More Is More

How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences

Blake Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138046788
• eBook ISBN: 9781351694483
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

"Less is more" may be good advice for many efforts, but it is terrible advice when it comes to customer experience. Brands that want to stay relevant must apply more energy, focus, and resources to creating knock-your-socks-off customer experiences than they ever did before. Companies that embrace a "more is more" philosophy work harder and go further to ensure that their customers have a positive experience: they do this through customer-focused strategies and leadership, via operations, policies, and procedures that consider how the customer will fare in every scenario.

Customer experience guru Blake Morgan walks you through the D.O.M.O.R.E. concepts that set businesses up for success by emphasizing the importance of relationships. Companies that do more:

Design something special
Offer a strong employee experience
Modernize with technology
Obsess over the customer
Reward responsibility and accountability
Embrace disruption and innovation

More Is More offers practical advice for building or improving customer experience that you can apply immediately at your own organization. Time is of the essence: your customers are not willing to wait for you to get the customer experience right. Outlining the key areas you need to address immediately, More Is More will help you weather external changes, remain relevant, and thrive in today's ever-changing business landscape.

Part 1
The Customer Experience Today and Tomorrow

Let’s establish something; most companies have the best of intentions. When they open their doors, most businesses are ready and willing to help customers solve their most pressing problems. However, as time goes on and profits become more and more important, something gets lost. The business makes a sacrifice in service here, allows a decrease in quality there—and before you know it, the customer experience has gone downhill. Over time, the small and eager company has turned into a big machine and lost its way.

A company has a bad habit of acting like a flaky person you’re dating. At first the suitor works very hard to win you over. He picks you up on time, brings you flowers, and promises you a wonderful life together. You fall in love, give him a set of keys to your apartment, and tell your family and friends about him. You change your Facebook status. But, in time, he stops bringing flowers, stops showing up on time for your dates, and eventually stops calling. He doesn’t even text. Companies are guilty of similar bad behavior. In the beginning, they work hard to get your attention and your business. They make promises about what life will look like once you use their products. But after you’ve been seduced by the promises, they don’t want to hear from you. They don’t want to spend a lot of time nurturing the relationship, making sure you’re happy and engaged. The attitude of these companies is, “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

Some companies, though, see how successful they can be when they put as much effort into the customer experience throughout the relationship as they did in the beginning. This book is the best dating manual you will ever read, but from a business perspective.

In part 1, we’ll look at the current state of customer experience, the desire of customers to do business on their own terms, and the growing role technology plays in customer experience.

Chapter 1
The Current State of Customer Experience

Have you noticed that most people don’t listen? Think about the dinner parties you go to. Do you find that people ask you a lot of questions, or does it seem that most people genuinely like to talk about themselves? In business, the failure to understand what customers need, or what their experience is, represents the worst offense against customers. Salespeople who talk at customers and don’t listen to what customers need are among the worst offenders.

Listening is hard. It requires an individual to focus and control her urge to talk over the other person. Why do people and companies make the mistake of not listening? Mostly, because it feels good to talk. As humans, we enjoy expressing ourselves, conveying messages, and feeling heard. Listening can be scary. When you ask someone what he wants from you—rather than telling him what he should want—you leave room for the other person to ask for something you can’t deliver. You (the seller) risk not having what the person wants. You could hear no.

Businesses need to be listening every single day because what customers are saying is changing at an increasingly frequent pace. While many companies are listening closely, many are not. In fact, many marketers are using the approach they’ve always used. In a recent Ernst & Young survey on the C-suite perspective, only 31 percent of the 800 C-level executives surveyed said the CMO drove the best marketing practices tailored to constantly changing customers.¹ That means that about only one-third of CMOs listen to and understand customers. The CMO is a key player within the company impacting the customer experience—this should be a major alarm to every CEO today.

A Treasure Trove of Information From Customers

We’re living at a time when there is more free and easily obtained feedback than there has been at any time in the history of the world. We have constant access to a treasure trove of insight about our products, neighboring products, and pretty much anything else we want to know about.

When you read feedback about products, services, or experiences on Amazon, Yelp, or Trip Advisor, you see that consumers are generally complaining that the product or service did not meet their expectations. In his book Customer Experience 3.0, John Goodman talks about the fact that customers are more upset with brands when they feel duped or misled about a product than they are by any other part of the customer experience. More than anything, customers dislike the feeling that you—the brand—assume they are stupid. One of the ways brands do this is by creating one-size-fits-all approaches; by treating customers as if they are all the same, brands end up looking sloppy, with products and services that aren’t relevant for many customers. Perhaps some customers’ needs go unmet altogether. Most customer experiences are created for the masses. One message is sent via a television ad, billboard, or another traditional channel. The point is to reach as many people as possible in one swoop. One message is created for hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions. In your own life, you wouldn’t talk to everyone you come across in the same way. You probably wouldn’t say the same thing to everyone. Why? Because much of the information wouldn’t be relevant for everyone you spoke with. But this is precisely what companies do today.

Customers seek personalized, relevant, and just-in-time messaging. It’s time to move from lazy, one-size-fits-all messaging to tailored, relevant messaging. This is easier said than done, however, and not many companies are doing a good job at it. The way you communicate with your customers has an immense impact on the experience they have. Brands are no longer defined by a single marketing message, but by the daily interactions the customer has with the brand.

There is a customer experience crisis unfolding, and brands don’t seem to know how to fix it. No matter how many articles and books are published, how many studies are conducted, or how many customers complain on social media, brands are still at a loss about how to improve. Even with brands’ unprecedented access to better tools across the organization, mediocrity in customer experience remains the norm.

Mediocrity is everywhere. The brands that don’t pay greater attention to the customer experience will not be around for much longer, and commoditization is the reason these brands will die. Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi write in their book The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty,

Commoditization, not just of products but of brand promises, is one of the unavoidable hard truths of doing business in the twenty-first century. The time from launch to peak of market acceptance to everyone else ripping off your great new idea and calling it their own is shrinking down to almost nothing.²

As soon as you think you have something that sets your brand apart, competitors launch an identical product or service or claim. According to a study conducted by the authors, customers view only 20 percent of corporate brands as “truly differentiated.” Most offerings are very similar, and the bar isn’t set very high because most brands don’t execute well on customer experience.

A brand that is not fully in control of the total customer experience must vet its resellers and partners so that the final product or service is delivered seamlessly. If your company sells appliances, for example, you need to ensure that the delivery and installation company you subcontract to holds itself to the same standards that your brand embraces. When the delivery company’s employees go into customers’ houses, are they professional? Are they personable? Do they reek of cigarette smoke? These things matter.

My husband and I just moved into a new house, and almost every single purchase we made had some kind of problem, from issues with the purchase and installation of shutters to problems getting furniture delivered and getting the house painted. Even beloved electronics giant Best Buy delivered a flawed TV four times. The delivery person would install the flat-screen TV on our wall and turn the TV on, and a purple dot would glare back at us. Another company tried to deliver a couch and thought we wouldn’t notice the huge tear in the fabric. When we went to return the item, the customer service representative told us the company was being bought and would not be able to make any transactions for weeks, maybe longer. Our experience with this particular company got so bad that we asked our bank to use fraud protection to get our money back. Now, that is incompetence you can’t even dream up! Everyone you talk with has stories like these that illustrate the level of dysfunction in our everyday service interactions.

Someone Must Own Customer Experience

For a customer experience program to be effective, the most senior leaders at the company must take ownership of the program. But unless the CEO appoints a chief customer officer, a chief customer experience officer, or even a chief marketing officer who is empowered to get things done for the customer, it’s hard to say who will lobby for the customer across the organization. While it’s wonderful to have a CEO who takes on customer experience, without focus, the priority can be lost among a sea of pressures. Research from companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) shows that 63 percent of CEOs want to rally their organizations around the customer as a top investment priority, but that is easier said than done.³

The problem can generally be traced by to budgets and priorities. Worldwide, brands spend $500 billion per year on marketing and advertising and a mere $9 billion per year on customer service.⁴ A report by vendor Genesys and the Economist Intelligence Unit shows there’s frequent confusion over who is truly responsible for the customer experience.⁵ The report, published in June of 2015, surveyed 516 senior-level executives from twenty-one countries. The vast majority of these (464) were C-suite executives—of whom 165 were CEOs—while the remaining fifty-two respondents were heads of a business unit. According to the study, two in three companies surveyed (63 percent) say that customer experience is a “very important” investment priority. Two in five companies (42 percent) have boosted relevant spending by more than 10 percent in the past three years, a proportion that is estimated to climb to more than half (51 percent) over the next three years (by 2018).

Clearly, businesses believe that customer experience matters. But do they act on it? That depends on who owns it. When it comes to the big question, “Who owns customer experience?” the most successful companies have a CEO who takes ownership of it. The study showed that 58 percent of companies that say they are much more profitable than their competitors report that the CEO is in charge of customer experience. Only 37 percent of less profitable companies say the same. Meaning, if you have a CEO who cares deeply about customer experience and takes it on, your company is going to reap the benefits.

Companies that fail to respond to these changing modes of communication are vulnerable to large-scale customer flight.⁶ Not only that, but the study points to increased competition and the fact that, because of the greater number of service channels, the potential for customer dissatisfaction is also higher. What is telling about the study is the overall lack of accountability when it comes to customer experience. When asked who is leading customer experience transformation initiatives, CEOs say one thing and those who work for them say something different. Seventy-two percent of CEOs say they (the CEO) are in charge of customer experience, but only 27 percent of the other executives surveyed agree that the CEO is in charge of that area.

No wonder customer experiences are, by and large, far from ideal. Too many people are claiming partial ownership over the customer experience, and as a result, nothing is getting done. Smart CEOs who don’t have adequate time to commit to customer experience are delegating, with some of the most forward-thinking companies appointing a chief customer officer, who has real authority to get things done across the organization.

The Importance of a Chief Customer Officer

The chief customer officer represents the customer at the highest levels of the organization. Some chief customer officers are responsible for account management and customer service, while other chief customer officers are free agents who liaise with various departments across the company. Ideally, the chief customer officer spends a lot of time with customers and takes the customer feedback and insights to every department. That way, the entire company is on the same page around customer experience. The more visibility the chief customer officer has across the company, the better. One of the goals of the chief customer officer is to structure the company around the customer. Organizational structure and hierarchy are not the same at every company, however, and some companies may have various influential positions, such as VP of customer experience, chief experience officer, or other more creative titles.

In 2015, the CCO Council’s Annual Chief Customer Officer Study showed continued growth in the number of CCOs at major corporations, with 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies having already adopted the role, a percentage that jumps to 22 percent among the Fortune 100.⁷

The more profitable the company, the more likely it is to have a chief customer officer at the helm. At big companies, it can be hard to get things done, and one highly influential person with budget authority and freedom to move across the organization can cut through much of the bureaucracy. Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer, calls this position the “human duct tape” of the organization. In her book, she quotes the former chief marketing officer and customer experience officer of Walgreens, Graham Atkinson: “The role of the CCO is to drive executive appetite for wanting to know the interruptions in customer’s lives, simplifying how they are delivered and facilitating a one-company response to these key operational performance areas.” ⁸ This is a smart way to describe the role of the CCO. Driving executive appetite for learning about customers’ lives is not easy. How do you get the busiest people within the company to put top priority on something they can’t see every day (customers)? Additionally, how do you get the entire company to care about the many inconveniences and interruptions created in customers’ lives by poor customer experiences? Bliss says that if you reduce or eliminate these interruptions for customers, your business will always thrive.

Involving the Whole Company

The reality of customer experience is that everyone in the company owns it. Unfortunately, because of culture issues, employees often don’t realize that they have a palpable impact on the customer’s experience. Amazing companies have a culture of excellence, but these are few and far between. Face it, it’s hard to achieve a customer-centric culture because it takes effort—especially from leadership—and most leaders don’t want to exert the requisite energy. The CEO must lead by example, sending a message to everyone in the company that customers and the customer experience are of the utmost importance. Here’s an important attribute of a high-performing company: senior leadership doesn’t hide in their offices. It’s critical that senior leadership get out to the “floor,” so to speak, and engage with employees as visible examples of the company’s values.

There is no better example of CEOs engaging with employees in this way than the TV show...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Is Customer Experience—and Why Is It Important?
• Part 1 The Customer Experience Today and Tomorrow
• Part 2 Creating Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experience: D.O.M.O.R.E.
• Part 3 Designing the Customer Experience of Tomorrow
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• About the Author