Customer Experience Patterns Podcast

Kelly Price

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

Welcome back to the CX patterns podcast with Sam stern in this loose threads, missing threads mini episode, I'm returning to my conversation with Kelly Price, where we talked about designing experiences for the peak end rule.

Kelly And I talked to a lot about addressing negative experience peaks. And tackling those first. For many of those negative peaks in the experience, the answer as Kelly said is to fix them so that they are smooth and unmemorable, and that's right. And Kelly had some great suggestions for how to do this. But I also wanted to note that some of these peak moments are avoidable. So you don't have to redesign them. You don't have to fix them. You don't have to obsess over them. You can just avoid them altogether. For example. Heavy equipment manufacturers think caterpillar, John Deere, and similar. They now have sensors on their equipment that collect data and can help predict when key parts will wear out or break. I'm sure there are other examples of this in other industries, too. This is just One I'm familiar with. Anyway, the goal is to use the sensors, to provide forewarning of needed parts, maintenance, or replacement, and to do that proactively. This avoids equipment downtime for the farmer, the construction company, or whomever owns the equipment and completely sidesteps that negative peak of a broken piece of equipment. So imagine that they could have fixed the repair experience. But instead they're avoiding the repair experience. So it's now not only not a negative peak. That you're lessening the severity of, or smoothing out. It's one that you've avoided altogether. And a repair experience like in this example is not only a negative peak for the customer. It's also usually expensive and consuming a lot of resources for the manufacturer. So I wanted to share this example because sometimes the answer to a negative peak is not to fix the moment or , that discrete journey, but to make the moment or that journey irrelevant to the overall experience. Second, a loose thread, something we touched on, but didn't quite cover the point I wanted to highlight today. What gets remembered about the experience are the peak moments, either good or bad, and how the experience ends either good or bad. We talked about that, you know, this. And Kelly alluded to this additional point in the episode related to peak and moments in memory. And I didn't pick up on her point as well as I could've. It's not just how good or bad those moments are that make them memorable. It's also about how they stand out from the rest of the experience. Peaks are peakier. That's a word. When they come out of nowhere. To stick with the metaphor for a second. Mountain peak appears taller. When it's surrounded by a flat plane. Then when it's nestled in among other peaks in a mountain range. So now I can come back to Kelly's advice to address negative peaks first. And in many instances, maybe even most instances. Making them as unMemorable as you can, is the right approach. And then the remaining positive peaks will look even better by comparison. They stand out more. That's it for now. I'll be back with a full episode next week, Kelly Price and I in a second conversation this time talking about design research, another good one with Kelly. Talk to you soon.

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The Digital-First Customer Experience

Joe Wheeler

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

Employee enablement to deliver great customer experiences. If employees don't have information about the customers they're serving or about your intended experience and about how they, as your employees are supposed to deliver their piece of that intended experience.

They're not going to have much chance of success. And further in enablement if their technology, their tools or their training, let them down, well, then it's also unlikely to be a great customer experience. The best customer experiences contain moments of human connection. Your humans, your employees, they need all the support. You can give them to make those moments of human connection Magic.

Employee enablement is a critical often overlooked component of great customer experience. Simply put, without it, you cannot deliver great customer experiences, not for long. I've seen some companies paper over the cracks with a customer centric culture. There was a term for that approach that is pretty fitting. It's called culture driven heroics.

But you rely on your employees to be heroes every day and what happens? They burn out. And then the reality is that the failure of critical systems or the inadequacy of those systems. It can undermine the efforts of even heroic employees, which still leads to bad experiences.

And if systems failures, technology failures, letting down, otherwise customer centric employees, if that sounds like a problem that might've played, some airlines recently, airlines that usually score near the top of the customer experience rankings. Well, trust your instincts.

Foster ownership through customer community. And co-creation, he used the example of VMware, which has a thriving customer community. That is a shining example of the recommendations he made for design strategy. Number four. What I love about this strategy and why I wish I'd brought it up is that it is rare that brands can get on the same side of the table. Metaphorically speaking as their customers.

But a thriving customer community that helps with product Co-creation is certainly one way to do it. When your customers are invested in your success because it's their success, well, here in a different kind of relationship with them, not provider customer, but partners.

I'm not saying that's possible for every company, or in every industry. But it may not be as unlikely as you think. Lemonade, the insurer that Joe featured in his book is an example of a company that aligned its interests with those of its customers through its business model that donation to charities of unused funds means that customers and lemonade are hoping for the same outcome. And in next week's episode, I'll talk about an experience design strategy that some companies are using to find greater alignment with their customers, especially when they can't be sure that all their customers would want the same solution in the design.

There you have it folks, another podcast cliffhanger. You'll just have to come on back next week to hear the rest of the story. Talk to you soon.

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Small world story, and full-circle story. Rick & I met when he was my client at Forrester, and now we were introduced again as people who should be talking. And we have been talking! You'll hear this episode on the Process Renaissance in CX, and then you'll want to find his podcast, CX Passport (links below), and listen to an episode with Rick and I talking about more CX topics.

Rick's Links:

CX Passport YouTube channel youtube.com/@cxpassport

Audio Pod Apple | Spotify or your fave pod site

Sign up for CX Passport newsletter www.cxpassport.com

Accelerate business growth📈 by improving customer experience www.ex4cx.com/services

Rick on LinkedIn

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The varied career paths that lead to becoming a CX professional. The ways those expeirences help you be better at your job. The ways that focusing on customers can help you in other jobs.

Jeff Louden on LinkedIn

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.