chaos ensues. There is a frantic scratching around to find the answers to questions before we revert to taking the simplest path.

For every individual this simple path can be different. Send it on to your colleague and forget about it. Make something up that sounds plausible. Say what you ‘think’ the truth to be without taking the time to check it. As things get worse we stop asking, we stop seeking answers and just do whatever seems most likely.

When we stop following the process we can’t expect the right outcome to be delivered. In fact we can’t expect the outcome to be the same for each customer interaction.

The vicious cycle of customer experience

When we trip on a staircase the natural reaction is to grab the handrail to steady yourself. But if that handrail isn’t there we grab out at the nearest thing, the wall, a colleague or stranger standing nearby. Like the safety demonstration on an aircraft we aren’t expected to use these things all the time. But they are there whenever we really do need them.

It’s these ‘safety features’ that are often missing in our work that should help us deal with unexpected situations. Like the procedure document created for the last audit and left to collect dust in a filing cabinet, the lifejacket under your seat may as well not be there if you weren’t reminded about it every time you got on an aircraft.

And so this is what happens in a time of crisis. When things start to go wrong and there’s no obvious handrail to grab on to employees will grab whatever they can.

In the examples above this suggests the systems, and therefore the underlying process, were not fit for purpose. They didn’t help the team, they worked against them. This doesn’t fill your team with confidence, especially in times of high pressure.

When this happens it has an impact on employee satisfaction, a key part of delivering a great customer experience. If your front line staff aren’t happy it’s highly likely that will eventually affect customer experience.

Take this together with a worsening situation where the workload is going out of control. Add the fact that customers are becoming more and more frustrated as they are made to wait in endless queues listening to the same maddening holding music over and over and over.

A frustrated customer and an inability to effectively resolve that customer’s problem creates the perfect storm or vicious cycle. The vicious cycle of customer experience is when poor customer experience and low employee satisfaction reinforce each other in a downward spiral.

the_vicious_cycle_of_customer_experience
The vicious cycle of customer experience

The image above shows the various interactions in play that can lead to the vicious cycle. Keeping all these things in balance is important to maintain a healthy team.

Being prepared for disruption

As we have seen, under normal conditions a balance is found in the system allowing customer experience and employee satisfaction to stay relatively constant. However, the more ‘brittle’ that system is, the fewer safety features it has, the more likely balance will be lost in the event of a disruption.

Other elements in the system come into play. Being prepared for a disruption means making sure those elements are working. The better they are set up the more likely you will keep balance in the system.

The system diagram has been simplified and there are other aspects that can affect the balance but this shows those that are relatively easy to deal with. It provides us with concrete actions we can take to prepare ourselves for the worst. It tells us what a handrail should look like.

Ensure processes are well designed
Although a well designed process is only part of the story it is the essential foundation.

  • Are the processes designed to deliver the outcome you expect?
  • Do those outcomes align with business objectives?
  • Is it feasible to deliver that outcome with the resources you have?
  • Do your systems and tools support the process?

Ensure processes are easy to understand
A well designed process needs to be easy to follow. Having your front line staff poring over abstract architectural diagrams, or detailed text based procedure, during a time of crisis is hardly going to make things easier.

  • Can the process be easily read by your front line staff?
  • Have you tested these with a broad sample of employees?
  • Are they unambiguous?
  • Do they provide enough flexibility for employees to make their own decisions?
  • Are they kept up-to-date?

Ensure processes are easy to find
Just like the handrail, processes need to be easy to find so that staff can reach out and grab them easily in times of crisis.

  • How do employees access the processes?
  • Are they easy to find?
  • Have you tested that using User Experience (UX) tools?
  • Do you run regular ‘safety demonstrations’ to help employees remember how it works?

Ensure processes are easy to maintain
If processes are difficult to update then the cost of doing so will quickly become prohibitive.

  • Do you have a system that makes it easy to update?
  • Are processes stored in a single place?
  • Does the process documentation have appropriate governance? (not too much or too little)

Need help with your processes? We can provide a review of your current process documentation based on the above criteria to see how well prepared you are to deal with the next disruptive event. Contact craig@getskore.com for more information. Want to learn more about customer journeys? Check out Instrktiv.

Idea to app in 5 steps

This example comes from a blog post by David Patterson of KnowNow Information. KnowNow help companies through the innovation process helping them to formalize and test ideas and develop those into real applications.

In this blog post David takes us through a simple 5 step approach from idea to app. We have captured the 5 steps in a Skore process as shown below.

At each step David poses one, or more, questions that must be answered before moving to the next step. We have captured those questions as attachments that can be accessed through the paperclip icons.

To open the full interactive version of the skore process click the image below.

idea_to_app_in_5_steps
Click the image to open the interactive process

My favourite sandwich

I couldn’t help this. After a meeting earlier in the week I stopped by one of my favorite fast food chains. I love to watch how well the process for making my sandwich works. It must have taken years to get this right.

I’ve watched other vendors but none have the process down so well.

So without mentioning any names, here is the process for making my favorite sandwich.

favorite_sandwich_process
Click the image to launch the interactive process

7 steps to successful decision making

From the Erik Larson article in the Harvard Business Review “A Checklist for Making Faster, Better Decisions“. This 7 step approach uses Behavioural Economics as the basis for making better decisions. It’s designed to reduce bias and is ideally suited to important strategic decision making.

After reading the article on HBR we created this simple process view with guidance notes on each step.

Click the image to open the interactive view of the process
Click the image to open the interactive view of the process

How we made this process in Skore app

This is a very simple construction. We used standard What and Why boxes to describe the process. Additional notes based on the HBR article are included in the attachment icons.

Open the interactive process.

Software Implementation

This process is used to demonstrate to customers one of the solutions we offer. We’ve been involved in many software implementations over the years, from large scale ERP through to small implementations covering 4 or 5 team members.

Skore app is a fantastic tool for capturing and analyzing requirements based on process. We focus on asking stakeholders what they do today, which is a much easier question to answer than what do you want tomorrow.

From this information we can see exactly where today’s pains are and design solutions to alleviate those pains.

We can also create value by asking the customer what measurable improvement they would like to see (e.g. reduce costs, increase revenue, improve customer experience etc). We ask “how would that work?” and design processes that make it easy to see how feasible this is.

If you’d like more information on our approach to software implementation please do get in touch. info@getskore.com

Click the image to launch the interactive process
Click the image to launch the interactive process

How the software implementation process was created

Notes boxes were used to create the header in this process. The logo is taken directly from our website and added to the note using markdown:

![Image](url_to_image)

The two chevrons are the icon called angle-double-right from the icon library and the title uses a # at the beginning of the text to create a header 1.

The two grey bars, above and below the process, are simply notes boxes with no text in them. The background has been set to grey and then stretched out across the page.

The text box at the bottom right is also a note box with a border enabled.

Click here to view the process

The Scrum Process

The scrum process is one that we see more and more often. It may go against what many agilists believe but in larger organizations, defining a process is important.

We see many versions of this same process, the words change often but the main steps are almost always the same, in the same order.

the_scrum_process

View the interactive process here

Building the scrum process

The key to this process is representing the iterative nature of scrum. In this example we show the sprint in a group containing the main iteration.

To create a group in Skore app, simply select all the items you want to include in the group and click the Group button at the bottom of the selection. In this case there wasn’t room to display the Group title at the top. Instead I left it blank and added a title at the bottom using a Note.

We also highlight the fact that most products are, or should be, driven by a strategy and the external environment. These external inputs are highlighted using icons. So the icons indicate where the process flows out of scope.

Let us know what you think.

Customer Experience Process (CX)

Why do we need a Customer Experience Process?

This is an example of how we use processes to define and describe a methodology, or approach, in our consulting. In this case it’s our customer experience process. It describes the key activities we do when working with our customers on customer experience issues.

Click the image to open the interactive process

Typically a client will come to us with a request to look at, analyze and/or improve a process. It’s very easy for teams to see their issues, and sometimes lack of defined process, as an internal issue. But in many cases there are significant touchpoints with the customer. Here we would recommend what we call the outside-in approach.

How do we do it?

Before we agree which processes to focus on first we help the team think about what sort of experience they want to deliver. We gather feedback from existing customers and map out the touchpoints. This shows the team where the gaps are and helps them prioritise which process to focus on. More importantly it tells them what the value adding deliverable for each process is.

We define this approach in Skore as it gives us an overview of each of the key activities. It’s easy to change and update as we learn new things. And we can attach guidance notes, templates and additional information to each step. It means we can very quickly get up to speed by reviewing the process before each project. It also helps us to explain to the customer exactly how this is going to work and what they should expect. It helps them prepare better so we can really get the most out of our workshops.

How do we define that in Skore app?

As this is a high level overview we have defined it all on a single diagram. There are three key phases to the process; pre-work including interviews and research, the actual workshop(s) and finally any follow up work such as defining the actual processes. In order to show these phases we used grouping.

A group adds a border to a set of boxes on the diagram and allows you to give it a title. This way related items are shown together. You simply select the items  you want included in the group (hold down Shift and drag to select) and click on the Group option that is displayed.

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 09.10.03

We also use attachments on each box to link to templates and guidance notes for each step. Reading this process before each project is really very useful as a refresher. And it really helps the customer understand which phase of the process we are in at any given point.

Access our Customer Experience Process here.

Aircraft Turnaround Process

In this example we show an aircraft turnaround process from touchdown to take off. Please note this is not a real turnaround process and as the author, although I am a frequent flyer, I am no aircraft expert! I have used this process as an example in many training sessions. It is something that is recognizable to most people and brings together a lot of different interacting processes.

The story I like to tell is of the importance of a quick turnaround to the airline, while maintaining the extremely high levels of safety. What’s interesting with this process is all the interacting service providers that are all following their own processes. The baggage handlers, the fuel company, the catering and cleaners are often likely to all work for different companies.

In this case the purpose of the process is to orchestrate all these other processes. This is increasingly relevant today as most companies operate in a similar way, we may have a single value adding process, but so much of what we do is orchestrating our suppliers in order to output a product.

When we start the discussion the process sounds very complicated. There seems to be so much going on. So it helps to demonstrate how useful the process decomposition approach is for identifying details that might otherwise be missed. It helps the group break the major tasks down and think about how they interact. Each level of detail revealing something that was previously hidden.

In this example I have used Notes and Markdown to create the headline and to add images. To find out more about how to do this click the Keyboard Shortcuts link in the application.

View the live skore for the aircraft turnaround process here.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

Jobs_to_be_done_3This customer came to us with an adoption problem. They had a product that clearly solved a well know problem in their industry. For some reason user adoption of the product was relatively low with fewer customers getting the expected value than they expected. There was a suspicion, within the company, that the design of the user interface was responsible.

We reviewed the product and used a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) approach to understand how the product fit within the target customer’s workflow. Jobs To Be Done is a simple but powerful approach that helps to better understand the context in which users use your product. It highlights hidden opportunities and helps you set the right direction for your product strategy.

The Product

The product itself is a data analytics platform used in the Oil & Gas industry. It helps to improve the efficiency of oil well drilling by using analytics to improve the behavior of drilling operations. Problems during oil well drilling can be extremely expensive. Spotting problems early enough can potentially save millions of dollars in lost drilling time.

The Problem

In many cases the customers were not seeing the expected benefit. After implementing the product it wasn’t leading to the correct change in behavior. These companies were not seeing the expected savings. On closer investigation it seemed that the various users in the customer were simply not using the product and therefore not getting the benefit of the insights it provided.

This is what lead our client to suspect the user interface as the potential problem. We certainly wouldn’t rule this out but before we could confidently make that call we needed to understand the context better. After reviewing the product and receiving both sales and technical presentations we sat through the product training and interviewed the implementation consultants. The next step was to interview the customers and understand how they saw the product fit in their existing workflows.

Jobs To Be Done

The Jobs To Be Done approach lets you look at what the customer is trying to achieve and then place the product within that process. Our adaption of the approach ensures that every step adds value to the overall goal. This means when you place the product into the process you can clearly see where it’s adding value, where it falls short and potential opportunities to improve.

The approach is relatively easy to apply and results in a set of simple visualizations the team can use to discuss improvements of all sizes including potential strategy changes. While we interviewed our client’s customers we sketched out these processes and asked them to help us position the product in the process. We then discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the product in this context.

We created a high level view of the drilling process in Skore app:

Jobs_to_be_done
Simple high level view of the oil drilling process

This showed us where the product supported the customer’s activities. Next we broke the most important step, drilling the well, into a more detailed view. At this point we identified a series of user journeys that each resulted in a different outcome. Again each outcome added in some way to the overall customer goal.

jobs_to_be_done_2
Detailed user journey

Each of these user journeys followed the key steps that the customer did to achieve those goals including using the product. These visualizations made it very easy for the customer to describe what they needed and where the gaps were. When shared with our client, not only were we able to articulate why the users were not using the product as expected but our client also identified other improvement opportunities.

Providing the high level context first allowed the whole team to see the relationships between the different parts of the product and how each of those fit into what the customer did. It made it much easier to discuss improvements and understand the impact on the customer before any development even took place.

Product Strategy

These simple visualizations really helped to understand the product better. It helped the development team understand the context of what they were building better. It helped the sales team position the product better. It helped the implementation team train new customers better and it allowed the whole company to reach a shared understanding about how their product worked and what value it provided. As a result it guided a new product strategy that allowed them to deliver more value for their customers.

photo credit: Rig night shot 2 via photopin (license)

 

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