Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

customer journey

Your customer experience will never be better than what your employee experience was designed to deliver.

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Service Design Thinking is a fantastic toolkit for improving our customer service experiences. Mapping out customer journeys, identifying touch points and understanding different customer personas is going mainstream as everyone chases the elusive super loyal customer.

But did we get the wrong end of the stick?

Let just backtrack for a moment and ask ourselves the fundamental question: why are we so focused on the ‘experience’?

Because in order for something to qualify as service, it has to fulfill two criteria.

It needs to deliver a certain result and there needs to be a positive experience.

If you walk into your favourite coffee shop and they serve you a horrible wishy-washy cup of latte, the setting may be nice and the lady may be ultra friendly but your basic result was not delivered.

Or the other way round.

The coffee is great, but the place is filthy and noisy, the lady is rude. The result was delivered but the experience was horrible. You could just as well have made that cup of coffee at home and saved yourself quite a few bucks. When you opted for going to the coffee shop, you were looking for a service, not just a product.

Ok so far so good. Sometimes it can be sobering to get back to basics.

So assuming that you know how to deliver the result part of whatever service you offer,  let’s examine the experience part. As Seth Godin says, customer service is all about changing feelings. Experiences are emotions in action. No emotions, no experience. How was your train commute to work today compared with the same day last year? Ehhh?? Most probably you can’t remember because if it was just the way it always is, there was no emotion. You have not stored it in your memory as ‘an experience’ (Technically everything is an experience but we only retain in our memory the positive and the negative ones, the rest is auto-deleted).

“The only purpose of customer service is to change feelings.”
– Seth Godin

So as you look at your customer journey and map out the touch points, it’s a good idea to also map the emotional highs and lows. You can start out by estimating them but eventually, you will need to research and confirm your assumptions.

Let’s map a simplified example of a customer journey most of us can relate to, the airport check in: Arrive at airport, check in on the touch screen, walk through security, walk to the gate, board using automated boarding card verification, greeted by stewardesses, Settle into a seat.

What are the potential emotional highs and lows that we could work on to ensure that we maximise the experience? The touch screen provides no emotion unless it is not working, so it is just a negative risk. Walking the hallways can at best be neutralised by making the walk pleasant on the eye and informative. Boarding card verification is again automated. The automated or physical parts of the journey we can work on to eliminate negative emotions but they are hard to turn into over the top emotionally positive experiences.

The the two touch points that have the potential to provide emotional highs are the security check and the welcome onboard greeting by the hostess. The critical variable in achieving this is obviously the human being involved in these two touch points. The customer experiences are in their hands and totally dependent on how they feel (Technically we call that engagement, but that is actually just a fancy word for their feelings toward the job.) If they feel anything less than enthusiastic, they will deliver the minimum required to keep the job.

But, you may say,  we give them a service manual and they get the onboarding service course, they know what they are supposed to do. Yes, they know, but knowing and doing is not the same thing.  They will do or not do depending on how they feel.

In order to understand what drives their emotions, we need to map their employee experience. What is it like to be an airport security agent or a flight attendant? How does their employee journey unfold on a daily basis? What are the emotional highs and lows? Do we know and what can we do to maximise the highs and eliminate or neutralise the lows? (In a Service Profit Chain context, we would call this improving internal quality.)

If you are really serious about delivering best in class customer experiences, you need to start at the other end and look at what kind of employee experience you are providing that is your foundation.  Great service design pasted on top of mediocre employee experiences is like trying to paint over the rust spot on a used car.

You can download the Dream Team Checklist below and benchmark yourself!

 

 

What is our biggest challenge when we map our customer journeys?

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Customer Journey

The short answer to that is that we are deeply biased. Despite all our good intentions about delivering superb customer service, we time and again end up seeing the situations from our own point of view. And using that point of view, we make assumptions about what we think the customer is experiencing. But unless we actually walk in their shoes, we have no clue what they are experiencing.

I see this time and again when I give workshops that introduce Service Design to groups of service providers. In order for them to really understand what this is about, I let them try it for real. So we pretend that they are a group of city tourism planners that need to improve the tourism experience in our city. In order to do that, I let them choose a persona situation and set up their hypothesis (or assumption) for this experience.

One team of three said that navigating the Copenhagen subway is very hard if you don’t speak Danish. Another team of three had the assumption that tourists easily pick the wrong kind of restaurants and end up in the tourist traps. And other groups pick other similar situations that they felt had some problems seen from a tourist point of view. So we sent them out for a 3-hourr field study. Armed with just their iPhones, we asked them to bring back proof in the form of pictures or recorded testimonials that confirmed their basic assumption (so that we could start working on ideas for improvements).

So what happened?

None of the teams could prove their assumption to be correct, none. What they thought a tourist experience was like (here in their own home city) was nowhere near what the tourists said they experienced.

So then I had to ask them: So how many of the assumptions that you have made about how your customer experience your service do you think are accurate?

Food for thought: How can we test our own assumptions about our own service product?

The same way as we did with the tourists. We get out of the office and we observe, document and collect lots of testimonials in the actual situations (not post-experience 6-page surveys, please). With that raw data, we can now start truly talking about what we need to do to improve our various touchpoints.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that ground work, your next best solution is to ask a group of students (Anthropologists or service designers) and have them do the real-time observations for you.

Map out the guest journey. Record your assumptions at the critical touch points: “Our breakfast is the best in town.” or “Our meeting facilities are perfect.”; “Guests think our coffee shop has the perfect selection.” Now ask the researchers to prove you right if they can.

Don’t forget: Assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future’s posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.