1. What does customer experience mean to you? Why do you think it is important?
First and foremost, the customer experience is a strategic issue. To succeed online, a company *must* make the customer experience the cornerstone of its Web strategy. Without a good customer experience, no amount of advertising, "brand-building," or high-tech gadgetry will save the company from failure. If it's not good for customers, they're going to leave forever. Period, end of story. It's not that complicated.
2. What are the economic advantages of having a great customer experience?
In our consulting engagements, Creative Good measures the revenue increase after a client improves the customer experience on its site. One of our clients saw an increase of $11 million within two months of making our recommended changes. The client directly attributes the $11 million to the improvements they made to the customer experience.
But don't rely on our numbers: think about it qualitatively. Customers return to the sites that give them what they want. Once they arrive on the site, customers don't want complex technology, egocentric graphic design, or any other slick nonsense. What customers *do* want is a good experience. What do you expect to have the best economic advantage -- the nonsense, or the experience?
The customer experience is a holistic quality of a site that encompasses many areas of business -- usability is just one of them. For example, Creative Good engagements focus on five areas: strategy, marketing, technology, usability, and the client organization. In each area, we identify how it affects the customer experience, and how to improve it.
So yes, usability is an important part of our work -- but just a part. Running usability tests only is NOT sufficient for customer experience management. How can tests be effective, for example, without a deep knowledge of the strategy of the site? How can the strategy of the site be understood without forming consensus within the organization? Usability processes, refined through the years for *software* products, aren't fully applicable on websites (though Jakob Nielsen's discount usability techniques are effective). To put it plainly, the Web is not software, and the customer experience is not usability.
By the way, I recently explained this perspective to a group of usability professionals here in New York City. I've never seen an audience so close to riot :)
We don't ask customers what they want; we watch what they *do*. There's a big difference
Creative Good has a four-phase method: strategy, qualitative assessment, usability tests, and after site launch, ongoing maintenance. Essentially we start at the most strategic level and work our way into the tactics. At each step we base our work on what we established the preceding phase. To anyone interested in the customer experience, I'd definitely suggest starting at the strategic level. Don't just jump straight into usability work.
Overall, probably our most effective "technique" (if you can call it that) is our absolute commitment to creating a good site for the customer. We do whatever it takes to show our clients their customers' perspective.
6. What is your role at Creative Good, and how did the company get started?
I'm the president of Creative Good. I founded CG in January 1997. For the first year I slogged it out alone in my suburban New York apartment, conducting a guerilla marketing campaign to raise awareness of Web ease-of-use. During the second year I conducted my first few consulting engagements and wrote my first Good Report, "In Search of E-Commerce," with Robert Seidman. My campaign, consulting, and report brought about significant improvements on several top e-commerce sites; this prompted InfoWorld magazine to award me Netrepreneur of the Year 1998 for "doing more than any other individual to make Web commerce sites easier to use."
In February 1999 I hired an awesome CEO, Phil Terry, who came from McKinsey and Harvard Business School. We've been growing Creative Good together ever since. Now I have the pleasure of working side by side with some of the most talented, passionate people in the industry. I can say this with confidence because our hiring is extremely, extremely selective. We're 15 people big, and growing fast. All bootstrapped.
Our advantages are our vision (no one else focuses on the customer experience), our team (no one else has such selective hiring), and our culture (one of openness, listening, and partnership). We're trying to build a solid company that actually creates good online.
8. Final thoughts? Shameless plugs? What should every reader remember about this interview?
I'll just plug the three things that might help WebWord readers the most: first, our free e-mail newsletter, the CG Update, explores the customer experience every two weeks
9. Tell me what goals should be for improving customer experience?
You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.
10. How would you know that your customer experience needs to be improved?
You can not necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online), they will simply go to a competitor or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:
★ Is our market share slipping?
★ Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
★ Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
★ Are we getting fewer recommendations and favorable reviews online and in social media?
★ How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)?
Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.
Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.
12. Tell me how much your products and services factor in customer experience?
Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill, product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalization have made it much easier for competitors to crank out "good enough" substitutes.
But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.
13. Tell me about the most important elements of customer experience?
Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:
★ Trust
★ Low effort and sacrifice
★ Positive emotion
★ Personalization
This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers do not feel that they can trust the interaction points or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase. Research says that trust consists of two main components:
Confidence:
Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service.
Benevolence:
Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customer's self-interest above their own.
15. Tell me about the positive emotion in customer experience?
Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.
16. Please tell me what is customer experience?
Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company.
17. Tell me why does a customer experience matter?
Some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions:
★ What do your customers think about you?
★ What do your customers do based on their perception of you?
18. Tell me what is low effort and sacrifice in customer experience?
Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort. Another issue is the trade off between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing.
19. Do you know about the personalization in customer experience?
Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalizing the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.
20. Tell me how much should my customer be improved?
In any relationship with a company, customers expect or at least hope that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.
21. Tell me where would you start to improve the customer experience from?
Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research found that moving customers from rating the experience "below expectations" to "meets expectations" gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.
22. Tell me how would you identify where the problems are in the customer experience?
Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and out sources. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.
23. Tell me about the role of digital in improving the customer experience?
Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centers, for example, are as old as a graying dad even a few grandfathers.
24. Please tell us what is the reason to be held still regarding customer experience?
It is one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it is quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually because the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration - and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it, simply did not exist.
25. Has the customization created a nightmare in customer experience?
To make matters worse, companies have layered customization on top of customization over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases and the internet. They have made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.
