Digital-First Customer Experiences: Loose Thread / Missing Thread

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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