service

The employee experience needs to adapt to the employee life cycle

September 2, 2017By Mike Hohnen

The classical way to define the employee life cycle is: attract, recruit, onboard, develop, retain and transition. But that is the HR perspective, not the employee’s perspective. And as good service designers, we know that we need to consider the perspective of the ‘customer’ or user if we are going to be successful with our journey/experience design.

The life cycle will vary from industry to industry and of course from employee to employee. So good experience design would require that we do more research on this, in order to understand what it looks like in our case.

But here is what it might look like from an employee’s perspective.

Is this for me?
Attracted to a job proposition and wondering if it is for me.

Will I make it?
Entering into the application, selection, interview, and final negotiation process.

I made it!
The excitement of being chosen and starting the new job. Flooded with new impressions and ‘firsts’.The lunch canteen is amazing. Loving the attention I get as a newbie. (Or so one hopes.)

Am I good enough for this?
The first feelings of being overwhelmed. Am I good enough for this? Imposter syndrome. Do I belong here? Is this really for me? Feeling very much outside my comfort zone. Should I bail out and limit the damage?

Challenging but do-able
Feeling more secure in the saddle. Challenged and on the edge of my comfort zone, but in an exciting way. Giving the job everything that I have, and enjoying it.

Cruising – no sweat
The daily routine sets in, and most of what I do is well within my comfort zone. (Canteen is not nearly as nice as when I started.) Engagement may start to regress, through lack of challenges.

Is this it?
The first doubts start creeping in. I am always well within my (now shrinking*) comfort zone. This is no longer meaningful for me

From here there are two options: change your job or stagnate completely.

Experiences are all about managing customers’ emotions, as we have seen in previous blog posts on the subject of Service Design Thinking. The same principle applies to employee experience design. We need to understand the emotions that the employee is going through at each stage of the cycle.

When we review the above life cycle it becomes clear that the overall principle we need to look at is where people are in terms of comfort zones. Growth and development are keys to engagement and enthusiasm. But learning and growth happen just outside our comfort zone. We have the misconception that if we do the same thing for a long time we will get better and better at it. Not true. Research shows that, if anything, we stagnate or regress*. (Could you pass a driving test today? Probably not. See what I mean?) In order to get better we need to challenge ourselves and make a deliberate effort to improve. On the other hand, if we get too far outside our comfort zone we trigger fear, and then all learning and development stops as we move into “fight or flight” mode.

Engagement is essentially the product of the accumulated emotional experience. It is what we in a service profit chain terminology would call content. It is different from context (environment, salary and work conditions), which forms the basis of satisfaction but does not produce engagement. We can all have tricky and less than satisfying days, just as we can have fabulous days. But over time the key to engagement is: is this meaningful for me overall? Do I regularly find that I am at the edge my comfort zone, in a constructive and challenging way?

So the key to engagement and retention is to create an environment where the employee can safely switch back and forth between “challenging but do-able” and “cruising, no sweat” modes.

When looking at the employee life cycle in this way, it also becomes clear that as a manager you have a huge responsibility to know where your employee is in the cycle, and to do what you can to support that person in the best possible way. And that may even include helping an employee to move on to a new and more challenging position, if you have no more challenges to offer.

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

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

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!

The real key to creating the eternally fantastic experience

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

The Kano model teaches us that a service experience has 3 layers. There are basic attributes that need to be in place and that all services in a given category need to have to even qualify as a service. Then there are the performance features, attributes that define the better experience from the very basic experiences. And finally, there is a category of attributes that we call delighters. Things that make our most loyal customers come back again and again. Not only do they come back, they also tell all their friends.

But as we saw in my previous blog post, the trouble with delighter is that they have a tendency to fade over time. There is this notion of drift. Free high-speed internet in a cafe is a great example of this. So this puts all service providers under pressure to constantly innovate. They need to come up with new ways to delight their audience or risk fading into oblivion.

But there is actually another way to do it. There is one type of delighter that somehow never goes stale, that always stays fresh, and that is incredibly difficult for your competition to copy.

The key to understating this is likability.

Think about your own patterns. There are some services that you’re frequent not because of their physical attributes or technical specifications. You may even visit these services despite them not being quite up to par on some of these physical attributes. But there is one or often a whole crew of people that you find likeable. When I lived in Cape Town, we often used to go to Roberto’s. It was not the smartest cafe in town. It was also not the most elaborate culinary experience. But Roberto’s had one thing none of the smart cafes could match; there was Roberto and Roberto was immensely likable. Ah, you may be thinking, but that is a question of DNA, the Italians, the Greeks they know how to do to that, the rest of us don’t have those genes.

Not true.

As Rohit Bhargava explains in his lovely book Likeonomics, research has made the secret available. We know the components of likability and we can apply them to our own way of working and when can train our crew to practice these principles as well.

The key ingredients are: Truth, Relevance, Unselfishness, Simplicity, and Timing.

– Truth: you trust them. When the waiter says the special today is delicious, you know he would not say it if he did not actually mean it. He knows you and when he says you won’t enjoy that wine, you are so grateful

– Relevance: The service provider is not trying to upsell you like a robot (I so hate that expression “upsell”). They make relevant suggestions that actually enhance your experience.

– Unselfishness: They go out of their way no matter what to make sure that you have a great time, even if it is not always the most convenient for them. A hotel where I have conducted workshops recently has two crews working the restaurant. One crew always sets the lunch table for my group in the window area where there is a pleasant view and lots of light. But it is the furthest from the kitchen. The other crew always sets the lunch table at the other end of the restaurant, not nearly as nice. But it’s closer to the kitchen. One crew is likeable, the other one much less so. It comes through in all the little details of how they work because likeable is also an attitude.

– Simplicity. As my vegetarian chef friend says to create a great salad, use only three ingredients; that is what makes it delicious and elegant. As opposed to the salads where they dump the whole fridge into your salad bowl, they mean well I know, but…

– Timing: The person servicing you understands empathy. They are aware of what is going on for you and they adapt their service delivery to suit you. They understand the difference between coming in for dinner before a movie and coming in for dinner to celebrate your spouse’s birthday. And that is all about timing.

Now think again about some of those service experiences that you keep returning to again and again. I will bet you that it is because they are likeable.

And if you can implement these basic ingredients into your service experience, you have discovered the Holy Grail of delivering fantastic service experiences. The concept is simple. The execution is what makes it hard.

Check out the book: Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action

If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

You can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon 8WG55DP7C3. This is only available for a limited number of 30 people so first come first serve!

Download the book now!

The paradox of becoming a perennial service experience

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

I spotted at least 10-15 new restaurants, cafes and other food related concepts on my walk downtown yesterday. I love the raw courage, energy and pure optimism many of these new service ventures exude. They are brave because the reality is that by next summer, most of them will be struggling and many of them will already be gone.

And then once in a while, there is a survivor, a business idea that makes it through that first critical 2-year hurdle and becomes a viable stable business. But that is just the first hurdle, the real test is to make it past the 5-year mark and beyond.

So what does it take?

You need to do two things equally well. On the one hand, you need to be extremely consistent in the way you deliver your product and at the same time, you need to be constantly renewing and innovating. That is the wicked paradox and that is why it is so hard to do.

One way to understand this is to use the Kano model.

Quickly explained, you could say that our goal is to reach total satisfaction, and avoid any dissatisfaction. In order to reach that goal. I will need to ‘implement something’. Certain things need to be in place.

If we stay with the simple example of the coffee shop, there are certain basics that need to be in place in order for you as a customer to even consider this a coffee shop. Tables, chairs, coffee, decent hygiene. If these basic are not there and well functioning, you would not even consider setting foot there. But that does not mean that more tables and chairs and scrubbing the floor even cleaner are going to attract even more customers.

It will take something more than just the basics.

You will need to implement attributes that we could call performance items. For a cafe to be considered a possible option for me. it would need to have high-quality coffee, friendly helpful staff, a selection of light bakery items etc..

This, of course, is individual and subjective. Now in my case, I can easily think of a dozen coffee shops that would fulfill these performance criteria. But there are a few coffee shops in town that I will actually go out of my way to visit. Not only do they get the basics right, they also fulfill my performance criteria AND they have something that delights me, a feature that I find unique and special for this place and that few others have in the same way.

But these needs are layers in order of priority. One layer builds on the next. It’s no use focusing on the delighters and neglecting the basics.

So the need for consistency is about the ‘basic’ and especially the ‘performance’ items. If they are not stable, you’ll very soon get tired of a place. If most days the coffee is great but sometimes it’s not, that is the end of that. You find somewhere that is consistent. Because the main reason we come back to a service experience is that we would like more of what we had on the previous visit. This is a fundamental customer need that we must never forget as service providers.

But at the same time, in the Kano model, there is also this notion of ‘drift’. Maybe, 6-7 years ago what really delighted you about a certain cafe was that it had free, no code high-speed internet connection (and it was one of the few that offered this in your area). Then 2-3 years ago, you started thinking of the free high-speed internet as a performance item, most of the good cafes had that. And today you probably consider that internet connection is as basic as the tables and chairs, and if it is slightly inconsistent in its performance, you will switch to a cafe that does have a stable internet connection.

So the service attributes that start out as delights, over time drift and become first performance items and then just basic. The reason for this is that customer expectation mature and competition is constantly copying the best delighters from each other. That puts us under constant pressure to renew ourselves to continuously think up new delighters while skilfully maintaining our performance and basic attributes.

This over time becomes a delicate balancing act. What to add, what to maintain and what to let go. It can only be done successfully by being very ‘close’ to our customers. We need to fully understand why they chose us, and how their preferences are evolving!

If we are successful doing that, we achieve the nirvana of a great service concept and become perennial. My favourite example of this is the Danish Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, it has existed for more than 50 years. There are certain things that are rock solid consistent and at the same time, they are always reinventing themselves. Brilliant!

If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

You can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon 8WG55DP7C3. This is only available for a limited number of 30 people so first come first serve!

Download the book now!

How is customer value created? And who does it?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Service

In a previous question, we looked at what value is to a customer, how they calculate it in their mind if they received value or not. In this post, we will look at how and by whom is the value then created?

If we go back to the basic definition of service, then we know that Service = Result – Experience.

The experience part is relatively straightforward. We need to provide a good experience at all the touch points and most reasonably successful service organisations understand that.

We can get back to how to do this in a future post. But what truly separates the great from the good is their understating of the result bit.

If I walk in to a store to purchase a hammer of a certain size and make, and I leave the store with exactly that hammer then it is relatively easy. My primary result was to purchase a hammer and that is what I did.

But what is the result that I am looking for when I have a two hour layover in an airport? Or what is the result that I am looking for when I as the CEO organises an offsite meeting for my top ten managers at a conference center? What is the result I am looking for when I check in to a hotel?

The mediocre service providers assume that it is the primary product that is the result. The bed to sleep in. A conference room with a projector etc. But that is not the point. The hotel bed is the solution to a need, and the need may be a good night sleep. The conference room is the solution to a need that could be about undisturbed workspace with no distractions.

When I say ‘could be’, it is because we can’t be sure. Most of these service needs are highly subjective and individual.

So we have two choices. We can give everybody the standard solution and hope that it covers some or most of their needs. Or we can take pride in discovering what the real result is that they are looking for and deliver a customised solution.

When I explain this during my Service Profit Chain seminars, I often hear grows of protest at this idea: “But we don’t know. How on earth should we know what the need behind a conference room booking is other than they obviously want a conference room? We have hundreds of guests each day, how are we to understand what each and everyone’s different needs are. How are we going to do that?”

It quite simple: Ask!

Initiate a conversation that tries to explore and uncover what the need is behind the request for a product. Just like your doctor does. You don’t go to your doctor and say hey could you give me a box of the blue pills, they were wonderful last time. No, your doctor will investigate, and question and use his intuition and experience in order to determine what he thinks is the real need. Once that is identified, he prescribes the best product to solve the need.

That is exactly what our best service providers do as well. What makes them outstanding at their craft is that they investigate, question and use their experience and intuition in order to understand what the real need is. Once they understand that, then they use their professional expertise and knowledge of their product to propose the best possible solution to exactly that need. And funnily enough, that always creates an exceptionally happy customer. Go figure.

If it is a complex service delivery then it requires a lot of time and effort. If it is a simple service delivery, it’s easier to do. Here is a simple example:
Two people come into our restaurant and ask for a table for two. Seated, we give them the menu and let them know we will be back shortly. We come back. They order. Food arrives. They eat, pay and bye bye. Standard solution, that was the product the client asked for. they were not unhappy you could claim.

Let’s rewind.

Two people come into our restaurant and ask for a table for two. Seated, we give them the menu and ask so have you been here before? Their answer will give us valuable information about what’s next to say (Do they need help in understanding our restaurant concept / menu or do they know it well and need help to learn about new initiatives specials etc.?)

Then, we ask casually: So you look really happy tonight are you celebrating something? With a bit of luck, we get some really valuable information back:
a) Oh no we just escaped from the kids and we are off to a movie (Meaning they are on a limited timeframe and we need to adapt to that.)
b) Yes we are actually. It’s my wife’s birthday today. (Meaning they are here for the evening and they would like it to be special somehow. Just sticking a flare in their dessert is already a much better experience than the standard solution we started with if you get my point.)

A skilled service provider will ensure that they not only have the evening they dreamed of but they will probably also spend more than they would have if we had not had this opportunity to really understand their need. The better we understand the more values we create.

And that brings me to favourite peeve. I am not mad about the expression ‘Up-sell’. It sounds like we are force feeding them more than they need. But I do encourage the service sale, which is the sale you make once you have understood that here is a deeper need than what was originally voiced by the customer. By letting them spend more on achieving their real need, you are giving them fantastic service.

So how is value created? By uncovering the true need: Understanding what is the real result they are looking for and then customising your delivery to fulfill that need in the best possible way.

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 post, 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.

Why the Service Profit Chain concept is more important now than ever before?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Service Business

Check out Google trends, the interest in customer service and customer experience is steadily rising year by year and has been for the past 5 years.

Why?

Because we live in an age of abundance – this is one of my key points when I give live presentations. By abundance I mean that there is too much of everything. There are more hotel rooms, restaurant seats, cars for hire or consultants etc. than the market actually needs. So we are all trying to survive in a hyper-competitive environment.

In a hyper-competitive environment, it is not enough to try and compete on product specifications. Because within a given price bracket, the specifications for most product are more or less identical. So in order to differentiate, we need to look at the experience and that typically means that we add some service components.

On top of that, we are rapidly moving away from products and into services (Just think cars, in a few years when cars become self driving, they will no longer be products but we will see them as a service). So society is moving to service dominant logic. And when products are turned into services, the focus shifts, it is not about the product spec but the customer need.

If we want to compete on experience and service, we need to focus on the interaction between the frontline staff and the guest/customer – what we also call the touch points. That is the critical interface – that interaction can lift what is otherwise just a bland run of the mill experience into a memorable experience. And when that happens, we create loyalty. High customer loyalty is the key profits a growth.

So some companies launch major initiatives around creating loyalty. They see that as their main objective.

But that is only because they are not paying attention to the principles of the Service Profit Chain – in a sense they have got the wrong end of the stick.

There is no shortcut to the profits and growth. You need to take the long haul and that starts with creating an inspiring and engaging workplace, and that is what the concept of the Service Profit Chain can help you do – and that is why understanding this key framework is the best way to survive in a hyper competitive environment.

Check our my course The Service Profit Chain explained!

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Progress drives engagement – So how do you focus on progress?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Progress

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win, can make all difference in how they feel and perform.

The Progress Principle

This quote which makes so much sense to me brings us to another aspect of not just why we need to focus on developing the people around us, but also how we can do it.

Focus on progress

In order to progress, we need a baseline to progress from. Once we have a baseline, we can start thinking about what we need to learn or practice in order to get better.

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

So in order for our people actually to learn they need to:

Have an awareness of the gap
Be willing to declare their incompetence (I don’t know how to do that.)
Commit to learning

(I have written about this in a previous post some time ago.)

So if I sneak into your business and tap any one of your team members on the shoulder and ask them: “What are you working on at the moment in order to get better?”, or I ask them: “In what ways does your boss feel you have made progress last month?”, do they know?

Or is progress something that is randomly observed and then celebrated: “Oh look isn’t this nice!”?

Focusing on progress is an important part of your leadership role. And your most important tool for this is not a dashboard in excel but conversations, one-on-one conversations (According to Gallup research, team members who have no or very few one-to-one sessions with their direct supervisor are 67% more likely to be disengaged at work. I mention this just in case you have the notion that one-on-one is a waste of time and it is easier to tell them all at once.)

If you happen to be a manager of managers, this is even more import – you are the role model. If you are not having one-to-one conversations (about progress) with your direct reports, there is little chance that they are having them with their team members. In fact, if you are not talking to them about how they are progressing with their approach to manage progress with their team, I am pretty sure it is not happening at all.

How to structure an engaging conversation

What would be a good way to structure these conversations?

Establish the gap. Once we have a gap, we can establish a goal. Moving toward our goal is what progress would look like. Then we can have a chat about so what is going on now compared to that goal. Once we agree on how what is going on is different from the goal, then we can talk about what options there could be in order to make progress towards the goal. Finally, we pick an action and commit to doing that.

The following conversation will be a follow up / feedback on how this is going. If you are familiar with coaching, you will have recognised that what I have described here as a framework is in fact the GROW coaching model – you can check it out in more details HERE.

In any case, in my upcoming course The Team Leaders’ Toolbox, we will be exploring this model more in details. If you would like to be notified when we launch that, sign up with the link below!

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Teams are organic systems, and therefore, by definition unstable.

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team member

As we continue to explore team leadership as different from team management, we now need to look at another aspect of the team.

A team is also a system. And when we look at it from that angle, we need to recognise that systems come in many forms. One way to look at them is as either mechanical or organic. Mechanical systems are things like computers, cars and factories. Mechanical systems are by definition stable. You may feel that your car is moody – but that is probably more about you than the car. The car works or it does not work. If you stress it, it continues to work up to a point and then it snaps and is kaput.

Human beings – the core elements of your team are organic systems, as are cats, cauliflower or caterpillars. And organic systems are by definition unstable. They are always in transition from one state to another. Humans, go from happy to excited to sad. From wide awake to drowsy. From enthusiastic to reluctant and back again, on and on it goes. The only constant is change.

If we try and handle this instability with just management tools, we quickly get into trouble. The whole principle of management is that we can set up rules, and ways of doing things that can be replicated every day no matter what. Great idea if you are working with a stable system – quite tricky if you are working with an unstable system. Add to that, the complexity that these team members are not transitioning from one stage to another in an orderly and synchronised manner. While A is happy, B is frustrated, and C is indifferent. And tomorrow that may well be the other way round. It just depends…

The instability is not completely random. We typically shift to a new state as a result of some stimulus. This can be a change in weather, a remark from a colleague, a difficult task etc. the list is endless. Here you see the big difference with mechanical systems. Your car does not get sad when it rains, happy when we are going downhill – or frustrated by all the bigger cars on the road today. It just does its car thing in the same state no matter what.

Now all this may seem obvious to you. But in my day to day work as a coach, I keep running in to leaders who are assuming that everyone on their team is operating like a car and therefore have two states ‘off’ and ‘on’.

First step is to acknowledge and accept that this is what is going on. Learn to live with the fact that everyone around you is basically unstable – including you.

Second, if you are the kind of leader who is highly volatile or moody or otherwise prone to dramatic shifts in your states, you need to learn to manage your own states (I will be giving an online course on that in beginning of the New Year).

Thirdly, now that you are aware that this is what is going on, you need to help your team members better manage their states.

We will look at that in next week’s post.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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