Category Archives: Customer Experience

Tailoring Experiences at Scale

The Power of Personalization

Tailoring Experiences at Scale

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, the dominant logic in business was mass production and mass consumption. The goal was simple: optimize for the average customer. But in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive marketplace, the average customer no longer exists. They are individuals demanding recognition, relevance, and respect for their unique context. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the future of competitive advantage lies in mastering The Power of Personalization — the ability to deliver tailored, meaningful experiences to millions of people, simultaneously and seamlessly. This is the ultimate convergence of human-centered design and technological scale: using data and intelligence to make every single customer feel profoundly understood. Innovation must move beyond simple segmentation to anticipatory intimacy.

Personalization is not just about slapping a name on an email. True personalization is a strategic innovation challenge that addresses the fundamental human need for relevance. When a product, service, or communication is relevant, it eliminates friction, conserves the user’s valuable time, and builds trust. Conversely, irrelevant experiences create “digital noise,” foster annoyance, and actively erode loyalty. The challenge for leaders is to establish the infrastructure—both technical and human—that allows the organization to perceive, remember, and respond to the unique needs and behaviors of its individual customers, moving from a transaction-based relationship to a personalized partnership.

The Three Dimensions of Human-Centered Personalization

Effective personalization at scale requires a deliberate strategic focus across three integrated dimensions, ensuring that technology serves human purpose:

1. Contextual Intelligence (The When and Where): Personalization fails when it is delivered out of context. This dimension involves using real-time behavioral data, location, time, and device context to deliver the right message at the exact moment of need. It’s about being helpful, not just interruptive. For example, offering a specific type of coffee to a regular when they step within range of their usual store, not hours later at home.
2. Behavioral Prediction (The Anticipatory Insight): Moving beyond “what they bought” to “what they are about to need.” This requires deep data analytics to model future behavior and latent needs. The innovation here is in creating proactive experiences—solving a problem the customer hasn’t even fully articulated yet. This is the difference between recommending a product and recommending a solution to a future pain point.
3. Ethical Transparency (The Trust Equation): The more personal your service, the higher the need for trust. Personalization must be built on a foundation of ethical consent and clarity. Customers must understand what data is being used, why it benefits them, and have meaningful control over it. Lack of transparency transforms personalization from helpful to “creepy,” immediately destroying the human relationship you were trying to build.

“The best personalization doesn’t guess the customer’s mind; it anticipates their next human need.”

Case Study 1: Netflix – Personalizing the Discovery Experience

The Challenge:

With thousands of titles in its library, Netflix faced a monumental human-centered challenge: choice overload. An average customer who spends too long searching often quits out of frustration, leading to churn. The vastness of the library became a liability rather than an asset.

The Personalization Solution:

Netflix innovated by turning its entire platform into a hyper-personalized discovery engine. Their personalization extends far beyond basic recommendation rows. They use data to:

Personalize Artwork: Displaying different title images for the same movie based on the viewer’s previous habits (e.g., showing a romantic image to a romance watcher, or an action scene to a thriller fan).
Personalize Rows: Creating unique rows that reflect highly specific taste segments (e.g., “Visually Stunning Sci-Fi Movies with a Strong Female Lead”).
Behavioral Prediction: Using complex algorithms to anticipate the titles most likely to be watched next, drastically reducing the cognitive effort required to choose.

The result is a service where the entire interface is tailored to the individual, solving the human problem of choice overload.

The Human-Centered Result:

By investing in personalization as its core product strategy, Netflix dramatically increased customer engagement and reduced churn. The experience feels curated and intimate, creating a strong sense of value. It proved that in the digital age, relevance is the killer feature, and the best way to innovate around a huge catalog is to make it feel small and tailored to each person.

Case Study 2: Spotify – Tailoring the Moment of Discovery

The Challenge:

The music world is characterized by an infinite library of new content. For Spotify, the challenge was helping users feel connected to new artists and music they would love, without relying solely on manual searching or static genre lists. The innovation needed to capture the highly personal, emotional nature of music discovery.

The Personalization Solution:

Spotify’s innovation, particularly the Discover Weekly playlist, is a masterclass in anticipatory personalization. The system uses a complex blend of collaborative filtering (what similar users like) and natural language processing (analyzing articles and blogs about music) to create a wholly unique, algorithmically-generated playlist for each user, delivered every Monday.

Contextual Delivery: The timing (Monday morning) positions the playlist as a fresh start and a soundtrack for the week.
Ethical Partnership: The playlist format feels like a gift from a trustworthy, knowledgeable friend, minimizing the “creepy” factor because the value exchange is clear: “We observe your taste, and in return, we give you this high-quality, personalized content.”

This system essentially turns data analysis into an act of creative, personalized curation.

The Human-Centered Result:

Discover Weekly became one of Spotify’s most successful features, driving massive engagement. It demonstrated that personalization can be an act of generosity, giving the user a valuable, curated product that is better than anything they could have created themselves. It solidified Spotify’s role not just as a music player, but as a trusted curator and partner in the user’s emotional relationship with music.

Conclusion: The Future of Business is Individual

The Power of Personalization is the core strategic challenge of our time. It requires leaders to embrace a fundamental truth: human connection scales. You don’t need to choose between mass market reach and intimate relationships; technology has finally allowed us to achieve both.

To succeed, organizations must move from seeing personalization as a marketing tactic to recognizing it as a holistic innovation imperative — a guiding principle for product design, service delivery, and ethical governance. By leveraging contextual intelligence and behavioral prediction with unwavering ethical transparency, we can create a future where every customer feels understood, valued, and served with a precision that delights. The most profitable innovations will be those that master the art of the individual experience, delivered on a global stage.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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Engaging Users in the Design Process

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Co-Creation for Experience

Engaging Users in the Design Process - Co-Creation for Experience

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the world of design and innovation, we have long operated under a traditional model. We observe users from a distance, conduct market research, and then retreat to our labs and conference rooms to design a solution that we believe they will love. We call this “customer-centric” design, but it’s a one-way street. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that this model is no longer enough. The future of innovation belongs to those who move beyond designing **for** their users to designing **with** them. This is the power of **co-creation**, a strategic shift that transforms customers from passive recipients of a product into active, invaluable partners in its creation.

Co-creation is the ultimate form of empathy. It’s an open invitation for your most passionate users to contribute their insights, skills, and creativity directly to the design process. This isn’t just about collecting feedback; it’s about treating your customers as equal partners in the journey of innovation. The benefits are profound. By involving the people you serve, you bypass the risk of building something they don’t genuinely need. You uncover unarticulated pain points and desires that a traditional survey could never reveal. And perhaps most importantly, you build a powerful sense of ownership and community. When customers have a hand in creating a product, they don’t just use it; they become an army of loyal advocates, invested in its success and eager to spread the word.

The Co-Creation Framework: A Human-Centered Approach

Successful co-creation is not a random act of crowdsourcing; it is a structured, human-centered process. It requires a clear framework to ensure that the collaboration is meaningful, productive, and respectful. Here are four essential steps:

1. Define the Challenge, Not the Solution: The starting point is crucial. Don’t ask users to validate a product you’ve already built. Instead, present them with a clear, compelling problem to solve. For example, instead of “How do you like our new app?”, ask, “How might we make your daily commute more enjoyable?” This opens the door to a wider range of creative solutions.
2. Build the Right Platform: Co-creation can happen in many forms. It could be a series of in-person workshops, a dedicated online community, a digital platform for ideation and voting, or a private beta program. Choose a platform that is accessible, easy to use, and facilitates collaboration among all participants.
3. Empower the Co-Creator: Treat your users as equal partners. Give them the information they need, and make their role in the process explicit. Whether they are ideating, prototyping, or providing feedback, ensure they understand how their contributions will be used and how they fit into the bigger picture.
4. Close the Loop: This is arguably the most important step. A co-creation initiative is not a one-off event. It requires transparency and a continuous feedback loop. Be sure to show participants what happened to their ideas. Even if an idea wasn’t chosen, explain why and thank them for their contribution. This builds trust and encourages continued participation, turning a single project into a long-term community.

“The best innovations are not born in a lab; they are born in the conversations between creators and the people they are creating for.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Threadless – Building a Business on Collective Creativity

The Challenge:

In the highly competitive world of apparel, fashion trends are traditionally dictated from the top-down by designers and major retailers. This process is inherently risky and often disconnected from what consumers actually want to wear. A small t-shirt company needed a new model that could consistently produce fresh, relevant designs with minimal risk while building an authentic brand.

The Co-Creation Solution:

Threadless launched a revolutionary business model based entirely on co-creation. The company’s platform is a digital community where artists from around the world submit t-shirt designs. The community then votes on their favorite submissions. Each week, the designs with the highest votes are put into production. The winning artists receive prize money and royalties on their designs. This model is a masterclass in crowdsourced innovation.

Empowered Co-Creators: Threadless gives artists a clear incentive and platform to contribute their creativity. They are not just submitting work; they are participating in a creative community.
Reduced Risk: The voting process acts as powerful market validation. Threadless knows a design is likely to be a commercial success before it ever spends a dollar on production, significantly reducing inventory and design risk.
Built-in Community: The platform fostered a vibrant, global community of artists and fans who felt a deep sense of ownership. This turned a transactional relationship into a collaborative partnership, leading to immense brand loyalty.

The Result:

Threadless became a major success story, proving that a company’s most valuable design team might be its own customers. By co-creating with its community, Threadless not only built a profitable business but also created an authentic, beloved brand known for its originality and its dedication to the collective voice of its creators. The company’s model demonstrates that the best way to predict what consumers want is to simply ask them to create it.

Case Study 2: L’Oréal’s Open Innovation Platform – Co-Creating Science and Beauty

The Challenge:

As a global beauty giant, L’Oréal’s R&D model was powerful but also traditional and at times, slow. The company needed to accelerate its innovation pipeline, especially in cutting-edge fields like green chemistry, artificial intelligence, and new biotech ingredients. The challenge was how to access and integrate external expertise from the world’s most brilliant scientists, researchers, and startups in a way that was agile and efficient.

The Co-Creation Solution:

L’Oréal adopted a strategic open innovation approach, which is a sophisticated form of co-creation. Instead of relying solely on internal labs, the company actively seeks partnerships with independent scientists, researchers, and startups through dedicated platforms and venture capital initiatives. L’Oréal presents specific scientific or technological challenges and invites external experts to co-develop solutions. For example, they might partner with a startup to develop a new sustainable ingredient or collaborate with a university lab to create a new method for personalized skincare.

Defined Challenges: L’Oréal clearly articulates its technological and scientific needs, empowering a global network of experts to contribute.
Empowered Partners: The company treats these external collaborators as true partners, not just vendors. This approach fosters a culture of shared purpose and mutual trust.
Continuous Innovation: This model is not a one-time project; it is a permanent innovation channel that allows the company to continuously learn from and adapt to the rapid advancements in science and technology.

The Result:

By implementing a co-creation strategy on a massive scale, L’Oréal has been able to significantly accelerate its innovation cycle and develop groundbreaking products that would have been impossible to create internally alone. The approach has led to new patents, new product categories, and a more agile business model. This case study demonstrates that co-creation is not limited to consumer-facing products; it is a powerful strategic tool for even the largest and most complex organizations to stay at the forefront of their industries.

Conclusion: The Future of Innovation is Collaborative

The era of closed-door design is over. In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, the most successful organizations will be those that open their doors and invite their users to the innovation table. Co-creation is not a marketing gimmick; it is a fundamental strategic shift from “customer-centric” to “customer-led.” It is an acknowledgment that your users are not just consumers; they are a wellspring of insight, creativity, and passion.

As leaders, our role is to create the platforms and the culture that enable this collaboration. By treating your users as partners, you will not only build better products and services but also forge a deeper, more resilient connection to the people you serve. The future of innovation is not solitary; it is collaborative, and it is waiting for you to invite the first person in.

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Holistic Metrics for Customer Experience Innovation

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Beyond NPS

Holistic Metrics for Customer Experience Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the world of customer experience (CX), the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the gold standard. With its simple, elegant question — “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” — it has given leaders a seemingly clear and powerful metric to track customer loyalty. And while NPS has served its purpose, it has, in my opinion, become a crutch. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that chasing a single score is a dangerous oversimplification. It tells you what is happening, but it provides almost no insight into why or how to fix it. The future of customer experience innovation belongs to organizations that move beyond a single number and embrace a holistic, multi-dimensional metric framework that captures the full, rich tapestry of the customer journey.

The problem with a metric like NPS is that it is a lagging indicator. It measures the outcome of an experience, but it doesn’t diagnose the cause. It’s like a doctor taking your temperature and knowing you have a fever, but having no idea if the cause is a minor cold or a serious infection. This singular focus can lead to a host of negative consequences: a lack of actionable insight, a disconnection from real customer behavior, and a dangerous internal obsession with “gaming the number” at the expense of genuine customer value. To truly innovate the customer experience, we must stop chasing a score and start understanding the human story behind it. We need to measure not just what customers say, but what they do and how they feel.

Building a Holistic CX Metric Framework: The Three Dimensions

A more effective approach to measuring customer experience involves a framework that looks at three distinct, yet interconnected, dimensions. These are your essential innovation levers:

1. Behavioral Metrics (The “What”): These are the objective data points that show what your customers are actually doing. Metrics like repeat purchase rate, average session time, feature adoption, time to resolution for a support ticket, or product usage frequency provide hard, undeniable facts about customer engagement. These tell you if your product or service is truly creating value.
2. Perceptual Metrics (The “How They Think”): This is where traditional scores can be useful, but in a more nuanced way. Metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) — “How much effort did you have to put in to get your issue resolved?” — or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) on a specific interaction are incredibly powerful. They tell you if the experience was easy, simple, and satisfying.
3. Emotional Metrics (The “How They Feel”): This is the most critical and often overlooked dimension. It goes beyond a simple number to capture the emotional state of the customer. Use sentiment analysis on open-ended survey responses, call center transcripts, or social media comments. Qualitative feedback, such as an interview where a customer shares a story of a “wow” moment or a frustrating interaction, provides the color and context that no score ever could.

In the pursuit of holistic experience management, many of my clients are turning to strategic partners to help them build the necessary infrastructure. A great example of this is the work being done by companies like HCLTech, which helps clients implement Experience Management Offices (XMOs). These are not just new departments; they are a centralized command center for an organization’s entire experience ecosystem. By creating a dedicated XMO, companies can move beyond siloed efforts and begin to measure and manage experiences for their customers, partners, and employees as a unified whole. This includes the deployment of Experience Level Measures (XLMs), a set of sophisticated metrics that go far beyond a simple NPS score. XLMs capture the full journey, measuring everything from emotional sentiment and perceived effort to behavioral data and digital engagement. It’s a fundamental shift from a reactive, score-based approach to a proactive, human-centered one, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized for a truly superior experience.

“The best metric is not a score; it’s a story. And a holistic framework gives you the chapters, the characters, and the plot points you need to innovate.”

Case Study 1: Zappos and the Obsession with “Wow”

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Zappos faced the monumental challenge of building a viable e-commerce business for shoes, a category that many believed would never succeed online due to the need for a physical try-on. The challenge was not just to sell shoes but to create a customer experience so exceptional that it would overcome the inherent friction of online retail and build a brand on trust and loyalty.

The Holistic Metrics Response:

Zappos’ innovation was not just in their business model, but in their metric framework. While they tracked revenue, they were obsessed with delivering “wow” moments. They didn’t just measure Customer Satisfaction; they actively encouraged employees to spend a minimum of an hour on a single customer service call to build a deep, human connection. They measured the number of free shipping upgrades to delight customers. The company was willing to spend money on a customer call or shipping because they understood the immense, long-term value of an emotional connection. Their core metric wasn’t NPS; it was the number of times they could surprise and delight a customer. Their behavioral metric was the high rate of repeat purchases, which they knew was a direct result of the positive emotions they fostered.

The Result:

Zappos became famous for its customer service. The emotional and behavioral metrics they prioritized directly led to high customer lifetime value and an army of loyal brand advocates. This focus on the holistic experience was their primary innovation, and it created a level of brand love that was almost impossible for competitors to replicate. The lesson: by measuring the moments that matter, you can build a more resilient and beloved business.

Case Study 2: HubSpot’s Proactive Customer Health Score

The Challenge:

In the world of B2B SaaS, customer churn is a constant threat. Historically, companies would rely on a lagging indicator — cancellation — to know when a customer was at risk. The challenge for HubSpot, a leader in marketing and sales software, was to move from a reactive posture to a proactive one. They wanted to know a customer was unhappy or disengaged long before they decided to leave.

The Holistic Metrics Response:

HubSpot developed a “Customer Health Score” as their primary innovation metric. This wasn’t a simple survey result; it was a holistic metric composed of three key dimensions:

Behavioral: How often were they logging in? Were they adopting and using the key features of the software? Was their team size expanding or contracting?
Perceptual: What was their satisfaction with the support team?
Emotional: What was the sentiment from a recent check-in call with their account manager?

By combining these dimensions, HubSpot could see a comprehensive view of a customer’s health. For example, a customer who was logging in less frequently and had a recent low satisfaction score would be flagged as at-risk, even if they hadn’t expressed a desire to leave. This gave the team a chance to intervene and innovate the experience — by offering more training, providing personalized support, or addressing a specific pain point — before it was too late.

The Result:

HubSpot’s proactive, holistic approach to customer health significantly reduced churn and increased customer lifetime value. By moving beyond a single metric like NPS and instead focusing on the full story of customer behavior, perception, and emotion, they were able to build a more resilient customer base and a product that continuously evolved to meet customer needs. This case study proves that a holistic metric framework is not just a tool for measurement but a powerful engine for continuous innovation.

Conclusion: The Future of Experience is Human

A single score, no matter how elegant, is an oversimplification of the complex human experience. It is a tool for the passive manager, not the human-centered innovator. The most successful organizations of the future will be those that have the courage to move beyond the comfort of a single number and embrace the messy, beautiful complexity of their customers’ lives. By building a holistic metric framework that measures what people do, how they think, and how they feel, we can move from simply managing customer satisfaction to truly innovating the human experience.

The time has come to stop chasing a number and start listening to the human story. The next great innovation is not hiding in a spreadsheet; it’s waiting for you to find it in the heart of your customer’s journey.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

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The Future of Service

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Innovating for Seamless and Delightful Interactions

The Future of Service

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In a world where products are increasingly commoditized and competition is just a click away, the true and lasting competitive advantage lies in the quality of your service. But the very definition of “service” is undergoing a profound transformation. It’s no longer just about fixing a problem or answering a question; it’s about creating seamless and delightful interactions that anticipate needs, remove friction, and build deep, lasting relationships. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I believe the future of service is not just about being reactive, but about being proactively human-centric, leveraging technology to amplify empathy and deliver truly exceptional experiences.

The traditional service model often operates in silos, with fragmented touchpoints and a rigid, transactional approach. A customer calls one department, is transferred to another, and has to repeat their story multiple times. This isn’t service; it’s a series of frustrations. The future, however, is unified and intelligent. It’s about designing a holistic service journey that anticipates what the customer needs before they even ask, making every interaction feel intuitive and effortless. This shift requires a fundamental change in mindset, moving from a cost-center view of service to a strategic, value-creation engine.

The Four Pillars of Future-Ready Service Innovation

Building a service model for tomorrow requires a focus on four key pillars:

Proactive & Predictive: Leveraging data and AI to anticipate customer needs and issues. This means resolving a problem before the customer even knows they have one, such as notifying them of a potential shipping delay and offering a solution preemptively.
Seamless & Omni-Channel: Ensuring that the customer journey is fluid and consistent across all channels—from a website chatbot to a phone call to a social media message. The customer should never have to repeat themselves.
Personalized & Empathetic: Using data not just for efficiency, but for personalization. This means interactions feel tailored and human, remembering past conversations and preferences to build a genuine rapport.
Delightful & Unexpected: Moving beyond just meeting expectations to exceeding them. This involves small, surprising moments of delight that create memorable experiences and foster brand loyalty.

“The best service is so seamless, it’s invisible. The next best service is so delightful, it’s unforgettable.”

Integrating Technology to Amplify the Human Touch

Technology, particularly AI, is not the enemy of human-centered service; it is the ultimate enabler. When used correctly, it frees up human agents from repetitive, mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on complex, empathetic, and relationship-building interactions. It allows us to scale empathy in ways previously unimaginable.

AI for Triage & Efficiency: Use AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants to handle simple, high-volume queries, and to intelligently route complex issues to the right human expert with all the necessary context.
Data Analytics for Foresight: Analyze customer data to predict churn risk, identify opportunities for upselling, and proactively address pain points before they escalate.
Automation for Seamlessness: Automate routine tasks—like order tracking, appointment scheduling, and password resets—to eliminate friction and create an effortless experience.
CRM for Personalization: Equip human agents with a unified view of the customer’s history, preferences, and past interactions across all channels, enabling them to provide highly personalized and empathetic support.

Case Study 1: The Modern Banking Experience – A Shift from Transactional to Relationship-Driven

The Challenge:

For years, banking was a transactional experience. Customers only interacted with their bank when something went wrong, they needed a loan, or they had a question about a fee. This reactive, low-engagement model was ripe for disruption, especially with the rise of FinTech startups offering more user-friendly digital experiences.

Innovating for a Seamless and Proactive Service Journey:

Forward-thinking banks and FinTechs have used technology to fundamentally redefine the customer relationship:

Predictive Insights: Instead of just showing a balance, banking apps now use AI to analyze spending habits. They might send a notification that “you’re close to your budget limit on dining out” or “you have a recurring subscription you might have forgotten about.” This is a proactive, helpful service that anticipates a customer’s financial health.
Unified Channels: A customer can start a conversation with a chatbot on the app, and if the issue is complex, seamlessly transition to a human agent who has the full chat history and customer context instantly available. There is no need to repeat the problem.
Automated Problem Solving: Basic issues like a temporary debit card freeze or a disputed charge can be handled instantly through the app, without ever needing to call a representative, removing a massive point of friction.

The Result:

This shift from a purely transactional model to a seamless, proactive, and relationship-driven service has drastically improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. By using technology to anticipate needs and remove friction, these institutions have transformed banking from a chore into a tool that genuinely helps customers manage their financial lives. The innovation isn’t in a new product, but in a fundamentally better, more human-centric service experience.

Case Study 2: The E-commerce Returns Process – Turning a Pain Point into a Moment of Delight

The Challenge:

The returns process is often the most frustrating part of the e-commerce experience. It’s a key moment of truth that can either cement brand loyalty or destroy it. Traditional returns often involve printing labels, finding boxes, and a lengthy wait for a refund, all of which creates a high-friction, low-delight experience.

Innovating for a Delightful and Effortless Service Experience:

Some innovative retailers have re-engineered the returns process to be a moment of delight, using technology to enable a human-centered design:

Frictionless Returns: Companies like Nordstrom and Amazon have partnered with services that allow for no-box, no-label returns at local drop-off points. The customer simply brings the item in a bag, and the service center scans a QR code. This is an innovation that removes multiple points of friction.
Proactive Communication: Customers receive automated, real-time updates on their return status, from “item received” to “refund initiated” to “refund processed.” This removes anxiety and the need to call customer service.
AI-Powered Recommendations: Some companies use AI to analyze the reason for a return (e.g., “wrong size”) and then proactively suggest a replacement product that is a better fit, turning a potential lost sale into a new one and creating a helpful, personalized service.

The Result:

By transforming the returns process from a source of friction into a seamless and proactive service, these companies have significantly improved customer satisfaction and repurchase rates. They recognized that the moment a customer wants to return an item is not an endpoint but a critical inflection point in the relationship. By innovating around this service journey, they built immense brand trust and loyalty, proving that great service can turn even the most negative interactions into positive brand-building opportunities.

Conclusion: The Human-Centered Imperative

The future of service is not about automation for the sake of efficiency; it’s about using intelligent technology to enable a more deeply human-centered experience. It’s about anticipating needs, removing friction, and empowering employees to focus on the moments that truly matter. The organizations that will win in the long run are those that view service not as a cost to be minimized, but as a strategic asset to be innovated upon.

As leaders, our challenge is to break down old silos, foster a culture of empathy, and design service journeys that are as delightful and intuitive as the products they support. The goal is to move beyond simply satisfying customers to genuinely delighting them, building a future where service is the ultimate driver of loyalty, innovation, and growth. The future of service is here, and it’s beautifully human.

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Avoiding An Unamazing Customer Experience

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Avoiding An Unamazing Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

NICE isn’t just the right way to treat people. It’s the name of a software company that specializes in helping businesses improve their customer and agent experience. NICE has analyzed billions of customer interactions to better understand customer behavior. They know what customers like and dislike. They know what frustrates customer support agents and what gets them excited about helping their customers. But often, it’s not an agent experience that gets customers to come back.

A recent study from NICE found that 81% of consumers today start with a digital channel when they have a question, a need or want to buy something. They don’t call the company. They go to a website, YouTube, Google search, etc. They want and expect the companies and brands they do business with to have answers readily available. What they don’t want is to call a company, be placed on hold for what seems like an unreasonable period of time, talk to a rep who transfers them to another rep, etc., etc.

I recently interviewed Laura Bassett, Vice President of Product Marketing at NICE, and had a fascinating conversation about how customers’ expectations are changing. She said many experiences are unamazing. They simply disappoint, which doesn’t give a customer the incentive to come back for more. Bassett said NICE’s mission is to rid the world of unamazing customer experiences. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom Bassett shared on how to do exactly that.

1. Customer experience is the entire journey.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that customer experience is customer support. It’s much more than that. While customer support is part of the experience, it really starts when a customer initiates a Google search, finds your company and interacts with your website. The service begins with how easy it is to do business with you regardless of where they are in the customer journey.

2. Customer experience involves every person in the business.

Just as customer experience includes the customer’s entire journey—not just when they reach out for customer support—it also involves every employee. If you aren’t dealing directly with a customer, you support someone who is or is part of the process that will impact the experience. Even people behind the scenes, who never interact with the customer, have impact on the experience. Everyone must understand their role and contribution to the customer experience.

3. Proactive communication is essential to the customer experience.

Companies know many of the questions that customers ask. So, why not be proactive about giving customers information before they have to make the effort to get answers? Bassett said, “Companies should understand and predict when they can answer a question before customers even realize they have it.”

4. Walk in your customer’s shoes.

This is an old expression, yet its meaning is timeless. You must understand what the customer is going through at every step of the journey. Then compare it to the experience you would want. When designing an experience that makes customers want to come back, think about what would make you come back. Is the experience your customers receive different than what you want?

5. Agents are consumers too.

Their expectations have accelerated. They compare what they should be able to deliver to what they experience with other businesses. When they have an amazing experience with another company, they want to repeat that experience for their own customers. They must be equipped with the tools to deliver what they consider to be an amazing experience.

6. Make your customer support agents knowledgeable.

This is a great follow-up to No. 5. Help them understand that they don’t have to follow a script when it is unnecessary. They don’t want to feel held back. They don’t want to feel over-managed or under-enabled. After you hire good people and train them well, you should empower them to do their job. Bassett said, “Turn agents into customer service executives who can really own that experience.”

7. Amazing customer service doesn’t need to have fireworks.

Seamless and simple wins every time. This is the perfect concept to close out this article. Nothing shared in this article is rocket science. It’s common sense. It’s what every customer wants. To be amazing, you don’t have to go over the top and WOW the customer with the most incredible service they have ever experienced. Delivering the simple and seamless actually creates the WOW factor so many businesses believe is unattainable. Just be easy. Eliminate friction. Easy and seamless isn’t that hard—and for customers, it’s the opposite of unamazing!

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

E-commerce hasn’t killed retail—it’s just transformed it.

For years we’ve been hearing that retail is dead, and the rash of store closures in cities across the country would seem to confirm the trend. The local mall no longer serves as a de facto community hub, if it’s even stayed open at all.

Given what we think we know, would it surprise you to learn that retail sales in 2021 were actually up more than 10% over the previous year, topping $4.44 trillion? Although fears of recession loom, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that both personal income and consumer spending continued to rise in June. And while e-commerce may be an unstoppable force, much of this consumer spending is still happening in brick-and-mortar stores.

That said, there’s no question that the retail experience is changing—and must continue to change. E-commerce growth and tech developments, in general, have transformed customer expectations. I always advise my clients to meet customers where they are, and where retail shoppers are right now is standing in an aisle, smartphone in hand, comparing prices and reading online reviews. Technology has become an integral part of the retail experience, and retailers would be fools to ignore that.

Luckily, they aren’t fools. Whether saving their customers time or offering them unique experiences, retailers are incorporating technology to improve the customer experience. Here are three ways they’re doing it:

1. Smart Screens Digitize the In-Store Experience – You probably remember the first time you went to fill your soda cup at your favorite fast-casual spot and found yourself facing a dizzying digital array of fountain soda choices. Smart screens are on the march, and they’re not just in restaurants anymore.

Clothing retailers are using touchscreens to help customers build their wardrobes, while furniture stores use similar tech to let shoppers design rooms in their homes. Smart screens can offer retail customers what they love about online shopping—plentiful product information, eye-catching photos and on-the-spot promotions—in an in-store setting.

Consider the cooler aisle at Walgreens, where high-resolution smart screens from Cooler Screens have transformed the drugstore chain’s fridge and freezer doors. Shoppers no longer have to brave an icy blast—they can see the beverages and frozen treats inside at a glance without even opening the door. Plus, they can get calorie counts and take advantage of instant deals—and soon will also see customer ratings and reviews.

Data showed that 90% of Walgreens customers prefer the new smart screen cooler doors to the traditional kind. For retailers looking to bridge the online/in-store gap, smart screens present the opportunity to both accomplish some point-of-sale digital marketing and enhance the customer experience.

2. Click-and-Collect Services Save Time – Another way retailers are meeting their customers’ hybrid shopping expectations is by beefing up their click-and-collect capabilities. Buying items online and picking them up in person offers consumers the best of both shopping worlds. They can browse a store’s product selection on their desktop or phone, and once their order is assembled, there’s no wait or shipping expense. Curbside pickup goes one better by allowing people to order products online and pick them up without stepping foot in the store.

I admit it’s not rocket science, but I believe that high-quality customer service depends on listening to what customers want, and many of them clearly value this hassle-free shopping experience. The 2022 Click-and-Collect Forecast shows that U.S. buyers will spend $95.87 billion via click-and-collect this year, a 19.4% increase over 2021. Retailers that expand their click-and-collect offerings stand to increase revenue by giving customers more of what they want.

Enabling this experience requires an up-to-date e-commerce website that’s optimized for mobile. Furthermore, retailers will need to achieve seamless integration between their online shopping platforms and on-the-ground operations. Many are already adapting by adding more parking spaces for click-and-collect customers and hiring more personal shoppers to gather orders.

3. Self-Service Improves Convenience – Another thing the e-commerce revolution has changed is customers’ expectations of self-service. From product page to shopping cart to checkout, the typical online shopping experience is a solo affair. While a retail store offers the possibility of assistance from a real person, many shoppers would rather take care of themselves. Smart retailers are using tech to let them.

Digital self-service kiosks help in-store shoppers get their bearings, look up product information, scan prices and see whether the item they want is in stock—and order it on the spot if it’s not. Retailers’ mobile apps enable customers to locate products, read reviews, compare prices and pounce on in-store discounts. By offering the right tech assistance, retailers give their customers a sense of control.

When customers think of self-service, self-checkout is usually the first thing that comes to mind, but even that is evolving. Going beyond the usual “Scan your first item and put it in the bag,” Amazon has launched fully autonomous checkouts. In its Amazon Go stores, customers scan a barcode going in and get charged electronically for purchased items as they leave. Instead of making customers do more work, Amazon employs its “Just Walk Out” technology to make customers’ lives easier and the retail experience friction-free.

Technology has greatly impacted people’s lives, and the retail setting is no exception. Retailers that use tech to improve the customer experience will see increased profit and customer satisfaction. Research has shown that experiences increase happiness more than things, so retailers that can provide both are setting themselves up for success.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Uncovering Hidden Opportunities for Innovation

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Mapping the Customer Journey

Uncovering Hidden Opportunities for Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the digital age, companies often focus on data, metrics, and technology, but the true frontier of innovation lies in one thing: empathy. The most powerful innovations aren’t born in a lab; they’re discovered by deeply understanding the human experience.

As an innovator, your greatest asset isn’t your product, but your customer’s journey. It’s the entire story of how they discover, consider, purchase, use, and advocate for your offering. By meticulously mapping this journey, we can move beyond assumptions and uncover the subtle, emotional truths that represent the greatest opportunities for transformative innovation.

Too often, businesses look at their customers through the lens of their own internal processes—sales funnels, marketing qualified leads, and customer support tickets. But this fragmented view misses the holistic experience. A customer doesn’t see a series of departmental touchpoints; they experience a single, continuous narrative. The friction in one stage, the moment of delight in another—these are the inflection points where innovation can make the most significant impact.

The disciplined practice of customer journey mapping is the foundational step in human-centered innovation. It’s a process built on empathy, not just data. It forces us to ask not just “what are they doing?” but “what are they thinking and feeling?” The answers to those questions are where the magic happens. The process is a strategic imperative and involves several key stages:

Define the Scope and Persona: Begin with a specific customer segment and a clear goal. Who are you mapping for? What is the start and end of their journey? Create a rich, detailed persona, complete with their aspirations, fears, and daily routines. This isn’t a demographic profile; it’s a living character.
Identify All Touchpoints: From the moment a customer first hears about you (a social media ad, a friend’s recommendation) to long after a purchase (a follow-up email, a review), map every single interaction. Don’t limit this to digital. Include physical interactions, customer service calls, and even third-party reviews.
Document Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings: This is the heart of the map. For each touchpoint, use qualitative research—interviews, ethnographic studies, and surveys—to capture what customers are doing, what’s going through their minds, and how they feel emotionally. Plotting this emotional arc is critical; it’s where you’ll find the hidden pain points and moments of truth.
Pinpoint Pain Points and Opportunities: Once the map is visualized, look for the lows on the emotional arc. These are the areas of friction, confusion, and frustration. Simultaneously, identify the highs—the moments of delight and ease. These are your innovation targets. The goal is to either eliminate a pain point or amplify a moment of delight.
Ideate and Prioritize: Bring a cross-functional team together to brainstorm solutions for the identified opportunities. Don’t just think about fixing what’s broken. Consider new services, new technologies, or entirely new business models. Prioritize these ideas based on their potential impact on the customer and feasibility for your organization.

Case Study 1: Transforming the Grocery Shopping Experience

The Challenge: The Checkout Bottleneck

A major grocery chain faced fierce competition and declining customer loyalty. Journey mapping revealed a critical pain point: the checkout process. Despite having a great in-store experience, customers felt frustration and a loss of time and control when faced with long, unpredictable queues during peak hours. This final, negative touchpoint was tainting the entire shopping experience.

The Innovation:

Instead of just adding more cashiers (an expensive and often inefficient solution), the journey map highlighted a deeper need for control and transparency. The company developed a two-part solution: a mobile self-checkout app for customers with 15 items or less, and large digital displays at the front of the store showing real-time wait times for each lane. The app allowed customers to scan items as they shopped and pay instantly, bypassing the queue entirely. The wait time displays managed customer expectations and gave them the agency to choose their best path to checkout.

The Results:

The innovations led to a 15% reduction in average checkout time and a significant increase in customer satisfaction scores related to convenience. The mobile checkout became a key differentiator, attracting tech-savvy customers and reinforcing the brand as a modern, customer-centric retailer. The most important result? Increased customer loyalty and repeat visits.

Key Insight: The innovation wasn’t about speed; it was about addressing the emotional pain of feeling a loss of control and transparency.

Case Study 2: Reshaping the Patient Journey in Healthcare

The Challenge: Patient Anxiety and Information Overload

A large hospital system recognized that their administrative and clinical processes, while efficient from an internal standpoint, were a source of immense stress for patients. From complex paperwork to confusing post-discharge instructions, the patient journey was marked by feelings of fear, uncertainty, and a lack of clear communication. This anxiety negatively impacted patient well-being and recovery.

The Innovation:

The hospital’s journey map, which included direct patient and family interviews, revealed the need for a more empathetic, human-centered approach. They introduced two major innovations: a Patient Navigator Program and a Personalized Digital Information Hub. Patient navigators were dedicated staff members who acted as a single point of contact, guiding patients and their families through every step of their visit—from initial registration to understanding medical jargon and coordinating follow-up appointments. The digital hub, accessible on tablets, provided a single source of truth for each patient, including their personalized schedule, details about their care team, and simplified explanations of their condition and medication. This hub also streamlined the discharge process with easy-to-follow, multimedia instructions.

The Results:

The impact was profound. Patient anxiety levels decreased, and HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores saw a remarkable climb. The navigators addressed the emotional need for human connection and support, while the digital hub empowered patients with clarity and control. This combination of high-tech and high-touch innovation transformed a stressful experience into one that felt supportive and coordinated, leading to better patient outcomes and a stronger reputation.

Key Insight: True innovation in healthcare isn’t just about clinical breakthroughs; it’s about creating a more human and supportive emotional journey.

From Map to Mindset: The Path Forward

These examples illustrate a crucial lesson: the customer journey map is not a deliverable; it’s a living tool. It’s a call to action. By using it to align cross-functional teams, you can break down internal silos and create a shared, customer-centric vision for innovation. The most powerful question you can ask is, “What if…?” What if we redesigned this touchpoint to be a moment of joy instead of frustration? What if we could anticipate their needs before they even know they have them?

In a world of relentless change, ignoring the customer’s journey is to operate blind. By embracing this powerful practice, you will not only uncover new opportunities for innovation but also build a more resilient, empathetic, and ultimately, more successful organization. Your customers are already on a journey. It’s time for you to join them.

Image credit: Pexels

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The Experience Economy

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Why Design Thinking is Your New Competitive Edge

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Remember when companies competed fiercely on product features, then on service quality? Today, that battlefield has shifted. We live squarely in the Experience Economy, a landscape where customers don’t just buy what you sell; they invest in the emotions, the convenience, the sense of belonging, and the holistic journey your brand orchestrates. From that initial flicker of interest to long after a transaction, every single touchpoint shapes their perception, their loyalty, and their willingness to advocate for you.

As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve witnessed organizations stumble when they cling to old paradigms. In this new reality, your competitive edge is no longer just about what you create, but about **how you make people feel**. And the most powerful methodology to master this nuanced art is **Design Thinking.**

Design Thinking is not a fleeting trend or a niche methodology for creative agencies. It’s a profound, empathetic shift in problem-solving that places human needs, desires, and behaviors at its absolute core. It’s an iterative, non-linear process that challenges ingrained assumptions, reframes complex problems, and propels teams to discover truly innovative solutions that resonate deeply with the people they serve.

Beyond Features: Orchestrating Unforgettable Experiences

To truly flourish in the Experience Economy, organizations must transcend a mere feature-list mentality and adopt a holistic, human-centric approach. Design Thinking equips them to build solutions that embody these critical outcomes:

Profound Empathy & Insight: It forces you to step into your users’ shoes, understanding their motivations, pain points, and unspoken desires through deep ethnographic research, immersive interviews, and genuine observation – moving far beyond mere surveys.
Problem Clarity & Reframing: Instead of rushing to solutions, Design Thinking demands a pause to truly define the *right* problem from the user’s perspective. This often involves reframing the challenge, uncovering root causes, and identifying hidden opportunities previously overlooked.
Expansive Ideation & Rapid Prototyping: It liberates teams to generate a vast array of potential solutions through divergent thinking. This is swiftly followed by building rapid, low-fidelity prototypes and testing them directly with users. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s learning quickly and cheaply to iterate towards the optimal solution.
Continuous Learning & Agility: Design Thinking inherently fosters a culture of iterative learning. Every “failure” or unexpected user feedback becomes a valuable data point, propelling continuous refinement and ensuring that solutions remain relevant in a dynamic environment.
Seamless Cross-Functional Collaboration: It naturally breaks down internal silos, bringing together diverse expertise – from engineers and marketers to customer service and finance – to co-create holistic experiences that span an entire organization, ensuring consistency and coherence.

Case Study 1: Kaiser Permanente – Humanizing Healthcare Journeys

Transforming Healthcare with Patient-Centered Design

Kaiser Permanente, a sprawling integrated healthcare provider in the U.S., delivered strong medical outcomes but often struggled with patient satisfaction due to complex processes and an impersonal environment. Recognizing that patient experience was becoming as crucial as clinical excellence, they embarked on a journey of human-centered redesign.

The Challenge: Improve the emotionally charged patient experience, particularly during stressful moments like emergency room visits, without compromising medical quality or drastically increasing costs.
Design Thinking in Action: Kaiser Permanente didn’t just survey patients. Multidisciplinary teams immersed themselves in the patient journey: they shadowed patients and staff, observed interactions in waiting rooms, and conducted deep empathy interviews. They uncovered anxieties stemming from long waits, confusing signage, and a lack of clear communication. They learned that small changes, like allowing patients to choose their own gown color, significantly boosted their sense of control and dignity. One of their most famous innovations involved redesigning the nurse shift change: instead of huddling in a back room, nurses now conducted handovers at the patient’s bedside, increasing transparency, reducing errors, and making patients feel more involved in their own care.
The Outcome: This empathetic approach led to innovations ranging from simplified wayfinding and redesigned waiting areas to standardized communication protocols. The result was a significantly more human-centered healthcare experience, leading to improved patient satisfaction scores, measurable reductions in medical errors, and enhanced staff morale, all stemming from a profound understanding of the patient’s emotional journey.

**The Lesson:** Design Thinking moves beyond efficiency, focusing on the emotional landscape of the user, leading to compassionate solutions that benefit both people and the bottom line.

Case Study 2: Commonwealth Bank of Australia – Reimagining Digital Banking with Empathy

Reimagining Banking for the Digital Age

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, faced the challenge of an increasingly commoditized and impersonal banking landscape, particularly for digitally-native younger customers. They understood that their future competitive advantage lay in delivering intuitive, seamless, and emotionally reassuring digital experiences.

The Challenge: Simplify inherently complex banking processes, enhance digital engagement, and build deep trust in a rapidly evolving financial ecosystem where traditional loyalty was eroding.
Design Thinking in Action: CBA made Design Thinking a foundational element of its digital transformation. They established dedicated “customer rooms” where cross-functional teams (comprising designers, developers, product managers, and even frontline branch staff) directly observed customers interacting with prototypes of new digital features. They moved beyond traditional focus groups, actively bringing customers into the ideation, testing, and refinement phases. For instance, when overhauling their mobile banking app, they deeply explored common pain points like bill payments and money transfers, meticulously simplifying workflows based on actual user behavior and expressed needs. They iteratively built and tested dozens of versions of seemingly simple features, ensuring each step felt intuitive, secure, and empowering.
The Outcome: This human-centered rigor led to a highly acclaimed mobile banking app featuring intuitive tools like “Spend Tracker” for budget management and streamlined payment flows, alongside a significantly more user-friendly online platform. By empathizing with the emotional journey of banking—from anxiety about managing finances to the joy of reaching savings goals—they built digital products that felt profoundly empathetic and empowering.

**The Lesson:** By deeply understanding the human emotions tied to financial interactions, Design Thinking enabled CBA to create digital solutions that fostered trust and loyalty, not just transactional efficiency.

Embrace Design Thinking: Architecting Your Experiential Future

For organizations determined to lead in the Experience Economy, integrating Design Thinking is no longer an optional extra; it is the strategic imperative. Here’s your roadmap:

Cultivate Profound Empathy: Train and empower your teams to truly listen, observe, and feel what your customers experience. Go beyond data points; immerse yourselves in their lives. Conduct ethnographic research, build detailed customer journey maps, and lead with empathy interviews.
Champion Problem Reframing: Resist the urge to jump to solutions. Encourage your teams to step back, question assumptions, and redefine problems from the user’s perspective, unlocking unexpected avenues for innovation.
Promote Relentless Prototyping & Iteration: Shift your culture from “big-bang” launches to rapid, low-fidelity prototyping and continuous testing cycles. Embrace “fail fast, learn faster” as a mantra for accelerating insights.
Forge Cross-Functional Power Teams: Deliberately break down internal silos. Bring together diverse expertise from across your organization—from R&D to marketing to customer service—early and often, to ensure holistic, seamless solutions.
Foster a Culture of Psychological Safety: Create an environment where testing new ideas, challenging the status quo, and learning from “failures” is not just tolerated, but actively celebrated. Risk-taking is the engine of innovation.

In a world where products are rapidly commoditized and services easily replicated, the human experience stands as the ultimate, enduring differentiator. Design Thinking provides the robust, empathetic methodology to consistently deliver those exceptional, unforgettable experiences—transforming fleeting customers into fervent loyalists and securing your organization’s indelible position as a true leader in the Experience Economy.

“If you want to create breakthrough products, you need to think like a designer. You need to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
– Tim Brown, IDEO

Image credit: Gemini & Braden Kelley

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4 Ways to Create Trust with Your Customers

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4 Ways to Create Trust with Your Customers

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

What brands do you trust the most? And why? There are certain products and companies that seem to own the trust of their customers. It stems from product quality, reliability, managing expectations, good customer service and, perhaps most importantly, consistency.

Keep in mind that consistency is related to all of the attributes mentioned. A consistently bad experience and poor quality, while still consistent, is the opposite of what you’re trying to create. And inconsistency is almost as bad. A great experience one day followed by an average or poor experience will cause customers to question what the next experience is going to be. A pattern of inconsistency kills confidence and trust.

Let’s break it down:

1. Quality and Reliability: A product or service must do what it’s supposed to do. When you think of the most successful brands, you trust them because you know what you’re going to get. That comes from confidence in the product and/or the customer service. If that confidence is broken, it can take a long time to rebuild trust—if the customer even chooses to give the company or brand another chance. For example, a popular restaurant chain had an E. coli outbreak. Even with a stellar reputation, it took years to regain the trust of its customers.

2. Customer Experience: Customer service must be easily available. Customer service isn’t a department. The best companies know that serving the customer is more than reacting to problems, answering questions and resolving complaints. It’s the way customers are treated throughout their entire journey with a company or brand.

And while you may want to have a 100% flawless experience in which the customer never has to reach out, it’s impossible. Every company is going to have problems. In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was famous for saying that Amazon should be so good that it didn’t need a customer support department. Maybe it was that good, but when the product left the warehouse a third party took over the shipping. And if the package was lost in transit, who would the customer blame? To the customer, it was Amazon’s fault. So, Amazon needed a support center, even for problems that weren’t its fault.

It’s not if there will ever be a customer service issue, it’s when. The best organizations recognize the need for an excellent experience combined with excellent customer support, when needed.

3. Managing Expectations: You don’t have to WOW a customer to get them to say, “Wow.” When people describe a “Wow” experience, it’s typically over-the-top. The problem is that you can’t always be over the top. The opportunities to be over-the-top or go above and beyond happen when there are special situations, such as a problem that is handled so well that the customer says, “Wow!”

The key is to not worry about trying to be over-the-top with every interaction, but to be just a little above average. It is consistent and predictable above-average experiences—even just a tiny bit above average—that make customers say, “Wow!” Speaking of consistent and predictable, we move on to the next attribute …

4. Consistency: Anything less than a consistent experience erodes trust. Consistency is where “the rubber meets the road.” As just mentioned, it is the consistent and predictable above-average experience that gets customers to say, “Wow!” What gets them to that point is when they say, “They are always so helpful … always so knowledgeable … they always respond quickly. …” It’s the word always followed by a positive comment. Often, those comments are basic expectations. Shouldn’t all employees be helpful, knowledgeable and respond quickly? Of course. Just meeting a customer’s expectations, with maybe a more positive attitude, will fuel the experience to be better than average. Consistency creates trust. Anything less erodes it!

Think of the brands you trust and why. The product does what it’s supposed to and meets your expectations. The experience is consistent, and the customer service is great. And to emphasize just how important the customer service part of this is, our 2022 customer service research found that 83% of customers trusted a company or brand more if it provided an excellent customer service experience.

If all of this seems like common sense, it is. Unfortunately, common sense is not always so common. So, be a little uncommon. Deliver quality and reliability, manage expectations and create a consistent and predictable experience that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pexels

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3 Ways to Get Customer Insights without Talking to Customers

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3 Ways to Get Customer Insights without Talking to Customers

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Most of my advice to leaders who want to use innovation to grow their businesses boils down to two things*:

Talk (and listen) to customers
Do something

But what if you don’t want to talk to customers?

After all, talking to customers can be scary because you don’t know what they’ll say. It can be triggering if they say something mean about your product, your business, or even you as a person. It can be draining, especially if you’re an introvert.

Plus, there are so many ways to avoid talking to customers – Send a survey, hire a research firm to write a report, invoke the famous Steve Jobs quote about never doing customer research.

Isn’t it just better to stay tucked away in the office, read reports, state opinions as if they are facts (those opinions are based on experience, after all), and make decisions?

Nope.

It is not better. It is also not safer, easier, or more efficient.

To make the best decisions, you need the best data, which comes from your customers.

But that doesn’t mean you need to talk to them to get it.

The best data

The best data helps you understand why your customers do what they do. This is why Jobs to be Done is such a powerful tool – it uncovers the emotional and social Jobs to be Done that drive our behavior and choices (functional Jobs to be Done are usually used to justify our choices).

But discovering Jobs to be Done typically requires you to talk to people, build rapport and trust in a one-on-one conversation, and ask Why? dozens of times so surface emotional and social JTBD.

Luckily, there are other ways to find Jobs to be Done that don’t require you to become an unlicensed therapist.

Observe your customers

Go where your customers are (or could be) experiencing the problem you hope to solve and try to blend in. Watch what people are doing and what they’re not doing. Notice whether people are alone or with others (and who those others are – kids, partners, colleagues, etc.). Listen to the environment (is it loud or quiet? If there’s noise, what kind of noise?) and to what people are saying to each other.

Be curious. Write down everything you’re observing. Wonder why and write down your hypotheses. Share your observations with your colleagues. Ask them to go out, observe, wonder, and share. Together you may discover answers or work up the courage to have a conversation.

Quick note – Don’t be creepy about this. Don’t lurk behind clothing racks, follow people through stores, peep through windows, linger too long, or wear sunglasses, a trench coat, and a fedora on a 90-degree day, so you look inconspicuous. If people start giving you weird looks, find a new place to people-watch.

Observe yourself

Humans are fascinating, and because you are a human, you are fascinating. So, observe yourself when you’re experiencing the problem you’re hoping to solve. Notice where you are, who is with you, the environment, and how you feel. Watch what you do and don’t do. Wonder why you chose one solution over another (or none).

Be curious. Write down everything you did, saw, and felt and why. Ask your colleagues to do the same. Share your observations with your colleagues and find points of commonality and divergence, then get curious all over again.

Quick note – This only works if you have approximately the same demographic and psychographic profiles and important and unsatisfied Jobs to be Done of your target customers.

Be your customer

What if your business solves a problem that can’t be easily observed? What if you don’t have the problem that your business is trying to solve?

Become your customer (and observe yourself).

Several years ago, I worked with a client that made adult incontinence products. I couldn’t observe people using their products, and I do not have important (or unsatisfied) Jobs to be Done that the products can solve.

So, for one day, I became a customer. I went to Target and purchased their product. I went home, wore, and used the product. I developed a deep empathy for the customer and wrote down roughly 1 million ways to innovate the product and experience.

Quick note – Depending on what’s required to “be your customer,” you may need to give people a heads up. My husband was incredibly patient and understanding but also a little concerned on the day of the experiment.

It’s about what you learn, not how you learn it

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking there is one best way to get insights. I’m 100% guilty (one-on-one conversations are a hill I have died on multiple times).

Ultimately, when it comes to innovation and decision-making, the more important thing is having, believing, and using insights into why customers do what they do and want what they want. How you get those insights is an important but secondary consideration.

* Each of those two things contains A TON of essential stuff that must be done the right way at the right time otherwise, they won’t work, but we’ll get into those things in another article

Image Credit: Pixabay

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