Category Archives: best_practices

Beware the Content Fallacy

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A recent conversation about emerging technologies reminded me of an interesting infographic that I saw posted and reposted a lot a few years back, It showcased the “30 Technologies of the Next Decade.” It’s an impressive list of where digital transformation is taking us and how the customer experience will change in the relatively near term.

One thing that’s clear: our technology stack is continuing to go through a period of dramatic change.

Over recent years I’ve also been privy to the plans of some major organizations across a wide range of industries. These plans map out their aspirational goals for addressing the challenges such change will bring. I’ve seen a lot of systems and architecture diagrams, proofs of concept, and prototypes demonstrated with varying degrees of success. And, with a few exceptions, they all share a common weakness.

I estimate that at least half of those 30 technologies depend on content — be it written, graphical, video, audio, animation, or developing media like augmented reality — to deliver the customer experience. Yet many of those future-looking plans that embrace those technologies suffer from what I term “The Content Fallacy.” An unstated belief that “content just happens.”

Content needs to be engineered

A common trope when talking about the impact of digital transformation is to focus on the end result. This is good; we all need a shared vision. But the road to achieving that vision is often built on a common understanding of what foundations are needed to build that road. And the one I believe is largely missing is the concept of content engineering. To achieve any sort of personalized, high-quality experience across a growing number of delivery channels, you need to think up front as to what sort of content you will need and how it will be engineered to achieve those goals.

To give a real-world example, when discussing with a client how they would meet a C-suite level mandate for personalizing the customer experience as part of their digital transformation strategy, we discovered that to meet all the different vectors of marketing campaigns, product types, customer segments, industries, languages, and delivery channels they were targeting, they would be potentially delivering over 18,000 variants of one piece of content.

They had assumed that because they already had the baseline content, they could just feed it into their new systems and it would be delivered in the format the customer needed. But content for a website is not the same content you need for a smartphone or watch. The content you have is most likely not written or structured for the question-context-interpretation-answer model you need for a chatbot or voice assistant. If your customer communications have primarily been text-based, then they will probably not work alongside visuals or provide the right context and enhancement for an augmented reality experience.

The six facets of content engineering

Content engineering is a six-faceted approach to thinking and designing your content for the emerging digital transformation experience. Each of those facets can be defined as follows:

  • Model: a representation of the types of content you create, including their elements, attributes, and interdependent relationships.
  • Metadata: information that helps applications, authors, systems, and robots use content in a smart way.
  • Mark-Up: a way to identify the structure and context of the content outside the content itself.
  • Schema: a form of metadata that provides meaning and relationships to content. Schema often involves published standard vocabularies for describing concepts with standardized terms. Examples of XML schemas include DocBook, DITA, and TEI.
  • Taxonomy: a map of related concepts which are applied to content, often as tags. Enables and supports features such as related content reuse, navigation, search, and personalization.
  • Topology: the art of developing common organizational structures and containers across content management and publishing systems.

By taking an engineering approach, content moves away from being something that just happens (and then often doesn’t deliver the expected results) to becoming the foundational fuel to power digital transformation and deliver those exciting new multi-channel experiences we are all looking forward to.

Are You Measuring Part or All of the Customer Experience?

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“A satisfied customer is a happy customer.”

That’s a well-worn saying — one that carries a degree of truth. But how do you know whether your customers are truly satisfied? Measuring something as emotional as an experience can be as much of an art as it is a science.

Why do people do what they do?

Sure, we have tools and metrics — surveys, Net Promoter Scores, the number of likes and followers — as well as behavioral analytics such as time on page and click-through and abandonment rates. And we use them to try and determine satisfaction levels. These are indicators of what some people do, but they don’t tell you why they do it.

Are you measuring based on what you believe your customers want as opposed to what they actually need?

Customers don’t come to your website or digital platform actively seeking out your latest marketing messages. They come because they have things they need to do. Those things can range from making a purchase to setting up an account to changing account information to paying bills. Therefore, efforts to measure the success of a customer experience must be based primarily on how easy it is to accomplish those tasks, with less of an emphasis on how often users click your call-to-action buttons.

One area with a long history of helping customers get stuff done is the customer-support call center. In recent years, I’ve heard many companies talk about a customer-experience success metric as being the number of calls that get deflected from the support center to a self-help portal on the website. That doesn’t measure customer-experience success; it just measures a process change. If you don’t have the right content on the self-help portal, and if that content isn’t easily accessible and navigable, then you may be delivering a worse experience when you send people to the self-help portal.


The word deflected makes me shudder because it implies (at least to me) that the company is actively avoiding engaging with its customers.

Customers want answers

This is especially worrying when research shows that what most customers want when they engage with a company are answers to questions. For instance, research by the Search Engine Journal showed that the top five content types that customers look for on a website can be summarized as follows:

  1. Answers to the five W’s (who, what, when, where, and why)
  2. How-to guides or instructions
  3. Definitions (especially of complex terms)
  4. Product comparisons
  5. Prices and cost breakdowns

That research confirms that customers want easy access to answers from any part of your organization. It’s no longer true (if it ever really was) that marketing provides one type of information and customer support provides another.

In the business-to-business environment, there is strong evidence that customer-experience needs are driving cross-functional convergence of content. A leading software company reported that over three-quarters of the visitors to its main websites want to look at technical content about the use and implementation of its products. Therefore, they now include metrics for what were traditionally seen as support functions in their overall customer-experience reporting.

Take a holistic approach

Do you measure in isolation as opposed to holistically?

In general, the metrics used for measuring customer experience still tend to be the indicators of success (or failure) for individual operational departments or groups. Rarely, if ever, are they looked at in a holistic way to provide an overall measurement of customer satisfaction. It’s possible that you could be scoring highly in specific categories but still delivering a poor overall customer experience because the journey is disconnected.


By looking at customer-related metrics as part of an overall ecosystem and not as separate performance indicators, you can develop a clearer picture of a customer’s overall journey.

Customer Experience Isn’t About Fixing Discomfort, It’s About Preventing It

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“Welcome back, Mr. Porter. Great to see you again.” 

Those were the first words I heard as I walked into my hotel after a day on-site at a client’s office. It’s always nice to be greeted in a hotel, especially one where you stay on a semi-regular basis. The greeting got me thinking, is there any better example of ‘baked in” customer experience than the hospitality industry? It is literally the key ingredient of the business (although I’ve stayed at my share of hotels where you’d think otherwise).

Technology Isn’t a Band Aid for Bad CX

How can we take the hospitality mindset and thread it through our digital transformation projects? I recently came across a sponsored post on my Twitter feed that declared, “Experience is everything,” and that we should “know what your customers are feeling so we can turn discomfort into delight.” It was of course a campaign to promote yet another experience management platform.

First, we need to realize that applying new technology isn’t the key to improving the customer experience. It should be an enabling tool, but if we don’t have the customer service culture in place, it’s a waste of time and resources.

But the Twitter campaign did get two things right: yes, experience is everything, in fact, it’s the key area of competitive advantage in today’s marketplace; and yes, we need to lead with empathy. But if you are starting with the assumption that your customers are already in some sort of discomfort when dealing with your company, then you have a systemic issue. Applying technology as some sort of band-aid will not improve the situation.

With Customer Experience, Actions Speak Louder Than Words 

Like the hospitality industry, thinking about the customer experience has to be woven into everything a company and its employees do, irrespective of their job-title or function, and it must come from the top. I once worked with a company where there was a lot of talk about “the customer” but very little seemed to be done to actually address known product issues. In fact, they had a reputation for ignoring their customers. The internal dialog seemed at odds with the external perception. Until one day someone said, “you do know what the CEO means when he uses the word customer? He means the shareholders and analysts, he means his personal ‘customers.’ He doesn’t mean the people who actually use our products.” That was like a lightbulb going off — it explained everything about that company’s culture and business model.

Compared this with another company I worked with. On the surface, it lacked the various functional roles you would expect would be necessary to deliver on the promise of customer experience. There was no customer support desk or call-center, no customer engagement manager, etc. In fact, no one had the word ‘customer’ in their job-title. Yet it has a top-ranked reputation for service with the people who actually buy and use their products. In fact, it also has a minimal marketing staff, because its customer’s word-of-mouth recommendations are such an effective marketing tool. The reason is that the idea that everyone in that company is part of the customer experience is central to the company’s culture, communicated from the CEO outwards.

That CEO understands you don’t have to be actually directly interacting with a customer to impact the experience. If the company has a customer-led culture it will be reflected outwards. Working in the accounts department sending out invoices? Think about how those invoices read to the customers. How easy is it for them to pay their bills? Designing a product? Think about how easy it will be to use. Putting together a website? Do you understand what your customers want to do when they engage with you online?

Customer engagement is a holistic experience. The customer’s don’t know, nor care, who works in what department. The response to any customer engagement, no matter where it originates, or where it’s picked up, should never be “Sorry that’s not my job.” It’s everyone’s job. If an individual can’t immediately help solve an issue, then build a culture where they take the details, find the person to solve the issue, and then follow up. (Never underestimate the power of following up.)

The Foundations of Customer Driven Cultures

I’ve outlined before what I believe are the three essential parts of planning any CX-related transformation project. They still stand as the core to baking in a leading customer-driven culture that will avoid the discomfort:

  • Know your customer.
  • Follow your customer.
  • Understand your customer.

But if you do find there are the occasional instances of discomfort (and to some extent they are inevitable), then rather than throwing technology at it I’d add a fourth and fifth edict:

  • Help your customer do what they need to do.
  • Follow up and build a relationship with your customer.

When Personas Go Wrong or, The Search for Fluffy

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The woman on stage proudly told the conference audience how her team had spent three days to find just the right kitten for Emily.

Emily was a single working mother in her early 30s who lived with her 4-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment. She was on a limited budget and often pressed for time. She also loved cats. Hence the search for the perfect kitten. The thing was, Emily didn’t exist. Emily was a persona dreamed up by the marketing team. The aim of the team was to create a series of recipes that used the company’s products — a series of recipes just for Emily. And they spent (wasted) three days looking for a photo of a kitten to accompany a made-up person.

I’ll be honest. I have a few problems with Emily — and others just like her.

Personas with too narrow a focus

By focusing on an individual as a persona you can narrow your focus too much and miss a large percentage of the customers and prospects who might benefit from your message. By creating messages “just for Emily,” the team was ignoring a wider need for anyone who wanted to create quick, nutritious meals on a limited budget. Personas should be focused on addressing customer needs, not on developing fictional characters.

It’s a marketing point of view

Often, as with Emily, personas are developed by the marketing team with little or no interaction with actual customers. Marketing teams are often organizationally isolated from everyday interaction with customers, which can lead to personas that reflect what the marketing team thinks customers are looking for, rather than what customers actually need and how they go about finding information. It is essential that your marketing team take into account real-life customer experiences and needs.

Customers are changing

I have seen many personas documented along the lines of “Emily goes to the website to do initial research, checks reviews on mobile, and uses the app to purchase.”

The customer experience evolves rapidly. I know my digital behavior patterns have changed over the last 12 months. You need to keep up with these changes. How often do you review personas to ensure that they keep up with new technologies and changes in how customers interact with your brand?

Still part of the “Sell and Forget” model

Historically, personas have focused on the buying behavior of a given set of potential customers. They are designed to drive people along the traditional sales funnel from awareness to lead to prospect to sale. But that only represents a small part of a customer’s overall interaction with a company.

How do personas fit with the continuous customer journey?

Once prospects become customers they shouldn’t be forgotten and neither should the relevant personas. How do your personas interact with your brand from delivery of the product through owning, operating, and getting support? Do you understand the full customer life-cycle of your personas and how their journey across every interaction with your company is connected and mapped?

Get that right and the satisfied customer persona can be your best advocate to generate even more business.

Was the kitten really necessary?

When you are developing needs-driven personas to help you understand customer behavior, your process needs to be systematic, efficient, and based on data. Building an emotional backstory for a character is all well and good if you are working on your latest novel, but it can be a time-consuming misdirection in developing effective customer-driven personas. How many customer interviews could that marketing team have done during the time it took to find the perfect photo of Fluffy?

Are Your Customers Shouting Into The Void?

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Many years ago I ran the support organization for a small software company. We had a whiteboard on the wall opposite the area of the office where my team sat. Everyone walking into the break room could see it. It showed the number of customer calls or emails we had each week, how many support tickets were still open, and how many we had resolved.

Above it sat another sign that said, “We are not a black hole.”

Don’t ignore customers

While the figures on the board were what we reported to the CEO each week, it was that simple informal sign that became our mantra. We didn’t want our customers to feel as though their requests for service were disappearing into a black hole. Let’s face it: no one likes being ignored, but more often than not ignoring people is the standard operating procedure of many support organizations. Even if it isn’t intentional, that’s often the way it appears to the customer.

It used to be easy to monitor and listen to your customers. They either called, emailed, or even wrote actual letters (remember those?) when they had problems. There was really no excuse for being a black hole and not responding to them. Today, providing support is much a more complex undertaking. There are an overwhelming number of channels that customers can use to communicate with you, and while you may be able to monitor most of them, it is almost impossible to capture them all — especially when customers come up with new, unofficial channels to make themselves heard, like the gentleman who was so unhappy with a company that he painted his complaints on the side of a van.

In my experience, companies respond to the voice of the customer in one of four ways:

  1. Ignore it.
  2. Capture it and do nothing.
  3. Acknowledge there is a problem but take no action.
  4. Acknowledge the problem and provide a solution.

Unfortunately, the response to any given request too often depends on when and where within the organization it was received and handled. This leads to an uneven experience. Companies do better when they treat customer input as a single unified data set.

Empathy first, followed by action

So how do you go about using that data set to deliver what the customer needs? The first rule of thumb goes back to not being a black hole. Acknowledge that the customer has a problem. Do that, and you’ll be way ahead of most companies. However, while empathy is all well and good, customers prefer action to empathy.

How do you enable your teams to take actions that help customers?

Give your customer-facing teams access to intelligent content.[fn: For more on Intelligent Content I recommend Intelligent Content: A Primer by Ann Rockley, Charles Cooper, and Scott Abel. (XML Press) 978-1937434465. ] Content is an expression of everything a company does, and it needs to be valued as an asset across a company. To solve customer problems and provide positive actionable feedback, you need to be able to tap into that pool of content in efficient ways that allow the right pieces of knowledge to be pulled together to provide personalized responses. That content can come from knowledge bases, technical documentation, support articles, operating schedules, customer profiles, or machine-learning chatbots. Match that content with current marketing campaigns and offers, and you can pull together positive customer experiences that help solve problems, further engage the customer, and continue to build brand engagement.

This comes down to taking a holistic, strategic view, this time in regard to your content. Look not only at what your content was created for but also at where else you can use it to answer customers’ questions. That is not a quick or easy task, but it is one that increases efficiency, leverages your content assets, and allows you to respond to the voice of the customer in the best possible way.

Is Your Voice of the Customer Program All Talk and No Action?

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voice-of-the-customer-feedback-survey

A recent conversation reminiscing about those far-off days when we could go out to eat and attend all sorts of types of entertainment reminded me of a couple of customer experiences in the fast-food world that left an impression – not always good.

A Hot and Cold Customer Experience

On the way to a concert one evening, my wife and I stopped to grab a quick meal at one of our regular Tex-Mex fast-food restaurants. After patiently waiting in line, we got to the front and the server asked, “Can you wait a few minutes while I fill these online orders?”

I was not impressed with them giving priority to online customers over those who took the time and effort to be in the store, so I tweeted my displeasure. By the time we were sitting in our seats at the concert an hour later I had received an apologetic response from the company’s social media team and a promise to follow up.

The follow up was an email on Monday with a generic “please rate your experience” survey attached. The good feeling created by the social media team’s quick response was undermined by the apparent disconnect with the customer service process.

Bland Food, Seasoned Service

Contrast that to another occasion when I ordered delivery from another local fast-food chain. They emailed me when the order left the restaurant with a link to an interactive app where I could actually track the driver’s progress towards our house.

The food arrived ahead of schedule, hot and well presented with a print out on each container with the details of each individual order. But it wasn’t as tasty as we felt it should be based on our in-store experience — none of the food had enough of the sauces that give the chain its distinct flavor.

The following day I had a survey call from them too. Not a generic email, not even a robocall automated survey, but an actual person who listened. When I mentioned the lack of flavor she said she’d pass it on. An hour later I had a call from the manager of the local restaurant asking for details of why we weren’t 100 percent satisfied with the taste of our meals.

Guess which chain will get our service next time we want some fast food?

Suffering From Survey Fatigue

There’s a well-worn saying that we have two ears and one mouth so we should listen twice as much as we speak. Too many companies use surveys to try and measure the customer experience, and in doing so say they are listening to, and capturing, the voice of the customer. But the truth is that these don’t really work.

We are all suffering from survey fatigue. Every single store on a recent shopping trip asked us to fill in a survey by going to a URL the sales associate helpfully circled on the receipt. It sometimes feels as if you can’t undertake any retail transaction these days without being surveyed.

And how many of these do you fill in, or respond to? I’ve seen and heard industry statistics that suggest that up to 90 percent of customer experience surveys are ignored. Why?

Some of the most common reasons for the low response rates include:

  • Too many surveys from too many sources
  • Sending surveys after too much time has elapsed since the customer’s interaction
  • Expecting the customer to initiate the action (i.e. “Please go to this website and let us know what you thought”)
  • Customers don’t see any changes due to the feedback they give, so they stop giving it.

The last point speaks to the heart of the problem: companies are collecting data, but they are not listening to what the customer is saying.

A survey on voice-of-the-customer programs revealed that:

  • 75 percent of companies are only collecting or analyzing data without deriving many actionable insights
  • 46 percent are only collecting data without analyzing or doing anything relevant with it
  • 23 percent collaborate around this data with other groups
  • Only 2 percent transform their business using collected data and insights derived from it.

The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Customer Experience

How can you change that? Firstly by acknowledging there are two distinct types of questions you can ask in order to measure the customer experience: “What?” and “Why?”

“What” questions may be the best way to capture data. They pose questions such as: What is the level of customer satisfaction? What is the likelihood to recommend? By collecting answers to these and similar questions, surveys can provide answers related to why satisfaction ratings are high or low but are often without context.

“Why” questions provide context and sentiment: Why is this customer calling? Why is that customer pleased or upset? Why, exactly, does this customer want to return, cancel or upgrade?  Interaction data includes customers’ open cases, phone calls, helpdesk tickets, sales orders or any other customer interaction information that gets recorded and tracked.

In order to derive the most meaningful insights from collected data, companies need not only to understand the “what” and the “why” of customer interactions, but must also be able to correlate the two. Customer experience managers need to take a holistic approach and consider both the feedback and interaction data as one unified data set.

By taking a holistic viewpoint of measuring the customer experience, it becomes easier to identify and plan actionable changes. A customer experience manager can start from a single customer mention of canceling service in a call recording and roll up from there to view survey scores, Net Promoter Score responses, and other related feedback.

The magnitude of the problem can then be assessed by rolling up to satisfaction levels related to certain features of the product or service in question. If the issue is compelling enough to merit a response beyond that to the individual customer, it will be easy to define an action plan accordingly.

The Start of a Relationship

When the customers know they are listened to, and that their feedback is bringing measurable results and changes, they are more likely to continue to respond and develop an ongoing relationship.

After all, listening is the key to any successful relationship.

 

Your DX Testing Isn’t Done Till it Passes the ‘Buddy’ Test

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Buddy

“Do you think our customers will like the image of the kitten better than the one of the puppy?”

If you think digital experience testing comes down to resolving questions like this, you are missing the bigger picture.  I written before about how we should be designing for a frictionless experience, and testing is a large part of that process.

Testing Means More Than Click Troughs

Test to make sure that your content — text, graphics, video, audio — help drive the overall experience. It doesn’t matter if the kitten gets more hits than the puppy if neither helps the customer progress through the experience to get the information they need. Look at click-through rates and subsequent customer actions.

Check to make sure the graphics are composed and positioned to help the customer on their journey. For instance, shots that guide people’s eyes in the direction of the next call to action generate far more click-throughs than thoughtfully posed shots of smiling models looking straight out of the page.

Refining the digital experience focuses on the user interface as well as content design, but you also need to make sure you understand how they work together.

Test to make sure the page layouts, paths, text and graphics are market and culturally appropriate. Does the experience change based on the level of the customer engagement and where they are in their journey? Is the logged-in experience more personalized than the general ‘guest’ experience? It should be.

Do you have your customer journey mapped out and know which parts of the digital experience map to which steps in that journey?

How about the language you are using? Is your website, mobile app, augmented reality solution, digital signage or whatever you are using to deliver the digital experience littered with jargon, acronyms and industry terms understandable to you and your development team, but meaningless to customers?

Names are important. Think about what you call something. Don’t expect the customer to know the terms you use internally. Pick names that the customer will recognize and use them consistently.

Don’t Take it From the Insiders, Ask Your Buddy

Once you’ve done your final internal testing, and maybe even a focus group or two, I’d suggest you employ the final and best test: the “Buddy” test.

Ask your family and friends to walk through your planned experience design. Make sure whoever does the testing has no knowledge of your industry, your company processes, etc. The more removed they are from your role in designing, testing and delivering digital experiences, the better.

Ask them to do a task a new customer would want to do, like create an account and find some basic information.

It’s amazing how often designers leave out basic information from online interactions because once we become integrated into a particular environment, we get to the stage where we have an almost intuitive baseline of knowledge — knowledge someone outside of the community would not have. Answering “it’s obvious” to any question raised during testing is not acceptable.

If your other friends repeatedly ask the same question about a part of your digital process, that part of your process is broken. You need to fix it. And not in a way that makes it easier for you, but in a way that it makes it easier for the customer to complete their task.

Remember, it doesn’t matter which picture gets more clicks if I can’t find out how your products can help me, how to buy them, or even where you do business or what time someone is available for me to talk to.

Improve customer experience with a little improvisation

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Improv

While I enjoy TV shows like “Whose Line is it Anyway” that use improvisation techniques to deliver some fun comedy moments, the thought of doing something similar myself had never crossed my mind. I’m happy standing in front of an audience telling stories as part of my presentations, as long as I know what my story is before I start, but improvising? I didn’t think it was my sort of thing.

Until I went on an off-site management retreat meeting a couple of years ago. The first two days of the retreat were devoted to training led by Second City Works, the corporate training arm of the renowned improv comedy club in Chicago. I’ll be honest I was a little uncomfortable at the thought of this sort of training, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying the experience and I learned several things to use in future public speaking engagements, as well as in the daily interactions we all have in the work place.

In the days following the training I began to realize that several of the lessons and techniques from those two days could also be applied to the way that companies deliver the customer experience. Below are just a few of those ideas that when applied to interacting with customers at any point, be it digitally online, physically in person in a store, or conversationally over the phone, could add up to an overall improvement in the customers experience.

Listen

This may seem obvious, but listening is not something that we, either as individuals, or companies, are very good at. I recently wrote an article on how companies are good at collecting data about customers, but not that efficient at using the data to really understand customer needs. As individuals, we focus on our own work, needs, and the processes that drive them. Consequently we tend to position any interaction with others into our own framework. We need to learn to listen, and understand what customers really want, what are they trying to achieve, and how do we fit into their framework of needs and processes.

Thank you

Acknowledging an interaction with someone is probably the easiest way to improve a customer’s experience. We all feel better when we walk into a store and someone makes eye contact with us and acknowledges that we are there. A simple “Thank You” goes a long way, be it in person, or online. Those can be anything from a simple pop-up when you complete an online form, to a personalized follow up email that shows that we listen, and understand the customer’s problem, or to thank them for a purchase and welcome them to our customer community.

Yes, and…..

No one likes to be told “No.” It sends the wrong message to customers and can bring a halt to the customer’s journey. There is a strong chance that overuse of negative statements will mean your customer will go elsewhere to solve their problem, or fulfill their need. Even if you don’t know the answer to a particular issue, or your system doesn’t have the information needed, there is nothing wrong with saying “we don’t know.” Instead of “No” how about serving up a response along the lines of “Yes, we understand your problem, and while we look into it why not try these few other things we can do for you…”

Understand where you are in the story

The basic structure of any story is that of three acts. The first is the set-up when a need or obstacle is identified. The second is the journey of discovery towards meeting the need or overcoming the obstacle. The third act describes the new reality once that need is fulfilled, or obstacle overcome. If you think about that in business terms, the classic story structure is also a description of the customer journey, awareness of a need (Act 1), research, selection, and purchase (Act 2), post sales ownership and support (Act 3). If you are mapping your various customer interaction points to the customer journey (and you should be), you also need to understand at what stage in the customer’s story those interactions happen. This will provide context and help define what you can do to help the customer continue along that journey.

Know who is the hero of the story

As I mentioned earlier we tend to look at any interaction from our own viewpoint, we see it as part of our own journey, or story. Yet we need to realize that the customer is the hero of his own story, not ours. When the two stories intersect we need to be able to empathize with the customer and see the journey from their perspective. If you know who the hero of any given story is, you can start to see the journey from their perspective, anticipate their needs, and help them solve their problems.

That sounds like exceptional customer experience to me.

Is Your Website a Reflection of You or Your Customers?

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“Hey Dad, did you have any feedback?” That text from my daughter was part of an ongoing discussion around the website that she was designing for a new business venture that she and a partner were launching. It was the third iteration of the site, and this was the first version that was fully mobile friendly.

My feedback was that with just a few minor tweaks, this iteration was very close to where they needed to be for the launch. It told a good story and provided the basic information their customers would be looking for.

It wasn’t always the case. Early in the process of them developing a business case I asked my daughter and her business partner what they wanted the website to communicate.

The immediate response was “We want it to let people know what we do.”

A logical answer, but my response was something along the lines of “That’s great, but other people do what you do. What makes you special?”

“We are focused on people with a particular problem area.”

“Great. So think about the people who need help solving that problem. What are they going to be looking for?”

As these sort of discussions continued, the website design and prototypes evolved from their description of what the new company did, to a series of short articles that addressed the potential customer’s problems, and how my daughter and her partner can help.

They also looked at the list of services they were offering and decided to focus on the three where they have had the most interest. Now instead of a webpage with a shopping list of things to pick from, each solution article has information about the relevant service, with pricing and contact information.

But it’s not only small businesses or start-ups that need to be switching their thinking from a website that, no matter how slick it’s presented, is little more than a digital brochure. Often these sort of “inside-out” websites end up being a reflection of the corporate structure accompanied by a list of products. Switching the mind set to a customer driven “outside-in” view can pay dividends, not only in an improved experience that can help customer’s solve their problems, but they can also have a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.

I once worked on a project for a large company whose website was a perfect reflection of their corporate and business unit structure. You had to know what part of the company was responsible for a particular product to be able to find it; even the employees had a hard time figuring out where to find information. But a customer focused analysis showed that 80% of the traffic went to the website for just four things: to look up product specifications, pricing, buy spare parts, or get support. Once we rebuilt the website around making those tasks as easy as possible, traffic, leads, and online parts sales revenue all increased, and support costs decreased.

Improving the customer experience is now regularly cited as a top strategic imperative for many companies, and the website is the always-on global showcase for that. Delivering a customer-driven web experience means not only changing the mind-set and the content, but also delivering a more engaging relevant and engaging experience that delivers value to the individual customer. It can rapidly become a complex process and needs the right sort of management tools to enable and support an effective web presence.

Ditch the FAQs: Design for a Frictionless Experience

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2016-06-October-Making-Sushi

All I wanted was some sushi.

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to find out if the any of the three sushi restaurants within walking distance of my hotel were actually open.

Their websites were full of text, explaining the ambiance, the chef’s background, even the history of the restaurant (and in one case the historic building that it was located in). The pictures of neatly arranged and presented sushi rolls and specialties looked pretty and further whetted my appetite.

But they still didn’t answer my question, nor did they help me navigate the website to provide the answer to my question — is this restaurant currently open?

FAQs Don’t Make Up for a Poor Site

I eventually found the information I wanted in the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Which got me thinking: If you still have an FAQ page then it means you implicitly acknowledge that you are presenting your customers with a digital experience full of answers and information that no one wants. You are ignoring the one question that will help you optimize your customer journey.

Why do your customers come to your website, or use your mobile app, in the first place? What are they trying to achieve?

I would think for a restaurant the three main reasons that people engage online are to find out location, opening hours and menu options.

So Many Pages, So Little Useful Information

I once worked on a project for a large company whose website was a perfect reflection of its corporate and business unit structure. It had a lot of FAQ pages — each business unit had its own.

Even the employees had a hard time figuring out where to find information.

But analysis showed that 80 percent of the traffic went to the website to look up product specifications, pricing, to buy spare parts or get support. Once we rebuilt the website around making those tasks as easy as possible, traffic, leads and online parts sales revenue increased.

Structure your digital experience around supplying the critical information your customer needs in the easiest way possible, then start to optimize the details through testing.

Your Goal: A Frictionless Digital Experience

Use testing to develop a frictionless experience. Test if the text and graphics you are using help drive the experience. It doesn’t matter if picture A gets more hits than picture B if neither help drive the experience. Look at click-through rates and subsequent customer actions.

If you are using graphics to drive the experience, check to make sure that the graphics are composed and positioned to help the customer on their journey. For instance, shots which guide people’s eyes in the direction of the next call to action generate far more click-throughs than thoughtfully posed shots of smiling models looking straight out of the page.

Test to make sure that the page layouts, paths and text and graphics are market and culturally appropriate. Does the experience change based on the level of the customer engagement and where they are in their journey? Do you have your customer journey mapped out and know which parts of the digital experience map to which steps in that journey?

Remember optimizing through testing is not about A versus B — it’s about removing the friction from the experience. I don’t care if the Dragon Roll looks prettier than the California Roll if I can’t find out when you’re open for business.