Alan Hosking chats to Mike Wittenstein about taking customer experience to new heights.

Profile Mike Wittenstein  (www.mikewittenstein.com) is a consultant, speaker and customer experience designer. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, Mike has, for two decades, helped business leaders around the world differentiate their brands by dramatically improving their customer experience. In the process, those clients have gained market dominance, increased their sales and/or discovered new, unexpected revenue streams.

Q: Customer service is a well known term but not so “customer experience design”. How do they differ? 

From many shoppers’ perspectives, customer service is a department. It’s the place you have to go because things have gone wrong with the service you asked for. In my culture, it equates with being sent to the principal’s office (even though you didn’t do anything wrong). Customer service is where companies send their ‘problem customers’ — those who ask for things the business isn’t designed to deliver from the front lines. From a company perspective, Customer service is where you send people with expensive-to-serve requests so that you can keep costs down.

Customer experience design, on the other hand, is a perspective and a toolset for specifying the intersection between customers and the employees who serve them so that both benefit. Unlike many bottom-line oriented approaches to running a business, practitioners of customer experience design don’t believe that one side has to lose for the other to win. Design as a problem-solving tool gives everyone more of what they want. Purposeful investment in the customer and employee experiences has yielded long-lasting competitive, operational and cultural benefits in organisations of all types and sizes — including non-profits and governmental units. The research shows that ‘enjoyability’ and profitability of a business go hand in hand.

Customer experience is everything you do for your customers and to them and how it makes them feel. The “for” part includes those services that make life easier for your customers — the smiles that leave them feeling better and the outcomes that leave them better off. When a business is designed to maximise service, customers receive value and feel good about the brands that serve them. The “to” part is when business processes make customers do things they don’t want to. It often includes filling out forms, standing in lines, waiting for call centre representatives, and repeating themselves. When business processes dictate the customer’s experience, cost (measured in time, money, effort and emotion) goes up and their satisfaction plummets.

Q: How has customer experience evolved?

In my opinion, the accelerated coupling of academics, consultants/practitioners and business leaders has quickened the evolution of this discipline. Twenty-five or so years ago, a subset of marketing academia started researching and writing about services marketing, which taught us that product and services marketing can and should be different. About 10 years ago, Joe Pine wrote The Experience Economy, which showed us the importance of putting on a good show for customers. In 2003, Frederick Reichheld wrote the HBR article, "One Number You Need to Grow," introducing Net Promoter Scores which gives numbers-oriented leaders a way to incorporate the soft/human/emotional stuff of CX (customer experience) into their business models.

Today, the topics of experience design and adoption are getting more attention. Around the world, I'm seeing fast-prototyping and innovation-led approaches to finding out what customers want most and how the business can meet their needs enjoyably and efficiently. I'm also seeing CX used as a way to positively impact business cultures. Business leaders are good at getting things done on time and on budget. Turning their attention to CX, they are finding better and faster way to adjust their companies to deliver and support the kinds of experiences their customers and clients want. The time from customer insight to design to implementation to effect on the metrics is coming down. For that and other reasons, I'm bullish on this CX wave. It's a great time to be learning and using the new tools to transform service businesses.

 Q: Why has customer experience become an important factor to companies? 

It has been known for some time that, all things being equal, the companies with the better customer experiences win in the marketplace — often by orders of magnitude. Good experience equates to good business and this is the primary reason to make customer experience part of the strategy toolbox. There's a sense of predictability in the CX investment now. In my own practice, I know the ideas are right when they delight customers, engage employees and pay back shareholders, all at the same time. CX is the only discipline I know of that can improve the top-line and the bottom-line with the same design.

Q: Is there a single custodian of the customer experience or are there multiple custodians?

Whether your organisation names a customer experience tzar or decides to embed CX principles into the business depends on the culture of the organisation and how they adapt best to change. I don't believe there's one answer that suits everyone. Placing attention on the customer experience — and on how to deliver it profitably — is good business practice for any firm.

Adoption will happen more quickly and last longer, however, if it gets its footing and has supporters throughout the organisation. It's ideal for CX to live, as a mandate, within best practices and as part of the culture.

Q: What are the basic building blocks required to improve customer experience?

The big picture answer is vision, willingness, support and follow-through. Someone has to have an idea of what the experience of the future should be. Leaders and followers must be ready and willing to make some changes. The infrastructure of the business (rules, incentives, budgets, politics) need to support positive improvements to the experience. Finally, as new experiences create new promises from the brand to its customers (and employees), the business must be ready to keep them. Not keeping promises is a guaranteed-to-fail method. 

Q: What opportunities present themselves for HR to enhance a company’s customer experience?

Every business really offers two experiences. The employee experience, in my opinion, deserves attention first. Without a great employee experience, how can you expect the people in your employ to know what the standard of excellence is for customers?

It's been my experience that companies whose HR teams understand the principles of customer and employee experience design are the ones who are able to get the right talent into the right roles more quickly. These are the ones who appreciate the brilliance of aligning an employee's learning agenda with the customer's preference for a delightful on-brand experience. In short, the best HR teams bring human magic to the customer experience and maintain it.