Managing Customer Experience and Relationships. Don Peppers
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in an enterprise's product or service bears a direct connection to how important or urgent the customer understands their need to be. Since customers have different opinions about these needs, they will have different opinions about the value of an enterprise's offering. We know this to be true because there is an economic principle that someone who considers the value of an offering to be higher than its price will likely buy it, while someone who considers its value lower than its price will likely not. Moreover, the value delivered in any customer's experience will increase directly in proportion to the amount of friction that is removed. Because friction is frequently costly to a company, removing it can also provide compounding benefits for both the customer and the enterprise.
CUSTOMER COMPETENCE
In addition to product competence, however, delivering a frictionless experience requires an enterprise to be customer competent, and this is a much rarer quality among today's businesses. Customer competence depends on two additional qualities in the customer experience: relevance and trustability. These two attributes relate directly to the question of whether a business is capable of treating different customers differently. Can the enterprise recognize and remember individual customer differences and preferences, and act on that knowledge by tailoring its behavior to meet the different needs of different customers, one customer at a time? Is the enterprise's business model structured in such a way as to profit by proactively working to protect the customer's own interest? Unfortunately, most enterprises are not nearly as advanced in their customer competence as they are with respect to their product competence.
A relevant customer experience is one in which an enterprise can identify and remember individual customers from transaction to transaction, across different channels, products, services, and organizational silos. Then it recognizes the differences among customers in terms of their many different desires from the enterprise and their different values to the enterprise. Unfortunately, a large proportion of companies fail to deliver a very relevant customer experience. Every time we have to tell a contact-center agent our account number again, having just punched it in on our phone, we come face to face with an irrelevant customer experience. Beyond simply remembering individual customer details, however, the fact is that every customer is uniquely individual (because every human being is uniquely individual), and a frictionless customer experience is one that is configured appropriately—i.e., relevantly—for each different customer.
Don't Run Your Business on the Goldfish Principle
Certain species of tropical fish have no territorial memory. None. Perhaps this trait evolved because the species inhabited the open sea, where territory was not very important and territorial memory counted for nothing, but the fact is that no matter where such a fish swims today, it never recognizes the fact it has swum there before. We can imagine such a fish swimming around and around in an aquarium or a goldfish bowl and never getting bored, because there's always something new and interesting to see.
Many of today's businesses still operate on “the Goldfish Principle” when it comes to their customers. They evolved in the age of mass marketing, before computers made it possible to remember customers individually, so whatever business model they developed didn't rely on remembering an individual customer from transaction to transaction. For instance, we can recognize a company operating on the Goldfish Principle when we sign up for a promotion with our airline or car rental firm, but then we continue to get email blasts urging us to sign up. Another example is when we go online to our credit card website and schedule our payment a few days before the due date, but then they still send us an email reminder that our payment is almost due.
Sometimes when a company is operating on the Goldfish Principle the results can actually be funny. For instance, below is a copy of an email message that a colleague of ours received from Marriott Rewards, with a comically irrelevant message. They might as well be broadcasting a message to the customer saying, “We don't care who you are!”
EXHIBIT 3.3 The Goldfish Principle in Action
With today's information technology there's absolutely no excuse for operating on the Goldfish Principle. It's actually worse than doing nothing, because it demonstrates a level of incompetence that destroys a customer's trust in the business.
Operating on the Goldfish Principle today doesn't just communicate that you aren't competent enough to run a sound business, it screams that you don't care enough about your customers to even try to be competent.
Relevance in a customer experience can only be delivered by an enterprise that is trying to see the problem through the customer's own eyes. In effect, we could say that delivering a truly relevant customer experience requires an enterprise to have empathy for the customer, “feeling the customer's pain,” so to speak. And this leads to the second element in customer competence: trustability.9 A trustable customer experience is delivered when the enterprise proactively acts in the customer's interest as it attempts to deal with what the customer experiences, even when there is a cost to the business itself.
Of course, trust has always been important in commerce and it is still essential to any company's economic success. Few companies will prosper long if they cheat their customers, or steal from them, or deceive them. But in today's hyper-interactive world, mere trustworthiness—that is, doing what one says one is going to do and not violating the law—is no longer sufficient to render a truly frictionless customer experience. As the velocity and volume of interactions have increased, customers have come to expect more from the businesses they deal with. Today they expect an enterprise to be proactively trustworthy, or trustable. A trustable enterprise provides complete, accurate, and objective information, and helps the customer avoid mistakes or oversights. If a customer feels they have to count their change or double-check that they aren't doing something they're going to regret later, this is one more type of friction to be avoided in a streamlined customer experience.
A few good markers of a trustable customer experience would include:
Facilitating objective customer reviews
Reminding a customer that the warranty period is nearly up
Reminding a customer that a subscription renewal is imminent
Advising a customer that they might be buying more of a product than they need
Providing a refund when one is due, without waiting for the customer to have to request it
At its core, trustability requires having genuine, human empathy for customers, and then applying the principle of reciprocity, treating each customer the way you would want to be treated if you were that customer. We could think of relevance as knowing who the customer is and meeting their individual needs, while trustability ensures that what the individual customer needs is provided without hassles, misinformation, tricks, bias, or any other motive that might not accord with the customer's true interest. In other words, relevance is seeing what the customer sees, while trustability is experiencing what the customer experiences.
UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING
In order to strategize, plan, execute, and then track whether the effect of what we're doing for customers is or is not working, more and more companies are engaged in customer experience journey mapping (CXJM), also known as customer journey mapping (CJM). The journey mapping tracks what it's like to be our customer now, visualizes what it should be like, and sets up the plan to close the gap, making customer experience journey mapping a key part of the successful customer strategy toolkit. Valerie Peck, cofounder and CEO of SuiteCX, a journey mapping tool, helped us think through what mapping is and does, and how to do