Summary: Customer What? The honest and practical guide to customer experience by Ian Golding

Customer What? injects pragmatism into often fluffy conversations around customer experience through flexible frameworks for authentic CX advancement. Read this book to drive actual CX improvements freed from restrictive assumptions on required resources or org structures.

Recommendation

Customer experience (CX) consultant Ian Golding delves deep into CX transformation, from fundamentals to maintaining momentum. Drawing on 24 years of consulting in multiple sectors, Golding cuts through assumptions and misconceptions – he recommends putting employees first, not customers, for example – with honesty, clarity and empathy. The book includes a long chapter on journey mapping and a fresh, practical perspective on personas. Golding’s advice is essential reading for CX leaders and those about to undertake transformation.

Take-Aways

• The business has to be ready before you implement a customer experience (CX) strategy.
• To transform CX, start by gaining employees’ engagement and alignment.
• Employees need to understand customers thoroughly in order to serve them well.
• Senior leaders need authority and capabilities to lead the implementation.
• A strategy statement will guide the implementation and build buy-in.
• Journey maps help drive change by clarifying the customer relationship and spurring engagement in the transformation.
• Personas illustrate how the customer journey varies for different customers.
• Creating a road map will require prioritizing a handful of improvements that you can deliver on within one year.
• As the transformation progresses, continue to focus on engagement and building a positive culture.

Summary

​The business has to be ready before you implement a customer experience (CX) strategy.

The business’s level of readiness will determine how easy or difficult you’ll find it to implement a CX transformation. A readiness assessment will reveal the organization’s receptivity to a sustainable, complete CX program. The assessment can also help you decide on an approach and pace for the implementation, as well as identify people who will support the initiative.

“Not every organization is ready to become customer centric – even if they say they are, or think they are.”

For a complete assessment, you’ll study four elements of readiness:

1. Acknowledgment of CX’s role – Analyze whether the organization acknowledged CX management as playing an important role in performance.
2. Awareness of drivers – Audit the level of awareness of CX drivers within the organization and their strengths and weaknesses.
3. Commitment to action – Probe the level of commitment to action to improve those drivers, including willingness to make investments and allocate resources.
4. Commitment to continuous improvement – Examine the level of commitment to embedding a program for continuous improvement of CX.

To transform CX, start by gaining employees’ engagement and alignment.

Customer centricity starts with the employees. People’s feelings about their work will affect their interactions with customers, and customers will remember how they’ve been treated. Bureaucracy, in particular, will spawn a negative culture and cause customers to feel dehumanized as employees enforce rules that seem to have no purpose. CX transformation will happen only if the culture of your organization aligns with the CX strategy.

“Every contribution counts. If even one link in your organizational chain is broken, it will show in your customer experience.”

Employee engagement holds the key to great CX. You’ll need to understand and build the levels of engagement at your organization. Engagement in turn serves an even greater need – for connections among employees. When strong, healthy connections exist throughout an organization, and when all employees know both their own and their colleagues’ roles, they can work together to deliver a seamless customer-centric service.

Employees need to understand customers thoroughly in order to serve them well.

To provide empathic, helpful service, employees need to know their customers – not just customers’ expectations but their feelings, perspectives, motivations and day-to-day lives as well. Encourage employees to purchase products and services from their own company so they’ll know what it feels like to be a customer. Where this isn’t possible, you’ll have to depend on customer insight methodologies. But never lose sight of your customers as complex, individual, emotional human beings.

“If you think you know your customers, you are probably wrong.”

To gain insights into your company’s customers, start by setting aside preconceptions – enter the process with an open mind. Then consider using methods such as the following:

• Shadowing – Have non-customer-facing employees sit beside customer-facing employees or listen in on their calls.
• Ethnography – Observe customers “in the wild” – in their homes, at work or in other locations – as they consider and make purchase decisions.
• Technology – Consider using apps that allow customers to record video diaries or capture elements of their purchasing journey, or create an online community where customers can chat and you can learn about their lives and priorities.

Senior leaders need authority and capabilities to lead the implementation.

Responsibility for delivering a customer journey and the resulting CX lies with every person in the organization, not only leaders. But leaders provide clarity and shared objectives, facilitate collaboration, and ensure accountability. Leaders need their own readiness – the skills, understanding and practices necessary to the task of leading CX transformation, in areas such as cultural change, customer insight, experience design and measurement.

To lead, you must hold authority in your people’s eyes. Your authority can arise from your position, or you can borrow authority from an influential person. But the greatest influence comes from earned authority – which you build by knowing how the business operates, including how people do their work and make decisions. Pizza Hut CEO Jens Hofma embodies earned authority. Hofma thoroughly understands what his people do because he regularly takes on their roles himself by working as a server in a London Pizza Hut restaurant. As a result, Hofma possesses the knowledge and authority to lead continuous CX improvement.

“Deliver benefit early in the transformation journey. This will build belief and get the organization behind you.”

To lead a CX transformation, you’ll need empathy for customers, a desire to serve their best interests, and confidence in your ability to change the status quo. You’ll also need all the emotional qualities and capabilities that add up to emotional intelligence – as defined by psychologist Daniel Goleman – such as self-awareness, a positive outlook, organizational awareness and teamwork.

And you’ll need trust in your people. Employees need to feel safe before they’ll act on behalf of customers. Making sure people know you trust them and will support them when they say yes to customers’ needs will foster a sense of safety among employees. Avoid requiring people to apply rigid rules and processes. Encourage the organization to stop saying no and start saying yes.

A strategy statement will guide the implementation and build buy-in.

At any organization, CX evolves through three stages. CX begins as random experiences that meet only minimum expectations and then evolves to deliver consistent, intentional experiences that lead to increasing profits. Eventually, for some companies, CX becomes differentiated experiences that exceed customers’ expectations. To reach the level of differentiated experiences will take a company six to eight years and require long-term thinking and a high degree of alignment. Few businesses achieve this.

“The raw materials – people, culture, business model, resources and commitment – should always shape your approach.”

Strategy enables the organization to align day-to-day activities with clearly stated aspirations and enables measurement of progress. A clear strategy will engage stakeholders and create focus. Your strategy statement – a key tool in the implementation of transformation – should set out the organization’s mission and vision, identify business key performance indicators, and give a summary of the CX strategy. It should also include a road map for change and details regarding how the business will execute the road map. As you develop the strategy statement, collaborate with stakeholders. Aim to build authenticity across the organization: a genuine, trustworthy devotion to serving customers, employees and stakeholders.

Don’t overlook completing the strategy statement: It will serve as your North Star as you undertake and sustain the transformation. The strategy statement will serve as one of your three most useful tools in the transformation, along with journey maps and personas. Complete the road map and execution portion of the strategy statement by gathering data. You’ll need to measure three “voices”: the Voice of the Customer, which reveals how customers experience the business; the Voice of the Employee, expressing how employees feel about the company’s products, services and CX; and the Voice of the Process, which shows how business performance correlates with CX quality.

Journey maps help drive change by clarifying the customer relationship and spurring engagement in the transformation.

Customer journey maps tell you what’s happening with CX in the organization today. They serve many other purposes as well, such as revealing touchpoints, providing a central place to collect ideas, showing where you should focus improvement efforts first and facilitating communication. Treat the journey map as an opportunity for inclusive dialogues across the organization that will help unify people toward change and generate engagement.

“Until you actually change, amend, replace, redesign or improve a touchpoint in your customer journey, nothing will change for your customer.”

Visualize the customer journey as a ring, reflecting a cycle or loop in which customers continually reengage with the organization to meet repeating or ongoing needs and wants. If the journey feels linear, exploring ways to see it as a loop can suggest ideas for building relationships with customers. Identify the steps of the process by which customers move from need or want to achievement of their goals. Then add touchpoints for each step. Name the emotion customers will likely experience at each step. Next, overlay customer insights on the map. Obtaining them will require an exhaustive discovery process; use the research techniques of completing the customer journey yourself, shadowing, ethnography and technology. Seek to make the final map visually interesting enough to pique people’s interest.

Personas illustrate how the customer journey varies for different customers.

Personas – fictional representations of typical customers – can facilitate empathy, helping you understand customers’ perspectives on their journey. Personas can suggest ways to link the brand proposition to individual customers’ needs and wants. Well-designed personas can become like team members, contributing information and ideas as you develop and refine CX.

“A good set of personas…puts the power of your entire market behind your customer experience strategy. It’s like having an (unpaid!) expert in the room every time you want.”

To avoid creating stereotypes, base personas on data and insights, not demographics. For example, basing personas on age means you generalize characteristics across vast numbers of people based solely on the decade in which they were born. Instead, segment personas on the basis of customers’ attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Employ the same research methods that you use for helping employees gain insight into customers and for developing journey maps. Always create personas in cross-functional teams, so stakeholders will understand and accept them. And always remember personas aren’t real customers. Personas can serve as a valuable tool, but you must validate all assumptions by researching real customers.

Creating a road map will require prioritizing a handful of improvements that you can deliver on within one year.

Chart a road map by choosing key interactions to develop. These choices will always involve trade-offs. For example, to accommodate large numbers of commuters, the rail operators in the UK have chosen to redesign carriages to carry more people. They’ve widened doors and aisles, reduced the number of seats, and removed tables. As a result, more people have to stand, and there’s nowhere to set a cup of coffee. The rail operators clearly had to make tough choices, and not everyone will be pleased. Ideally, you’ll fix basics that are broken while continuing to meet customers’ expectations. In reality, you will have to choose priorities.

“The customer experience road map and the business road map need to be one and the same.”

Select the five most vital priorities by creating a table where you score all alternatives according to how much they will benefit employees, how much they matter to customers, and the organization’s level of capability to implement each. Select five high-scoring alternatives that together form a balanced program for change. Aim to select at least one priority that fixes a basic problem, at least one that will lead to exceeding customers’ expectations, and one or more that will make customer interactions memorable. Not choosing an alternative as a priority doesn’t mean you’ve taken it off the table. CX transformation will take at least six years, and every year, you’ll choose new priorities. But at any given time, five will give you plenty to do.

As the transformation progresses, continue to focus on engagement and building a positive culture.

After you’ve initiated the transformation of CX at your organization, your task will shift to maintaining momentum. Your role will include acting as an advocate for change and energizing people to adopt and align with the vision you’ve outlined. Ensure everyone in the company plays a part.

“Steer the strategy through, but make it belong to everybody.”

In the long run, maintaining customer centricity will depend on good governance – meaning people’s clarity about their roles and a framework that ensures accountability. And a positive culture will go a long way toward keeping the organization customer centric amid changes in the business, leadership or market.

About the Author

Ian Golding is a freelance customer experience consultant. With over 20 years in business improvement, Golding is a certified Customer Experience Professional and Customer Experience Specialist and certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. His experience includes consulting globally in multiple sectors, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, retail, technology and education.

Genres

Business, customer service, leadership, management, marketing

Review

In Customer What?, customer experience expert Ian Golding dismantles common myths surrounding the buzzword “customer experience” to furnish pragmatic paths towards true CX maturity. With humor and frank perspectives, Golding guides readers seeking to enhance customer centricity without getting lost in empty promises of CX programs.

Golding explores popular yet flawed notions that CX always requires enormous effort and expense. He provides reality checks on assumptions that CX is achieved through siloed teams, disconnected incentives and superficial touchpoints alone. Golding introduces a flexible CX framework applied through incremental improvements to systems, processes and beliefs driving daily decisions. He upends traditions of insular boardroom strategizing, instead advising hands-on immersion in actual customer interactions. Vivid case stories demonstrate tangible CX progress via consistent small changes rooted in customer truth not abstraction.

While a long journey, Golding makes furthering genuine CX radically more approachable through overarching principles adaptable across industries and budgets. Customer What? is a CX bible grounded in realism not mirages.