Organizational building blocks and projects
I came across this interesting model about the interdependencies between organizational building blocks in projects. If one of these building blocks isn’t functioning correctly, your organization is highly likely to be in that particular state. Resistance and frustration are the ones I see most often in customer experience projects. Which one do you recognize most?
I’m afraid I don’t know the original source.
Principles of Service Design
Once in a while you come across a presentation that sticks in your mind. The one below is one of those, and discusses the principles of service design. I’ve looked around for a definition of “service design” in case you’re wondering what we mean with service design. I found one at the Service Design Network, who in turn refers to Birgit Mager from the Design Dictionary. ’Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view.’
The presentation is from Hugh Dubberly and gives Ten Principles of Service Design:
- Value is in the experience
- Experience = reputation = brand
- Sending a message is not enough
- Learning requires interaction
- Conversation builds meaning
- ServiceS must be seen as wholes
- Experience is a journey
- Practice metadesign
- Build Platforms
- Take advantage of network effects
Enjoy.
An overview of experience stores
Experience – or flagship – stores are very often the most expensive stores of a brand. Combine this with a list of the world’s most valuable brands and you get the most expensive stores on the planet. The question, which I address in a future post, is: are they worth the investment? And, how do you measure the success of such a store?
Here are 47 brands that run an experience store, the store’s nickname, the country in which it is located, and a link to a site with pictures of the store. My favourites? Gucci and Puma. Most of the websites are in English, unfortunately not all of them.
Let me know which one you’d like to see added to the list.
|
Brand |
Name |
Country |
Pictures |
|
Adidas |
Performance Store |
France |
|
|
Apple |
|
US |
|
|
Audi |
|
Germany |
|
|
Benetton |
|
France |
|
|
BMW |
BMW Welt |
Germany |
|
|
Bvlgari |
|
France |
|
|
Chanel |
|
Japan |
|
|
Coca Cola |
World of Coca Cola |
US |
|
|
Deutsche Bank |
Q110 |
Germany |
|
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Diesel |
|
Multiple |
|
|
Fiat |
|
UK |
|
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Garmin |
|
US |
|
|
Gucci |
|
US |
|
|
Heineken |
Heineken Experience |
Netherlands |
|
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Jyske Bank |
|
Denmark |
|
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Louis Vuitton |
|
Multiple |
|
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L.L. Bean |
|
US |
|
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M&Ms |
World Retail Store |
US |
|
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Mercedes |
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Germany |
|
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Metro |
Store of the Future |
Germany |
|
|
Miele |
Inspirience Center |
Netherlands |
|
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Nespresso |
|
France |
|
|
Nike |
NikeTown |
Multiple |
|
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Nokia |
|
Multiple |
|
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Porsche |
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Germany |
|
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Prada |
|
US |
|
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Puma* |
Nomad* |
Varies |
|
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Ralph Lauren |
|
US |
|
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Rolex |
|
Italy |
|
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Samsung |
VivoCity |
Singapore |
|
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Telefonica |
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Spain |
|
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Toys R Us |
|
US |
|
|
Umpqua Bank |
|
US |
|
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UNIQLO |
|
US |
|
|
Volkswagen |
Autostadt |
Germany |
|
|
Washington Mutual |
Occasio |
US |
* Click on ‘Buildings’ and then find Puma at the bottom of the navigation menu.
CX Wrap-Up: January 19 – 25, 2009
Here are the summaries of the articles I enjoyed most reading last week. Sorry for the slight delay in sending through this wrap-up.
- Design Research Methods for Experience Design. An article by Michael Hawley talks about some of the alternative design research techniques, in contrast to the traditional ones like task analysis, card sorting, personas, and usability testing. ‘Storytelling and personalization’ is one and is executed to create unbiased insights into users’ needs by asking participants to describe designs and concepts with human characteristics. ‘Triading’ is another technique and focuses on finding the attributes or emotional aspects of the experience by asking participants to describe how one concept differs from other concepts. The final technique that is discussed is ‘Games’ where the objective is to stimulate participants to be more open in their responses.
- How Much Democracy Is Too Much – When It Comes To Branding. Branding (partly) sets the expectations around a customer experience. And it’s the expectations that are held against the real experience to evaluate whether the product or service was worth the money. This article is about developing a brand – and who gets a say in defining it. “If branding truly becomes democratic, there is a very real risk that people would vote down the best and bravest ideas simply because they are unfamiliar. A democratic approach can at best dilute a good idea and at worst, kill it off”. Read further at the Landor blog.
- 5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours? Over at User Interface Engineering, Jared M. Spool lists out the different design decision processes, illustrating it with a (very nice) comparison of two stores that had different ways of picturing a similar product on their sites – and the ‘research’ behind the choice of taking the pictures in that specific way. The five styles are 1) unintended, 2) self, 3) genius, 4) activity focused, and 5) user focused. UIE’s research found that “the most effective teams were skilled in all five styles, choosing the style that best fit the needs and goals of a project.” I still see a lot of projects with a mix of the first three styles, but the balance is definitely moving over to the right, as more and more companies realize the benefits of user-focused design processes.
CX Wrap-Up: January 12 – 18, 2009
Not a lot of customer experience articles coming out this week, but here are two worth reading:
- The one thing you need to know about creating a remarkable retail shopping experience. A strong brand experience is one that holds across channels. Bernhard at ‘The Customer Experience Labs’ talks about the (offline) retail experience. “Customers want to experience what it is like to own your products – your shop should be designed to help create these “product discovery experiences”. I’ve written a post about this a long time ago, just after I visited the Nespresso store in Paris. Although you can touch and try the product, it feels as if it is just a big store rather than a place where customers can learn more about the brand and its products.
- Banks face Customer backlash due to poor experience. Colin who runs beyondphilosophy’s Experience Clinic Blog demonstrates how emotions and opinions can clash with banks’ tag lines (as a response) and other branding efforts. I’ve also written about this gap between customer worries and the way UK banks’ address these at their websites. Colin is right to say that banks should be ‘keep a low profile’ and be careful with putting ads on TV. The true solutions sit in the DNA of the firms, the way they operate and think – this needs to change, but it will take a long time before banks have transformed their customer experience DNA and act in the interest of their customers.
CX Wrap-Up: January 4 – 11, 2009
The blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading during week 2 of 2009:
- Employee Service is a Key Ingredient to Success. Judy at The Employee Factor posted an interesting read why firms should have employee service and ‘need to, in parallel with a focus on the customer, help their employees understand the desired experience, their role in delivering it and their value to the overall success of the brand’. She poses some interesting questions such as ‘Are the employees that understand your unique value replaceable?’
- 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. User experience is not user interface design, a step in the process, or just about usability. Whitney Hess does a good job debunking these myths. My favorite has got to be ‘user experience is not the role of one person or department’. Whitney says ‘Our greatest skill is that we [ux designers] know how to listen’.
- Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy. Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path reminds us to uncover the an organization’s overall business strategy when designing an experience. Several basic, yet strong questions like ‘how does the business make money’ and ‘where do they invest in’ can make design teams a lot smarter about their client’s business they are designing for. Brandon calls this ‘business empathy’.
- ‘Design’ is not the answer to all our problems. ‘Design Thinking’ should not be turned into another managment fad. Idris Mootee over at Innovation Playground makes a great call with saying that ’Design-driven Innovation’ is more accurate and appropriate than ‘Transformation’. And ‘Design-driven Innovation become transformational when there are relentless pursuits of truth, beauty, balance and responsibility’.
- Brazil vs Argentina: Latin America Creativity. Ok, a much lighter post. This one is about typography in advertising. Who said Latin Americans don’t have humor?
Technologies for a customer-first culture
A customer-first culture is ’a set of shared beliefs, values, and behaviors that guide employees of an organization how to deliver superior customer experiences’.
Here is a list with ‘new’ technologies that can help management teams build and support such a culture inside their companies. I’ll try to add technologies over time through updates.
- Yammer. Basically Twitter, a microblogging platform, in house. By answering the simple question ‘what are you doing right now?’ the technology’s premise is that employees will get more productive over time as they share and discuss ideas, documents, and links. More communication means better coordination across departments which means increased accuracy and quality in customer service delivery.
- Virtual Heroes. Virtual Heroes builds learning simulations as virtual worlds. For Hilton the company developed an interactive training game featurinig several scenarios where employees can practice interactions with guests. Built as a PSP game, hotel team members are shown how their actions impact the hotel and guest’s mood, which in turn (virtually) impacts the company’s Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking scores.
- salesforce Ideas. Sales reps and marketers can collaborate, vote and provide feedback on key marketing material (like collateral, ads, and presentations). Users can also tag and bookmark content so the best material shines through the ‘clutter’. One of the best applications of salesforce Ideas is that it allows firms to create employee communities around new ideas. Harrah’s Entertainment is one of the users of salesforce Ideas.
- fizzback. Through text (SMS) messages, forms and other media, consumers can leave feedback to anything they have experienced inside a store — from the way front-line staff treated you as a customer to random ideas such as ‘why don’t you use energy-saving light bulbs?’ The information that Fizzback collects can be used in a various ways. It even claims to be able to drive behavioral change of employees. Managers can forward a comment to a specific team to follow up on an idea, or send a positive customer comment straight to an employee to motivate him or her. Fizzback also claims comments can help to initiate healthy competition, and for appraisal and compensation purposes.
Please leave a comment if you are working on or know about other technologies that can help build a customer-first culture.
McKinsey on maintaining the customer experience
The McKinsey Quarterly just published a new article on cxp — Maintaining the customer experience with some interesting points (quotes) on the question “How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs?”
- Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction.
- In short, these companies have carefully measured the “breakpoints” to find their customers’ true sensitivity to service level changes.
- Finding these savings requires rigor in customer experience analytics: the collection of customer-level data, matching survey responses to actual behavior, and statistical analysis that differentiates to the extent possible between correlation and causation.
- It also requires a willingness to question long-held internal beliefs reinforced through repetition by upper management. Many will discover that long-held but seldom-reviewed assertions about what customers really want are wrong. The executive in charge of the customer experience needs to have the courage to raise these questions.
If customer experience rules, which UK banks will attract the Icesave money?
In short: ING Direct, RBS, and Barclays are best-positioned to grab the available £5 billion from ex-Icesavers.
Although an exact date is not set, at some point the 300,000 Brits with an Icesave account will get their £5 billion back. The question becomes what will people do with their money? And which banks are most likely to attract the funds?
For this post, let’s assume they are opening a similar (online-only) account somewhere else. I’ve also assumed that the online customer experience (CXP) is the only factor driving consumers’ choice. A quick-and-not-at-all-exhaustive CXP scan learns that ING Direct, RBS, and Barclays are best placed to win. Here is what I looked at.
- Simple and quick account opening process. Can only existing consumers apply for a savings account? How long does it take to go through the online application forms?
- Clear and visible security and privacy statements. Can consumers instantly see security and privacy statements on the main page (so not in footer or hidden link)? Are the statements written in a way it is easy to read and understand?
- Human assistance during application process. Can consumers easily find a phone number? Is the company offering innovative solutions like click-to-call and chat?
- To-the-point product information. Is there a penalty-fee for withdrawals? How is interest calculated? Is there educational material (like a demo) what an online-only account is and how to manage it? What are existing customers saying about the product?
Winner.
- ING Direct. Very simple and short application process. Quick approval process. Product content is enriched with customer videos. Negatives: bad treatment of security and privacy, hard to find phone number.
Followers.
- RBS. Good help section for a range of queries. Clear expectation setting for the application process. Good product content and functionality.
- Barclays. Looks like Barclays tried to reduce the number of form fields to a minimum. Good progress tracker. Aesthetically one of the better sites of the pack.
- First Direct. Easy to find phone number, good and easy-to-find product information. Contextual integration of privacy and security information. Aesthetically attractive too.
- NS&I. Usability-wise not a good performance, but largely made up with strong content about savings accounts, an easy-to-spot phone number, and information about the application process itself.
- Cooperative Bank. A leader with privacy and security content. Very short online form and in-context escalation paths to human support.
Contenders.
- egg, Abbey, Tesco PF, NatWest, Bradford & Bingley, Halifax, Nationwide, Bank Of Scotland, and HSBC. Little effort is done to differentiate the customer experience. Egg for example tries with the copy – the tone and manner are different than the pack, but lets potential customers down in other areas.
Losers.
- Lloyds TSB. No clear information about penalty fees regarding withdrawals and interest calculations. As far as I can tell, you need to be or become a current account customer to open a savings account.
- Alliance & Leicester. Apart from the placement of a security logo, little effort is made to really engage with prospects, in a different way than the other banks in the market.
Let’s see what happens.
PS: Compared to a few weeks ago, when I tried to find which bank is best at treating worried customers around the credit crisis, several banks added content around this to their sites.
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