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May 19th, 2008 - FYI Only - Pick up the phone
Last week, at Rubicon we talked a bit about miscommunication via email and how picking up the phone is often a better way to solve a problem than hitting (Send).
Well, on Saturday, I got a distressed (and distressing) email from a former client and all-around amazing human being. In a blind rage last week, he hit (Reply to All) and sent a message that never should have seen the light of day. While, technically, he was “in the right” his SVP responded saying “It’s time for you to find a job where you will be happier. Then I stumbled onto this article on Digg.
Excerpt:
A forthcoming study by Kristin Byron found that people tend to interpret emails more negatively than other forms of communication (Academy of Management Review, volume 33, issue 2), making them even more likely to respond aggressively.
Look, I’m a guilty as the next guy. But lets try to pick up the phone a little more often. So many problems can be solved with grace and ease when we hear the human voice on the other end of the line.
April 2nd, 2008 - Satisfaction Key to Experience Design
In the same way that hope is not a strategy, customer experience design is not an accident.
Most companies jump through fiery hoops to deliver what their customers will buy, but most fail to deliver stunningly great products and services because of a small blind spot — they fail to see and deliver on their customers’ tacit demands; the unspoken core needs which are essential to the purchase experience, adoption process, and/or repeated, everyday use.
With a few obvious exceptions, such as dealing with Apple, I’m always shocked and amazed when my (admittedly low) expectations are exceeded by a customer experience that I would characterize as truly delightful. And I suspect I’m not all that unusual in this regard. Most of the people I know are ecstatic when a company even comes close to delivering on a compelling customer experience, not just a another ho-hum product.
At the heart of the perception of customer satisfaction is this question: How do companies define what a customer expectation actually is? Well, from the email and phone calls I get everyday, I am left to assume that they don’t actually have a definitive answer to this question.
My response is that an expectation is the sum of the demands or needs plus the desires or wants in a given context or situation.
A range of expectations
Expectations can be negative or positive. But we’re focusing on the ones that are positive, where the expectation is to have, at a minimum, a satisfactory experience. Furthermore, expectations fall along a colorful spectrum from “just barely acceptable” on one side of the equation to “mind bogglingly ecstatic” on the other. So, how is this possible?
The answer is surprisingly straightforward. Fundamentally, customer experience design is an intentional process that companies can take to the bank; that is, once they’ve gone beyond paying lip service to it and made it a strategic imperative.
Customer experience design involves a deep empathy and an organizational willingness to anticipate the needs of and respond to those who matter most to your business, the customer. Beyond that, it requires a real understanding of the nature of experiences as interactions between people and things, as well as between people and people. Paramount to this, it involves the principles of design. (and lest you think design is about the “thing”, I want you to know that I consider design about the entire offer. But read on…)
The individual elements
While it may be a disservice to take a reductionistic look at the individual elements of customer experience design strategy, it’s the best way to establish how the sum of the parts contribute to the concepts underpinning customer experience design. Let’s look at some of the elements independently:
Customer — Designing a customer experience demands a significantly higher degree of specificity than classic segmentation models or persona work provide. It requires a detailed understanding, and an empathetic — almost clairvoyant — sense of who, specifically, through which channels, in what context, customers will be interacting with a company’s products, services, IT systems, employees, or partners.
Gaining keen insights at this level of detail requires a concrete commitment to look under the surface of the demographics, purchase behavior and personas. It requires digging into, analyzing and carefully mapping out the characteristics and attributes of the wants and needs of target customers who represent each micro-segment.
In the absence of this level of detail, your guess is as good as mine when it comes to inferring what demands and desires each micro-segment is likely to have in a given circumstance.
Developing an actionable understanding at this depth requires a company to look at customers as human beings not as market segments; or, as the Chairman of the well-known Silicon Valley financial company once said to me, as rats. Human Beings. And it pays off, ask Apple.
Experience — It may in fact be a misnomer to talk about designing customer experiences because, technically speaking, an experience is something that somebody has not something that somebody designs. And while it may be more appropriate to talk about customer expectation design, somehow something gets lost in translation.
For this context, I’m talking about crafting the conditions to support the logical unfolding of a set of related steps that a customer will engage in as they begin to, and continue to, interact with our products, services, IT systems, employees, channel distribution and delivery partners.
To the extent that a company is able to design these experiences intentionally, and for a specific type of user, we can take into consideration the “criteria for sufficiency” and the “criteria for success”. Accompanying these criteria are the boundary conditions for acceptable experience and the threshold for the conditions that create delight.
When companies take the time to understand — from the customer’s point of view — the basic demands that must be met in order to achieve satisfaction, and they expend the effort to get inside the customer’s head to explore desired outcomes that lead the customer down a path of exceeded expectations, the money will follow.
Design — This is one of the most misunderstood words in the corporate lexicon, because design means as many things as people asked to define it. From marketing communication professionals to software architects to industrial designers, ultimately design boils down to the intentional relationship created between utility value, emotional impact, and aesthetics.
Things can be designed. These are often products. Processes can be designed. These may be services. Interactions can be designed. These may turn out to be experiences.
What we’re talking about is identifying the kinds of specific people who want (or should want) to purchase products or services being engaged in a logically related set of interactions and phenomena that a company has intentionally created to help both the customer (and company) achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Moreover, we’re not limiting these interactions or phenomena to discrete moments in the customer’s experience. Instead a more profitable way to look at customer experience design is to step back and look through the customer’s eyes, ears and heart at the processes they are engaged in from beginning to end.
Strategy — Design is the next forefront of innovation. Taking a broad design view requires that a company place customer experience design strategy in the foreground of their over-arching business goals. It’s not just about writing code to build products, but understanding the experience of how and why consumers will utilize such products.
Why? Because a business strategy has to be more than what we build. A truly viable business strategy is that one that encompasses what we deliver as a company. And that’s about design in the biggest way possible. To do it right, we have to address some fundamental questions that include: who are we, what are we trying to accomplish, how will we go about achieving it, what do we need to design to fulfill the value proposition our customers seek.
There’s no question that serious customer experience design is a costly, demanding process that requires tremendous input from multiple teams. Balancing that is the fact that it is a core differentiator and an inoculation against competitors, with real benefits at the bottom line.
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January 6th, 2008 - Pay it forward - The Ethos of Silicon Valley
Right before the holiday break, I met the well-respected founder / chairman (and former CEO) of an innovative consumer electronics company to talk about what the future might hold and what was next for him.
It’s a classic Silicon Valley tale: he founded a cool company, got it funded, built the product, and then hired a CEO to take it to the next level. And, for various reasons, it became clear it was time for him to step back and attempt to guide the company from the Board.
This founder was lamenting the fact that he had been given an unceremonious brush-off by a seemingly arrogant, 23-year old CEO of a Web 2.0 start-up about which he was interested in learning more.
As he and I were talking, I was reminded that what lubricates Silicon Valley’s culture is an ethos of Pay It Forward; that is, doing someone a favor — taking a meeting, making an introduction, helping someone solve a problem –without an obvious benefit to you. Perhaps it was listening to Jane Siberry’s tune, “Calling All Angels” from the soundtrack of the movie Pay It Forward that got me to thinking along these lines.
In the movie featuring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, an 11-year old boy (played by Haley Joel Osment) tackles a school assignment by coming up with the utopian idea that any person who derives a benefit from from someone’s good deed should, instead of paying back, “pay it forward” by doing something positive for three other people.
Silicon Valley is built on this ethos. It’s how business is done. And its roots are buried deep in the relationship built between academia and industry, fed by the early connections and philosophy established by Stanford’s Fred Terman.
As anybody who has been there knows first hand, building something from scratch is an act of vision and courage. Success requires luck and timing. And of course, as the proverb goes, luck favors those who are well prepared.
So part of the magic of Silicon Valley is enabling those who dare to dream of building something new to tap into clans and tribes — the tight network of connections between people who have worked in the trenches together and won, angels and VC’s, and people who “know stuff” or know how to get things done.
This involves two, reciprocal things. On one hand, it requires a willingness to take some risk; that is, being willing to pick up the phone or send a email to someone you don’t know. It requires asking for help. And, on the other hand, it requires being open and willing to meet new people and to hear out their ideas. This means making time to help people you don’t know. It means setting aside pre-judgments, and your perception that you’re right. In Silicon Valley anyway, this is how we create the space for the future to unfold.
So it is in this light, that it’s hard to grok how a newly minted CEO could turn down a meeting with a well-respected (and as it turns out, well connected) founder and chairman who is starting to look around for something new to sink his teeth into.
Perhaps we should ask the VC who funded the 23-year old. That was the second call the founder made.
October 16th, 2007 - What’s Your Company’s Arrogance Quotient?
I don’t know anybody who likes being called arrogant. But, recently, however it happened to me. And I found myself experiencing four parts of Kübler-Ross’s stages of death:
- Denial – “Surely they’re not talking about me…”
- Anger – “I am NOT!”
- Depression – “I can’t bear to think of myself this way.”
- Acceptance – “Ok, maybe I am. I should try to understand this.”
This got me to thinking. What is arrogance? What is corporate arrogance?
When I run into hubris in an individual on the street, I experience a set of behaviors and/or assertions that seem to be based on a cocky attitude of self-righteousness married to an overabundance of confidence. Irritating, yes. But, so what? Is it really a problem?
On one end of the spectrum, I am simply talking about self-aggrandizing and dismissive behavior. On the other end, however, it may be a “big W” win-lose mentality, strong-arm tactics and, at times, the willful disregard for the law. Even more disturbing, perhaps, may be a lack of respect and consideration that leads to inadvertent destruction – bull in the china shop – or worse even, the calculated disregard.
Interestingly, corporate arrogance that stems from a company emerging as an undisputed market leader or monopoly affects various stakeholders differently, depending on factors too numerous to explore here. But everybody – shareholders, customers, partners, suppliers, the community in which the organization operates, the larger business ecosystem, and even more importantly the planet – ends up feeling the sting of arrogance.
But, at the end of the day, it is the company itself that must ante up for the caustic effects of its own ill-advised behavior. The company must reconcile the gap between its ego (an inwardly-focused self orientation) and its real accomplishments.
Dr. Robert Montoye, an unquestionably brilliant chip designer at IBM, once stated that arrogance is equal to ego divided by accomplishment. His equation suggests that when the corporate ego is balanced by stakeholder perception of meaningful accomplishments, arrogance is kept in check. This is how and why, at the end of the day, the perception of arrogance depends on whom, specifically, is evaluating what the company has accomplished against how it is behaving. Arrogance is relative, and it is highly context dependent.
Taking this a step further, in Egonomics, Fireside 2007, David Marcum and Steven Smith explore the dynamics between the value (both positive and negative) of individual ego as it gets expressed in a corporate context. And the analogy between individual ego and organizational ego holds up well because the essence of the idea scales.
In particular, Marcum and Smith point to what happens when the ego is out of balance; that a strength, which one could normally rely on gets twisted into a pathological “counterfeit” strength. For example, under certain conditions the positive strength of Dedication – persistence in the face of opposition – decays into the negative “counterfeit” strength of being unwilling to consider important alternatives. Vista anyone?
Sure, a failed product launch is costly. And there are undoubtedly many seemingly legitimate reasons for the problems that lead consumers and IT managers to go out of their way to buy XP Professional seven years after its Rev 1.0 release. (Check out Mistakes Were Made: But Not By Me by Tavris and Aronson). Now that I understand the anatomy of self-justification, it’s hard to imagine a failure of this magnitude being the result of anything other than institutionalized arrogance.
But clearly no one likes arrogance. So it’s unlikely that companies go out of their way to behave badly. The problem is that people treat perception as fact. And arrogance is a perception, a sticky brand attribute, a bad smell. The challenge is that it’s virtually impossible to detect the arrogance being projected from inside the organization. What’s needed is twofold: a channel for mindfully listening from the outside in and the corporate priority to use it effectively.
Is there really a way to avoid this business social trap?
Clearly. Companies like Apple, for example, continue to deliver so well that they manage to squelch most of their critics most of the time. They set expectations carefully and then delight their customers, shareholders, and * their competitors. Even they make mistakes from time to time. But they give the outward appearance of having considered what matters to whom. In the recent case of the iPhone, for example, the $100 store credit [to those who paid an additional $200 for the first launch] doesn’t make all the pain go away, but it goes a long way toward removing the stinger.
So how can you tell if your company is becoming arrogant? Here are some things to ask yourself:
- Are you the market leader in your space? If so, is there an Open Source competitor?
- Does your company have a formal process for gathering, evaluating, and responding to external stakeholder feedback? If not, why not?
- How do you treat bad news? Is the bearer of bad news punished or rewarded?
- Are you surprised at how well the competition is doing?
- Have you shipped a major product that is being derided in the press? Are people poking fun at you in their blogs? How do you respond?
- Have you developed a marketing communications “crisis” strategy for dealing with product complaints?
- Are potential employees or partners turning down what you consider to be good offers? What reasons do they provide?
Anyway, I believe that that on some level, every founder and CEO envies on some level market leaders like Amazon, Google, and VMWare, and that it’s rare to have a natural monopoly, like eBay. But, the real opportunity is to operationalize mindfulness.
So, if being perceived as arrogant runs against the grain of your mission or corporate values, it’s critical to step back and consider who really matters, what they care about, and how your business practices – corporate behavior – should or could be modified to take the sting out of your planning, execution, and messaging.
March 28th, 2007 - The Bottom Line: Hit Rewind
Recently, I wrote a short piece for one of my favorite clients on setting context in conversation. I realized it might be useful to share this (if not for you, perhaps for someone you know). Here goes:
Have you ever listened to an audio recording, then stopped it, and then restarted it? It can be a little confusing. You miss the first couple of words as your mind races to catch up. It’s much easier to rewind or back up a tiny bit to get a running start. The fact is, it takes the human mind a little time to orient and to figure out what’s happening.
Most people have a tendency to dive directly into a conversation and make assumptions about the relationship they have with their audience. To be sure, part of being clear is helping people to understand why they should care about what you are saying. It’s about getting people on the same page so they understand where you are coming from. Setting context in conversations is a profoundly helpful device for establishing a framework for shared understanding.
If, as I understand it, that Terry Winograd says, business is all about conversations and commitments, then you may find it useful to remember that conversations are similar to the audio book analogy. Setting context sets the stage for the content that follows.
In the absence of context, people are momentarily confused. The result is that while the people you are talking to should be listening to you, they are instead scrambling to get a clue about what you are saying, why you are there, what you want, whether they are about to receive good news or bad, etc.
So when you begin a conversation, you can begin by orienting your conversation partner quickly as to where you are coming from, what role you are in, what you want to discuss, and even expose what you want will set the context or frame the conversation productively and positively.
This notion of framing the conversation positively is especially important when you are not face-to-face (i.e., calling on a cell phone) consider always asking the question, “Am I interrupting?” or “Do you have a moment?” then follow with can we talk about x? or I have a question about y? I’d like to revisit our discussion about q.
In most situations, framing things positively is better because it puts people at ease, creates a safe space, and establishes a productive environment for mutual understanding.
Without a doubt, setting context is an art. Too little is not enough and too much may seem ponderous. However, it’s worth the effort to dramatically increase the speed of understanding, build trust, and maintain rapport.
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February 24th, 2007 - Don’t Quit Your Day Job (just yet)
Entrepreneurs tend to make a small number of early fatal assumptions or mistakes. (By “fatal” I mean fatal to the business…not to the entrepreneur).
One mistake is assuming there is little or no competition. Just because you have a stellar idea or there seems to be a stunning opportunity doesn’t mean that the competition isn’t going to be fierce. This is especially true in areas where the barriers to entry are very low. Another fatal mistake is assuming there is a market for the product.
To address these potential gotchas, the big questions that need to get answered are:
- Who, specifically, would be willing and able to pay for your products?
- What is the total available market size?
- What percentage of the total available market do you think you can capture?
- Is it worth your while to pursue this venture based on the perceived opportunity?
- Who are you likely to end up competing with? - VERY important.
- Who, very very specifically, are your customers?
- Why would they buy from you, as opposed to a competitor?
- How are you uniquely positioned to take advantage of this market opportunity
- Are your products truly unique? Will your products remain unique
- Are you *really* passionate about these products, and building a business based on them? Or would your time be better spend on things that are even more interesting to you?
Have you read The Silicon Valley Way ? It’s a digestible book to help you think through some of the major issues related to getting a new venture off the ground. Another good book is Jump Start Your Business Brain. And check out this interesting presentation on how to think about the notion of a value proposition from the author. And I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest you check out Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start.
February 14th, 2007 - Improving *the* most important skill
I just ordered a(nother) new book from the Center for Creative Leadership, entitled “Active Listening: Improve Your Ability to Listen and Lead.” The email summary reminded me of Ward Ashman’s powerful communication model, from Conflict to Creativity. And, if you’ve never had the opportunity to listen to Covey’s Signature Series audio book on Habit 5: Seek first to understand… pick it up. It’s quite an amazing work.