A strike of 40,000 Verizon employees could be the best thing that’s ever happened to the telecom company’s customer experience.

That’s not because the managers filling in for the front-line workers are any better at serving customers (a company executive acknowledged as much in a recent Washington Post interview).

Rather, it’s because these managers are getting a first-hand, unvarnished look at what it’s like to be on the front-line.  They’re seeing, with their own eyes, the obstacles that hamper employees’ best efforts to deliver a consistently great customer experience.

Verizon managers and professional staff who normally work with spreadsheets, reports and legal briefs are instead donning call center headsets, laying fiber optic cable and installing Internet service.  And, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, when these organizational leaders temporarily take on a front-line role, they’re spotting a variety of improvement opportunities.

An operations head whose management reports frequently showed wide variations in TV/Internet installation times suddenly saw the reasons why such variations exist – putting him in a much better position to come up with solutions.

An engineer who normally monitored Verizon’s network from an office cubicle quickly discovered how work schedules can be completely disrupted when installers don’t get the information they need (such as whether a customer’s residence has previously been wired for cable or internet).

Front-line annoyances – things that make workers’ jobs harder than they need to be – also came to light, such as how quickly the batteries drained in field technicians’ smartphones and tablets.  (A Verizon manager is now exploring supplying the company’s installers with portable battery packs for their devices.)

What all of these examples illustrate are the inherent limitations of relying on spreadsheets, reports and other traditional management information sources to reveal workplace impediments.

The internal obstacles that undermine a company’s customer experience are frequently rooted in some of the most mundane and unglamorous activities.  They involve things that often don’t make it into a management report or get discussed at an executive staff meeting.

By periodically venturing “into the wild” and stepping into the shoes of their employees, managers can guard against this blind spot.  They can witness what’s really happening on the front-lines, and gain insight that’s difficult to obtain in any other way.

When armed with this unfiltered perspective, managers are much better equipped to develop actionable improvement plans – the kind that don’t just enhance the customer experience, but the employee experience, too.

Don’t wait for a worker strike or some other crisis situation before venturing out to your front-line.  Set aside time now and start walking a few miles in your staff’s shoes.

As Verizon’s managers are fast learning, there’s no better way to understand – and start overcoming – the internal impediments that can sabotage your customer experience.

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has advised thousands of business leaders across some of the world’s foremost brands.

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, or follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult.

Seven years ago, we launched the Customer Experience ROI Study to illustrate the impact of a great customer experience – using the universal business “language” of stock market value.  The analysis has since become one of the most widely cited research studies of its kind.

To date, all of our studies were based on cross-industry customer experience ratings, covering more than 200 companies from over a dozen sectors. But readers of the studies often asked us:  Had we conducted a similar ROI analysis within specific industries?  We hadn’t…  until now.

Watermark Consulting is pleased to release our first sector-specific Customer Experience ROI analysis, covering the insurance industry.  As was the case with our previous studies, the results of this one are sure to make many business leaders rethink their priorities.

This past May, in honor of Mother’s Day, JetBlue released a 3-minute YouTube video paying tribute to mothers who fly with young children:

The video is sure to make you smile, and there’s no doubt it’s a great marketing instrument for the airline.  But what’s also noteworthy about the clip is how it illustrates the importance of understanding your target customer and their state of mind.

As any parent or guardian who flies with little ones knows, it can be a stressful experience (perhaps the understatement of the year).

There are all kinds of fears and negative emotions swirling through one’s head:  Have I packed everything I need?  Will my baby behave on the flight?  Will fellow passengers scowl at me when the child cries?

Understanding your customer’s mindset is an important first step in engineering a brand experience that people will appreciate and seek out in the future.

JetBlue, perennially rated a top airline in customer experience, realizes this.  The fact that they even thought to produce a video highlighting the passenger experience, from a mother’s perspective, is a testament to that.

The key takeaway?  Well, don’t scowl at crying babies and their parents on your next flight, of course.  But equally important:  think carefully about what’s going on in your customer’s head, in order to really figure out how to best serve them.

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has advised thousands of business leaders across some of the world’s foremost brands.

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, or follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult.

Someone’s figured out how to bottle a great customer experience.

No, this isn’t a magic elixir that, when applied to any customer interaction, turns disappointment into delight.  This is, quite literally, a bottle that delivers a great customer experience.

It’s called “ClearRx” and it was developed in 2005 by graphic designer Deborah Adler.  She sought to improve what is actually a pretty crummy customer experience – one’s interaction with a prescription medicine bottle.

Traditional Prescription Medicine Bottles

If you think about it, prescription bottles don’t sport a very customer-friendly design:

• Childproof caps, while great for keeping medicine out of the hands of children, also make it difficult for less dexterous people (many of them elderly) to easily access their drugs.

• The most prominent feature on the prescription label itself is often the pharmacy’s logo, which is actually the least important piece of information for the patient.

• Reading the label requires some mental gymnastics, as the drug name, dosage and intake instructions are printed in a tiny font that meanders around a cylindrical bottle. It’s hardly the ideal platform for easy viewing.

• Color-coded warning stickers (indicating, for example, that the medicine should be taken with food) are typically printed on orange labels, which don’t stand out well on a traditional amber-colored prescription bottle.

• If your household stores prescription drugs in a drawer, good luck finding the right one. Since the drug name is printed on the side of the prescription bottle, you need to pick up and inspect each one in order to locate the right medication for the right person.

• Some of the most important information, such as that about drug interactions and side effects, is usually printed on a separate sheet that’s stapled by the pharmacy to a paper bag. That sheet often gets discarded with the bag, and therefore isn’t readily available when people actually need to consult it.

When her grandmother misread a prescription bottle and mistakenly took pills meant for her grandfather, Deborah Adler decided there must be a better way.  And that’s when she invented the ClearRx system, which was later licensed to Target’s pharmacies.

ClearRx Prescription Medicine Bottles

ClearRx essentially reinvented the prescription medication bottle, creating a far more customer-centric product.  Here’s how Adler did it:

• A reshaped bottle now allows for a flat surface on which prescription information can be printed. No more reading while rotating the bottle.  All the key information is clearly visible to the patient from a single vantage point.  In addition, the drug name is printed on the top of the bottle, as well, so even if stored in a drawer, it’s easy to find the right medication.

• The information architecture of the label itself better aligns with what the patient needs to know. Pharmacy branding takes a backseat to safety.  The top half of the label prominently displays the drug name, dosage information and intake instructions.  The bottom half of the label, printed in smaller type, is reserved for less critical information, such as the quantity of pills and the name of the prescribing physician.

• The drug information sheet (describing interactions and side effects, among other important details) is now neatly tucked behind the prescription label – always easily accessible when you need it. There’s also a rudimentary magnifying glass inserted behind the label, for people who need some extra help reading the bottle.

• Essential warnings, such as whether to take the drug on an empty stomach, are more prominently delineated on the back side of the bottle (instead of crammed onto a small warning sticker).

• The bottle cap was redesigned to still be childproof while allowing for easier access by elderly patients and others with limited dexterity.

• Colored rubber rings attach to the neck of the bottle, allowing each individual in a household to choose an identifying shade so they can spot their prescriptions at a glance – even if the bottles are co-mingled with those of other family members.

ClearRx was a huge hit with Target’s pharmacy customers, many of whom are now lobbying CVS to embrace the design.  (CVS acquired Target’s pharmacies in 2015 and subsequently converted all prescription bottles to their more traditional design, in the name of “cost efficiency.”)

Here’s what you should take away from the ClearRx story:  everything has a customer experience.

Yes, even the act of opening up a prescription medicine bottle is a type of customer experience.  And when such seemingly inconsequential interactions are intentionally engineered, it can distinguish the experience (and the associated company) in the marketplace – as ClearRx and Target so skillfully accomplished.

Think broadly about the types of interactions that constitute your company’s customer experience.  It’s not just about interactions with retail store associates, call center staff, or onsite sales reps.  There are likely more subtle components to the experience that deserve to be managed just as carefully – for example, the act of opening a box of shipped goods, or installing a piece of software, or reading an account statement.

Be deliberate and thoughtful in shaping the design of all of these interactions, always incorporating the perspective of those who actually use your product or service.

The brilliance of ClearRx is that it took a meaningful but overlooked touchpoint and redesigned it with the customer in mind – thereby creating a source of competitive differentiation, where before there was none.

That’s a prescription for success, in any business.

Faced with increasingly commoditized markets, more and more companies are launching customer experience improvement programs to differentiate themselves.  However, there’s something many of these companies don’t yet realize:  the vast majority of their programs will fail.

In a survey of over one thousand companies by communications provider Avaya, an astounding 81% indicated that their customer experience improvement programs had failed to deliver results.

Those are a lot of companies wasting a lot of time and a lot of money on something that isn’t working.

What’s worse, given how these failures typically play out, companies end up losing more than just their investment in a better customer experience.  They lose credibility – in the eyes of their employees, and potentially even their customers.

Launched with great fanfare, most of these programs are left to die a slow death, starved for funding and attention.

What remains strong, however, is the signal that sends to their workforce – confirming the staff’s suspicions that customer experience really wasn’t that important to the company.  These programs become yet another casualty in the long line of corporate transformational changes that, in reality, just turn out to be the “initiative du jour.”

Given how that realization can take the wind out of an organization’s sails, many companies are probably better off never launching a customer experience program in the first place, as opposed to pursuing one halfheartedly and letting it wither over time.

With so many of these programs cratering, it’s no surprise that one of the most common questions companies ask about these initiatives is “what’s the number one driver of success?”  I love that question because the answer is so clear and unambiguous:  it’s executive commitment.

Having witnessed many organizations tread the customer experience strategic path, there’s no doubt in my mind that the unflinching commitment of a company’s senior leadership is the single greatest predictor of success for these programs.

That’s not to suggest that a compelling vision, flawless execution and skillful change management aren’t critical to the journey.  They absolutely are.  But it all has to start with a level of executive commitment that goes beyond mere sponsorship for the customer experience cause.

To be among the 19% of companies that succeed on this journey, what does that required level of commitment involve?  Here are three markers to look for:

#1:  Consistency

If you view customer experience improvement as a project like any other, with a defined beginning and end, then you may want to reconsider this path.

Companies that succeed in this realm recognize the need to embed customer experience in their DNA, to make it an integral and enduring part of how they do business.  That work never ends.  Customer expectations and preferences will always evolve, as will a firm’s products and services.  As a result, fixing, polishing and tuning the customer experience is an ongoing task.

If yours is an organization that easily gets distracted by the “next big thing” – whether it’s Big Data, predictive analytics, AI, or some other shiny object – then that may foreshadow problems down the road.  When it comes to building an effective customer experience improvement program, the importance of consistency – in organizational focus and executive messaging – cannot be overstated.

#2:  Appreciation of Scope

Some business leaders think customer experience initiatives are about a good tagline or a clever marketing campaign.  Others think it’s about sending satisfaction surveys to customers, or putting staff through soft-skills training.

These may be components of a customer experience improvement effort, but they alone hardly constitute a robust one.

Executive support for these programs tends to wane once business leaders realize how comprehensive this work can be.

Creating an environment that cultivates customer-centricity requires setting a myriad of organizational switches and dials in just the right position:  hiring and training practices, performance measurement and recognition programs, compensation and incentive systems, IT infrastructure and business processes, customer research and feedback instruments…  just to name a few.

This is precisely why a superior customer experience accords sustainable competitive advantage – because it’s not as simple as making an advertising shift, revising a training program or installing a new CRM system.  It requires much more holistic change, involving not just customer-facing activities, but employee-facing ones, as well.  Do it right and it can be very difficult for competitors to replicate.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that most organizations don’t have an appetite for such sweeping change.  And that ultimately fuels the demise of many customer experience programs.

#3:  Receptiveness to a New Economic Calculus

Not unlike the customer experience itself, the benefits from these improvement programs tend to cut across organizational silos.

For example, enhancements in the clarity and readability of customer communications (such as contracts, correspondence or bills) may appear, based on traditional business accounting, to drive a net increase in expenses.  What traditional accounting doesn’t easily account for, however, are the savings associated with reduced inquiries from less confused customers.

Effective customer experience design frequently involves upstream improvements that pay dividends downstream, often in a totally different organizational unit, cost center and time period.  That economic calculus can be unsettling for some organizations that are more accustomed to the clear-cut ROIs of office consolidations, lease renegotiations and distribution expansions.

That doesn’t mean the ROI of customer experience improvements is any less compelling (see this research if you need convincing).  It does, however, require a more thoughtful, holistic and long-tailed approach to benefit quantification.

Without executive openness to that kind of economic calculus, it’s likely that an organization’s customer experience projects will be subordinated to other business endeavors, sowing the seeds for the program’s downfall.

Customer experience differentiation is hardly a waste of money.  In a highly competitive marketplace, it is perhaps the best and only way for companies to stand out from the crowd.

Investments in this area, however, do become wasteful – and potentially even harmful – when companies underestimate the commitment and fortitude needed to shape a truly customer-centric organization.

Before embarking on a customer experience improvement program, executives should engage in some soul-searching, looking for those three markers to gauge their personal commitment to this journey.

And if those markers aren’t present, then perhaps the best thing those business leaders can do for their organizations…  is to focus on something else.

[Editor’s Note:  A version of this article originally appeared in Carrier Management magazine.]

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has advised thousands of business leaders across some of the world’s foremost brands.

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult, or sign up for Watermark’s bi-monthly eNewsletter.

Eight years ago, Watermark Consulting launched the Customer Experience ROI Study to illustrate the impact of a great customer experience – using the universal business “language” of stock market value.  The analysis has since become one of the most widely cited research studies of its kind.

We started with a cross-industry study that covered more than 200 companies over a dozen sectors.  We then moved on to our first sector-specific Customer Experience ROI analysis, focused on the insurance industry.

This year we’ve expanded the ROI Study to yet another industry, one that consumers love to hate — airlines. Could there possibly be a Customer Experience ROI in such a seemingly commoditized business?  The answer holds lessons not just for airline executives, but for any business leader who questions the value of customer-centricity.

For all the time and energy that companies invest in improving their customer experience, many are unknowingly sabotaging those efforts.

How?  Simply by using two words which should be stricken from every business leader’s vocabulary – “back office.”

This is a term that many executives throw around without regard to its influence on the culture and mindset of their organization.

Here’s the issue:  Creating a work environment that supports customer experience excellence requires getting everyone in the organization to view their role as a critical part of the customer experience equation.  The moment employees start to feel that their work is invisible to the customer, they then lose appreciation for the impact their role has on the customer experience.

That’s an unfortunate outcome, and one that can undermine employees’ engagement in their jobs.  It’s also based on an inaccurate premise, because every job in a company truly matters.  Every job impacts the customer experience, or at least the staff who deliver it.

Regardless of what business you’re in, or the size of your company, there are always just two roles in any organization:  You’re either serving the customer, or you’re serving someone else who does.  This is true no matter what position you hold or what title you possess.

Within every company there is an internal “value chain” – a set of business processes (let’s call them links in the chain) that, together, form a service or solution for the customer.

Everyone in an organization represents a link in that chain.  Even though your link might not be the one at the end of the chain – the one that actually “touches” the customer – every link still needs to be strong and solid in order to create a positive customer experience.

Those final links in the chain represent what are typically viewed as “customer-facing” roles – sales and customer service, for example.  Individuals in these roles need no reminder that their efforts have a very real and direct influence on customer perceptions.  After all, they interact with customers every day, either in person, on the phone or online.

It’s a different story, however, for those individuals who are in supporting roles which involve little if any regular contact with customers.  Examples of those roles might include transaction processors, fulfillment personnel, manufacturing staff, mail sorters, sales support specialists, marketers, business analysts, and legal/contracting staff.

It is all too easy for individuals in these behind-the-scenes roles to lose sight of how their actions influence the customer experience and shape brand impressions.  That risk is heightened when the “back office” moniker is attached to any employees involved in these types of activities (as often happens with less senior, behind-the-scenes roles).

The term, itself, can have a negative connotation for those to whom it is ascribed (business leaders who use the phrase rarely ask rank and file employees how they feel about it).  It can imply a degree of inferiority, relegating less important and perhaps less polished staff to some “back office” wasteland where they safely perform their duties, shielded from any direct customer interaction.

Beyond the term’s unfavorable connotation, however, is an even more serious problem – its portrayal of any job as one which is seemingly dissociated from the “front office,” where company and customer connect.

That’s a recipe for customer experience disaster, as it robs these individuals of any sense of customer-facing purpose that would help inspire them and inform their behavior.

If you want to create a work environment that encourages customer experience excellence, consider the following actions:

• Never say “back office” again. Strike this term from your organizational vernacular.  It shouldn’t be uttered in hallway conversations or town hall meetings.  It shouldn’t appear in reports or memorandum.  And it most certainly should never be embedded in any position title or job description.  (Search LinkedIn for “Service and Back Office Operations” and you’ll start to get a sense for how pervasive this misguided approach really is.)

• Declare all roles to be either “customer-facing” or “customer-impacting.” Not all employees are customer-facing, but they are all undoubtedly customer-impacting.  That’s the key message which needs to be conveyed to anyone in a role formerly characterized as “back office.”  No matter where an employee sits in the internal value chain, their work influences the customer experience.  Mail sorters, for example, never speak with a customer.  However, if they don’t nail their part of the value chain (promptly delivering incoming customer correspondence to the right area), then the quality of the resulting customer experience suffers.

• Broaden the definition of “customer-facing.” Even if employees don’t have direct contact with a consumer of your company’s products/services, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a customer.  Their “customer” may be an internal one – perhaps a colleague in another department, or a teammate just a few steps away.  Encourage employees to think in terms of the external and internal constituencies they serve.  Then, suddenly, everyone becomes customer-facing in some fashion (i.e., either serving the customer, or serving someone else who does).  That’s a good mindset to promote, because behind every great external customer experience lies a great internal customer experience.

It’s widely accepted that our thoughts shape our language.  We think of something we want to communicate, and then our mind translates that into the words we vocalize.  Less appreciated, however, is the converse concept – that language shapes thought.  This is the notion that the words we use actually influence, if not constrain, our view of the world.

To see how this works in a business context, consider, for example, how an employee’s view of their job differs when they’re called a “food service clerk” versus a “barista,” or a “transaction processor” versus a “service specialist,” or a “staff recruiter” versus a “talent scout.”

These contrasting terms can evoke very different feelings in an individual about their role and its importance, potentially shaping their on-the-job behavior in more (or less) desirable ways.

Words matter, so labeling a role or an entire unit as “back office” can inadvertently create a culture that is anything but customer-centric.

If you’re striving to achieve customer experience excellence, then it’s time to retire the “back office” phrase and start watching your language.

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has advised thousands of business leaders across some of the world’s foremost brands.

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, or follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult.

What’s a great, competitively differentiated customer experience really worth to an insurance provider?

It’s a question that many in the industry struggle with, and it was the spark that led to our very first industry-specific Customer Experience (CX) ROI Study, focused on the Auto and Home Insurance sector.

That was two years ago, and we’ve now revisited the analysis.  The results are as eye-opening as ever.

Not only do Insurance Customer Experience Leader firms continue to outperform their Laggard counterparts, but the margin of outperformance has widened considerably.

The competitive edge enjoyed by Insurance Customer Experience Leaders is not just real, it is strengthening.

Insurers that earn jeers from their customers are falling further behind those that earn cheers.

That’s the key takeaway from Watermark Consulting’s 2018 Insurance Customer Experience ROI Study.

The study, which was last conducted two years ago, seeks to provide insurance executives with a macro understanding of the impact that customer experience has on a company’s fortunes.  This is important information for an industry that publicly affirms the importance of customer experience, but privately struggles to quantify the benefits of such investments.

About the Study

Watermark’s analysis is based on data from what is arguably the most well-regarded source of insurance carrier customer experience rankings – J.D. Power and Associates’ annual Insurance Satisfaction Studies.

The study’s approach was simple:  we calculated the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios, comprised of the Top 5 (“Leaders”) and Bottom 5 (“Laggards”) publicly traded companies in J.D. Power’s annual study.  (A white paper about the study, referenced at the end of this article, includes a more detailed description of how the analysis was conducted.)

We went through the exercise twice – once for Auto insurers (where J.D. Power rankings were available from 2010-2017), and once for Home insurers (where rankings were available from 2009-2017).

In both cases, our model portfolios tracked the stock performance of the carriers for the year-earlier period of their designation as a Leader or Laggard (so, for example, J.D. Power’s 2017 Leaders were used, retroactively, to build our 2016 stock portfolio).

This approach was consistent with our thesis that the market would already be rewarding/penalizing the Leaders/Laggards in the full-year period preceding the release of J.D. Power’s consumer survey (given the customer experience the carriers were already delivering).  It also helped ensure that the model portfolios’ performance was not at all influenced by the publication of the J.D. Power study itself.

The Results

Yet again, the Insurance Customer Experience Leader portfolios far outperformed the Laggard portfolios – and the margin of victory widened considerably as compared to the 2016 study.

Click Image to Enlarge

As the left-hand bar graph in the figure above shows, over the eight-year period studied, the portfolio of Auto Insurance Customer Experience Leaders far outperformed the industry, generating a total return that was nearly double (171 points higher) than that of the Dow Jones Property & Casualty Market Index.

While a few carriers made repeated appearances in the Leader category over the eight years examined, only one, Erie Insurance, earned that distinction for every year of the study.

What’s most striking is the growing chasm between the Auto Insurance Customer Experience Leaders and Laggards.  The Laggard portfolio now trails the Leader portfolio by an astounding 242 points.

As with the Leaders, there was some year-to-year consistency in the Laggards list, with two firms – MAPFRE-Commerce Insurance and The Hanover – showing up in that category every year of the study.

The right-hand bar graph, which shows the analysis for Home insurers, exhibits a similar pecking order as seen with the Auto insurers.

The Home Insurance Customer Experience Leader portfolio outperformed the industry, generating a total return that was nearly double (87 points higher) than that of the Dow Jones Property & Casualty Market Index.

While several Home Insurance carriers made it into the Leader category multiple times, Erie Insurance was again the only one that achieved that distinction for each of the years covered by the study.

The Home Insurance Laggards in this latest study fell even further behind the Leaders, with the cumulative performance gap between the two portfolios reaching 119 points.

Interpreting the Results

This study should give pause to anyone who is skeptical of the value that customer experience differentiation accords to an insurer.

The Auto and Home Insurance Customer Experience Leader portfolios generated average annual returns that were more than double that of their Laggard counterparts.  The results suggest that carriers which consistently excel in customer experience tend to be viewed by the market as more valuable entities than those that do not.

That enhanced value is a function of the Leaders seeing a rise in revenue, thanks to happy, loyal customers who spend more with them, stick around longer, and refer others.

It’s also a function of a more competitive cost structure, as the Leaders can spend less on new business acquisition, due to all the referrals they receive.  In addition, because these firms’ happy customers complain less, there’s not as much stress on their operating infrastructure, which also helps keep expenses in check.

The Laggards, of course, are weighed down by just the opposite factors – depressed revenues, high customer churn, and profit-sapping, strained infrastructures.

What was notable in this year’s study was that the disparity in performance between the Leaders and the Laggards wasn’t just striking – it was also growing by double digits.

This suggests that the competitive edge enjoyed by Insurance Customer Experience Leaders is both real and strengthening.  That should certainly concern any carrier who frequently finds itself in the Laggard category, because these results do not bode well for firms that struggle to endear themselves to customers.

Those angling to break into the Leader category should be forewarned:  there is no “silver bullet” for achieving customer experience excellence.  Latching on to some buzzword –  Big Data, InsurTech, AI, etc. – won’t get you there.  Neither will advertising how great your customer experience is (the reality will always overshadow the marketing).

Companies that do customer experience well (inside and outside the insurance industry) recognize that there are no shortcuts.  Customer experience isn’t some “initiative du jour” for them.  It’s not just part of their business, it is their business.

Those leading firms often rely on a handful of time-tested experience design principles (see the white paper referenced below for examples).  However, at their core, what makes the Leaders different is their unwavering commitment to always start with the customer – understanding their needs and wants, their frustrations and aspirations – and then working backwards to craft a distinctive, impressive end-to-end experience.

Fundamentally, it is this outside-in philosophy that gives these companies their competitive edge.  And, as this study so clearly illustrates, the strength of that advantage should not be underestimated.

A white paper describing Watermark Consulting’s 2018 Customer Experience ROI Study (Insurance Industry Edition) is available for complimentary download at http://bit.ly/CX-ROI-INSURE.

[Editor’s Note:  A version of this article originally appeared in Carrier Management magazine.]

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has advised thousands of business leaders across some of the world’s foremost brands.

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult, or sign up for Watermark’s eNewsletter.

No matter how hard you try to improve your company’s customer experience, the reality is that your customers won’t remember much of it.

That’s because our brains aren’t wired like a video camera, recording every second of every experience.  Rather, what we remember are a series of snapshots.

And those snapshots aren’t taken at random.  The camera shutter opens to capture the peaks and valleys in the experience – the really high points and the really low points.  Most everything else, all the parts of the experience that are just “meh,” fade into the background and disappear from our memory.

So, our recollections are less “streaming video” and more “still photograph.”  But what does this have to do with the customer experience?  Well, creating a great customer experience is a lot about shaping memories.

In order for a business to derive strategic and economic advantage from its customer experience, people need to remember it positively.  When a friend or colleague asks you – “what do you think of [Company X]?” – your response is grounded in your recollection of the experience, which is different from the experience itself.

That’s because your assessment of the experience, the basis for repurchase and referral behavior, won’t be derived from some meticulous calculation of the ratio between pleasantness and unpleasantness.  Rather, you’ll be making that judgement just based on the snapshots that your memory has taken from the encounter.

This is why companies that excel at customer experience recognize that they’re in the business of shaping memories, not just experiences.

They capitalize on cognitive science to influence what people will remember, strategically creating “peaks” in the experience that will outnumber and outweigh the “valleys.”

Their success in this regard is why customers recall the experience so positively, even if every portion of it wasn’t “delightful.”  (Take, for example, a visit to Disney World:  Disney’s customers spend a lot of time waiting in line at the park, but when they return home from their vacation, it’s not the lines they remember — it’s the attractions.)

There are a variety of strategies that great companies use to positively influence customer memories, but they all essentially involve creating more and higher peaks, as well as fewer and less deep valleys.

Great companies also recognize that it’s alright if there are parts of the customer experience that are just average (as long as they don’t involve interactions which are vital to customers).  What’s more important is to make certain there are at least some parts of the experience that will generate those positive, memorable “peak” snapshots.

And, conversely, one must address aspects of the experience that may be leaving customers with memorable (but negative) “valley” snapshots.  (Note that those valleys don’t necessarily need to be turned into peaks, but they at least need to be moved closer to “sea level.”)

As you work to differentiate your company in the marketplace, keep an eye out for those peaks and valleys.  They’re the features of your customer experience landscape that will shape people’s perceptions and, ultimately, their brand loyalty.  And that’s something worth remembering.

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Jon Picoult is Founder & Principal of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees.  Watermark has helped some of the world’s foremost brands manage the peaks and valleys in their customer experience. 

Contact Jon at www.watermarkconsult.net, follow him on Twitter @JonPicoult, or sign up for Watermark’s eNewsletter.