Cracking Employee engagement through Leadership

It’s tough to get employees engaged but, when you do, it’s worth its weight in gold… let me tell you a story about how I achieved this to great effect…

A number of years ago, back in my corporate career, I was asked to take over 20 call centers. The previous manager had been asked to move on, with good reason. He was a very poor leader. He thought management was about telling people what to do, measuring numbers and treating people as second class citizens. He was ‘old school’ and ran the place with a rod of iron. All this culminated in a poor performing organization whose people were demoralised. I remember finding out his office wasn’t even in the call centre – it was on the other side of town as he wanted more room! He rarely saw his people and when he did all he did was shout and tell them how poor they were doing!

His views of leadership and mine were very different.

My view of leadership has always been one of being inclusive. I believe everyone is equal, everyone should speak their mind, and they just have a different job to do. Achieving consensus, though, can be very powerful. I outline my thoughts on leadership in this blog, 6 secrets of success .

When I started I knew I had to break down the barriers between management and the teams. For example, I decided not to use the previous manager’s office; I worked at a desk with everyone else in the call center as I wanted to be accessible to everyone. I undertook the principles of MBWA, ‘Management By Wandering About’. This is not talked about much today but to get people engaged it is important to just spend time wandering around chatting to people.

As I got to know everyone I discovered some really great people who had a great deal of potential but they were being down trodden by the previous management, so I introduced a program I called ‘Releasing your potential’ to try and get over the message. The strange thing was even though I instituted a number of changes to ‘free the people’ they were not responding as fast as I had expected… I wondered why….

One day I was in my back yard with my kids. That morning I had spent time erecting more fences so that when we let their rabbits out of their hutch they had the whole of the yard to play in. I was looking forward to seeing what the rabbits did. I had expected they would see the space they had to run about in and shout ‘Wahoo!” look at all this space! (or whatever the equivalent is in rabbit language!). But they didn’t. When I took them out of their hutch and set them on the ground they just sat there. I left them and went to sit back in my chair and watch them. They didn’t move!

After some time one rabbit took a few steps forward, and then a few more as he started to explore the new area. The other rabbit, wandered back into the cage!  I reasoned it must have felt safer there, somewhere familiar.

As I sat there looking at this unfolding before my eyes it came to me that the people in the call center we were like my kid’s rabbits! There were a few of my team that were slowly embracing the changes and the freedom; they were taking a few tentative steps into the back yard.  Many of the team, though, were waiting to see what was happening and questioning if I really meant all these things, deciding if they liked it or not, seeing what other people were doing before venturing one way or another. It was also obvious some didn’t like the freedom at all. Why? Because with freedom came responsibility. Freedom meant they needed to use their brains and take responsibility for their decisions. They liked it back in the hutch, where everything was certain. An example of this was when I started working in the call center there would be a queue of people asking me questions. It’s not that they didn’t know the answer, in fact they knew much more than I did as I hadn’t managed a call center before. It was because they didn’t want to take responsibility for their actions.  I quickly learnt to say, ‘Do whatever you think is right’. It was amazing to see people’s faces. They were stunned. They preferred to be told what to do; they preferred the hutch, life was simpler then but I had thrown their hutch or cage away. A couple of people resented it. It has to be said that some of these people didn’t make it through the transition. They left to find other cages to live in. Unfortunately there were still a number out there in other organizations!

Over the following months I continued with the ‘Realize your potential’ program. When people made mistakes I didn’t shout at them, I used it as a learning opportunity. I replaced the managers who were still ‘old school’. I took a gamble on one of the call center agents who I thought would make a good manager. She showed drive and commitment to make the change. That turned out to be a great decision. She is a great leader and has moved onto bigger and better things.

The team turned around. We went from the lowest results in employee satisfaction to one of the highest. The productivity of the team improved and most importantly our customers were happier. It’s simple really – happy employees give you happy Customers. Employee engagement and Customer Experience are twin bedfellows – you can’t have one without the other.

Change takes time. You have to realise that some people won’t make it. Some people prefer the cage. However, most people thrive in the freedom given, as long as they can see you are serious and your words match your actions. Some employees will blossom and then being a leader can be one of the most rewarding jobs out there.

How do you engage your employees?

Shoelace Says Something About the Consumer

A few months ago, I found myself buying a pair of shoelaces online. When I say ‘found myself’, I literally suddenly became aware of what I was doing. It was a shocking realisation; it had become too much trouble to visit the local shops for a pair of laces, and I was using the Web and its online retail facility to purchase something trivial. I became conscious of the costs involved in buying shoelaces in this way, the storage, the selection, the packaging, the postage costs etc. and probably by way of self-justification I began to think about the true value of shoelaces! Do manufacturers consider this question when designing shoes? Do consumers consider this question when buying?

I began my self-analysis using Helga Dittmar’s model of consumer value, whereby every product or service available in the market offers two types of  benefit to the customer; namely functional  benefits and symbolic benefits.

Dittmar’s distinction was between the use of a product or service and what the use of that product or service said about the user. The sub-title of her thesis, “To have is to be”, encapsulated her idea that consumers use consumption to help establish their identities. Consumption, (particularly the conspicuous variety), is used by the individual to send messages to others about who they are, what values they hold, what social group they belong to and at the same time making subtle statements about who they are not.

Products and services are thus displayed as symbols. They are masks that present a make-believe-self to others (and eventually perhaps the mask-wearer comes to believing this ‘make’ or deception her/himself).

This ‘celebrity-self’ is as carefully constructed as a stage or screen character. The personality ‘emerges’ as a psychological invention in our minds; the result of our automatic implicit decoding of the props and scripts that provide an immediate psychological meaning. The solutions to the subconscious symbolic cues have been provided previously by the media, advertising, branding and PR. This social identity acts like a shield and is as artificial as Jack Vincennes’s on-screen character in Badge of Honour;  ‘Badge’ here being synonymous with the Jungian ‘Persona’ or outer part of an individual’s personality.

From this approach, the value of shoelaces is no longer trivial and the characteristics of laces such as texture and colour become important. So perhaps now we can look at the purchase of shoelaces a little differently, not as something trivial, but as a representation of the self.

The point is how often is this mask, this symbolic benefit considered within Experience?

If you were a person who buys your goods or services, what kind of person would you be, is the classic approach to this problem and probably far more important that you realise.   If identity is important for shoelaces, then it’s important for servers, cars and cans of coke.

Emotional celebrity

When you see an ad with a celebrity like Leonardo DiCaprio holding a watch or an ad with someone showing emotion like proposing to their girlfriend on their knees, what is more effective?

New research to be launched in June shows that advertisements that align to a specific emotion are more effective than celebrity endorsements. The research states:

In one study, athletes chose to listen to “angry” music and indicated they would pay more to see “angry” bands in concert, while volunteers chose to listen to “sad” music and were willing to pay more to attend “sad” concerts. In another study, athletes found an advertisement more persuasive when the model’s face in the ad expressed anger, while volunteers were more persuaded by a model with a sad face, and environmentalists by a model expressing disgust.

Consumers can benefit from matching their emotional experiences to their identity. For example, turning up some angry head banging music on the way to the gym might make you a better athlete, or listening to sad love songs on the way to the soup kitchen might make you a better volunteer.

Over 50% of your Customer Experience is about how a Customer feels and yet this is typically ignored by organizations and this is more evidence of the importance of looking at the emotional experience that your Customers have. But don’t just take my word for it. According to Forrester:

Emotional insights will take center stage. The idea that happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, try new products and services, and spread good news about their experiences has started to catch on. Over the past several months, we’ve seen a rise in the number of companies pondering the connection between enjoyment and metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). In fact, one global company statistically demonstrated that several emotional factors trump NPS in predicting customer loyalty, effectively dethroning “would you recommend?” as the ultimate question. As firms start to emphasize customer emotion in 2013, we expect to see more vendors developing offerings like Beyond Philosophy’s Emotional Signature, which examines the rational, subconscious, and emotional elements of an experience.

So if you want to start looking at this wave of change then you need to view our webinar on Emotional Signature®

But given there are many emotions out there what emotions drive and destroy most value, in other words generate $$$?

We discussed this in my blog post, How emotions generate value. The danger is that organizations spend millions on advertisements that create an expectation with their Customers which is then destroyed when they have the experience with the company. For example, the ad may show happy people in the call center dealing with happy Customers, but then when they actually interact with the call center the experience is poor. Therefore, it’s all about alignment.

Defining the emotions you wish to evoke in ad and as part of your general Customer Experience is critical. Then designing these emotions into your Customer Experience is critical. We conducted a webinar on this subject a couple of weeks ago on Moment Mapping®.

Customer emotions are starting to rise in importance, this is more evidence that organisations need to get to grip with this concept. How well is your organization moving into the new world of Customer emotions?

Opportunity is out there

I did a lot of travel recently. I flew with 5-6 airlines, used 4-5 different rent-a-car firms, stayed in half a dozen hotels, dealt with banks and logistic companies and let me tell you something – the opportunity to differentiate on the basis of customer experience is so much out there, even more than you think, just waiting to be grasped. Now let me make a full confession, I’m a customer experience consultant and for the last 4+ years I’ve been working with a number of clients, written a number of papers, read a number of other people’s posts on the subject, participated in a number of conferences, so much so that I almost get a feeling that everyone has jumped on the band wagon and “is doing customer experience”. But they are not! They are lacking 3 main things:

1.  A theme / clear vision of what is the experience    they are trying to deliver

2. Governance structure to embed it into the business

3. Consistency of the delivery

The following stories from my recent dealings in travel and everyday life will illustrate how much opportunity is still out there and the curse of being a customer experience consultant seeing opportunities being wasted.

Airlines – I was going to fly with Virgin Atlantic for the US, where I was also going to do quite a bit of domestic travel as well so I decided to travel light (as much as I can). No big suitcases. A cabin size suitcase and a small bag. Most airlines luggage allowance for long-haul flights are at least 21-23kg for checked-in luggage and 10-12 kg for a cabin luggage, but no one has ever looked at or bothered to weigh the cabin luggage. No one but Virgin Atlantic, which recently introduced a new policy or maximum 6 kg for a cabin luggage bag. I had read about it from a blog from a disgruntled former gold card member, but I found it hard to believe that Virgin, above all, will make a problem of a couple of kgs above that 6kg limit. But they did! In total, I had about 17-18kg of luggage, well below the combined 29kg allowance, but my problem was that these were in two small bags, rather than in one big suitcase and of course I had my laptop in, so I couldn’t check all luggage in. So I reorganised the luggage on the side and went back to another Virgin Atlantic desk. Guess what, this time no one even bothered to weight my cabin luggage (as I initially thought). It’s just that the first time I queued I went to a desk where there was a girl who was getting trained and they played by the company book to the dot! This shows the lack of consistency in the company and it’s typical for many organisations. It’s a fact though that Virgin Atlantic is going in an opposite direction of what made it famous and took the business away from British Airways – the focus on customer experience that made an icon out of Virgin Atlantic. Now I think the situation is reversing, Virgin is becoming arrogant whilst BA is working more on improving its customer experience. You must have read this famous complaint letter about the food in Virgin Atlantic. This shows the lack of consistent theme for the experience and living up to Virgin’s brand promise.

So no wonder the flight was quite empty and as we were getting on board they said that there will be quite a few empty seats so we can later change our seat. So I did just after take-off, but out of all seats I sat on an “extra-legroom” one and got told off. So I got back to my seat and didn’t bother anymore but I couldn’t notice that in a little while a lady took on all 3 seats and no one told her or asked her anything. So the moral of this story is: be consistent and don’t rest on your laurels. I have to add that now Virgin is well below the standards of Emirates and others.

Another story from the airline industry comes from American Airlines (which are just about to exit from bankruptcy administration for a merger with US Airways). The Airline Representative announced that due to some extra military equipment on board some passengers had to be denied boarding in order to balance the plane and she needs 3 volunteers who would get some vouchers as reward for this. Only one volunteered which meant that she had to pick 2 passengers to be denied boarding. With all my luck she picked me and a colleague. We stood calm and went to the desk, but all we heard was “stay here” and the rep looked at a few things, turned hear head and started to let other passengers in. No other word or explanation of what follows….nothing. No excuse, no acknowledgement of our feelings, nothing! We weren’t going to dispute the fact that we had to stay but we were three people travelling together so we wanted to stay together, which we heard was not an option as the person who was allowed to board would have to pay for a new flight. The second problem was that out of the three of us, the person they picked to board was the only one without a driver’s license, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to pick-up the pre-arranged rent-a-car and drive to the hotel. We wanted to switch her with one of us. That’s all! But no one heard this part, as they just parked us to the side and behaved as if we were not there. Luckily a second representative came in, who decided to do some more checks and found that fewer passengers had actually checked-in than had booked which meant we could actually get on the plane. Again this situation shows the lack of thought about the customer experience, what emotions do customers feel and how to handle these. What left us with such a bad feeling after it was not the fact that we could have waited for a few more hours till the flight, but the fact that no one acknowledged our concerns, feelings and situation as a whole. This didn’t require any capital investment, just someone to speak to us like a human being, not a machine. I guess “empathy” didn’t feature in the American Airlines training, though they just deal with people, whilst it is right in the centre of Apple’s training, who could’ve taken the view when dealing with electronic products, but they didn’t and that’s what had made them successful at the time.

I’ll continue my story in my next blog where I’ll look at the missed opportunities in a few other industries as well some of the good practices we have seen.

In the meantime tell us where do you see opportunities to differentiate on the base of Customer Experience?

How Attitudes drive Economies

It is fascinating to see, and more importantly, to feel the differences between the two countries that I love – the United States and the United Kingdom (UK). I now live in Sarasota, FL but frequently travel back to England to see the Beyond Philosophy team and deliver key note speeches. George Bernard Shaw was 100% correct when he said “We are two nations separated by a common language.” But recently I think I have witnessed more that separates us.

I have just returned to the US after being in the UK for 6 weeks and I have noticed a key difference. Now, let me say straight away that I am a very proud Englishman. I love the country of my birth but I have to say in the UK we always seem to look at the glass as if it is half empty, in the USA they look at the glass as if it’s half full.

This attitude drives many behaviors which I see every day. Even in good times, we English tend to see the problems not the opportunities. This is why Australians call us ‘whinging Poms’ (A POM’s is Australian slang for British). Too many people in the UK like nothing more than a good moan at the weather, the government and anything else! This attitude seems to have magnified 20 fold in this economic downturn!

In the US, I believe, the attitude of ‘the glass is half full’ has played a significant part in pulling the US out of the downturn. The US economy is turning around. Americans are not hindered by a fear of failure and do not resent success of those who have ‘made it’ as they seem to do in the UK. This optimism drives their behaviour.

The second area I admire in the US is the speed they work at when there is an opportunity, which then plays out in the Customer Experience. Here is a prime example: ‘Cell (mobile) phone parking lots’ at airports. We all know that when we are picking up friends and family from an airport we say “When you come through just give me a ring and we’ll drive around and pick you up”. In the UK, people park anywhere to avoid the extortionate airport parking costs– many illegally. In the US they saw this was a growing trend and acted quickly. My local airport in Tampa is a classic example – they have ‘Cell phone parking lots’. You park up, there are information boards showing when the flights will be arriving/have arrived, restrooms and even wifi – all of which are obviously free! It will be years before this happens in the UK.

I think this positive, can do, opportunistic attitude is a key reason why America leads the world. The strive for the ‘American dream’ is infectious from the top to the bottom.

What do you see from the country you live in? Is your country’s glass half full or half empty and how opportunistic is that?

NPS /CSAT

NPS/CSAT attitudinal measures (I use the terms interchangeably) are all very well but companies make a fatal error when they confuse Output with Input in the design of their touchpoint metrics. Too many times I have seen companies try to apply an NPS/CSAT measure to all and sundry items which (a) fails to action anything as a result (b) encourages a ‘tie us in knots’ mentality.

Consider this. ‘Ease of use’ of say website is a great output you might want to improve. Note the importance of the output being written in ‘attitudinal/ emotional’ language a customer might say to themselves. You may even relate NPS/CSAT on this measure as correlating highly with some behavioural measure.

Company X now targets itself to improve its ‘ease of use scores’ by 10% on the year.

But what does ease of use mean?  Here we get to the nub of the issue.  Ease of use like most Customer Psychology measures is a ‘Formative’ variable. This means that like the concept of ‘a person’ it comprises many parts (legs, arms, etc) but those parts are generally independent of each other (when you raise your arm, your leg doesn’t rise as well!).

Why is this important?

Well if ‘ease of use’ is formed of many parts – the look of the website, the font size, the download speed, the click through speed, the way the content is written as well as internal variables such as how one department speaks to another... – but only the output matters, you cannot then seek to isolate its individual components in an ROI formulation.

If you were now to take the logic of Output ROI into this Input ROI you would be committing a fatal error.  Questions like, what is the ROI of the click through speed, the ROI of the font size or even the ROI of how one department speaks to another are ‘impossible’ to demonstrate in isolation even though they are critical to formulating a better ‘ease of use’ experience.

Hence, after you quantify your principles, you must move from Science mode to Art (creative) mode.

For a physical example consider a car. A customer could rate the ‘speed and performance’. You now might want to increase this output rating (or judgement) by say 15% year on year (i.e., quality performance improvements).  So far so good, but now if you move Output ratings into Input you might start looking at developing an ROI on the quality of the wires going into the engine. Of course, even though it is fundamental to performance, it is unrateable, an ROI would fail at this level and you would do nothing.

Management Implications

1. Be careful not to pull your Output NPS/CSAT measures into your Input NPS/CSAT measures.  This means you must identify the principles (key moments) that count in the mind of the consumer and then moving into creative mode to formulate the inputs (any ROI barrier at this level will be like trying to put an ROI figure to those wires in the engine). Of course, you still need to demonstrate success, but you do that through piloting.

2. Always base your ROI on customer impact, best judged by both hard metrics (spend now) and soft attitudinal metrics (CSAT/NPS or Preference/ NEV (net emotional value) – what the customer actually thinks and feels about you (not the same as how much they spend!). This is important to avoid the ‘junk mail’ effect i.e., acquisition rates rise, but your customers hate you and their tendency to habitually stick with you or look for an alternative supplier becomes eroded (the propensity towards ‘search behaviour’).

3. Consider that customers only rate based on current knowledge, embed and pilot innovation. Making it up is highly valuable in a re-design. Culturally this means openness to innovation and a reduced dependency on the failings of quantitative research (see: The 10 Things wrong with Quantitative Research).

 How High Standards Can Hurt Your Business

Setting an Unachievable Vision

I was sitting in the reception of a new client the other day and I always take the time to look around, as reception areas start to tell you what the organization is like. I noticed on the wall there was a big sign that extolled the vision of the organization. It said; ‘We will exceed our Customer expectations at all points of contact’. I knew then that I was in for an interesting debate with this organization. This may sound odd coming from a Customer Experience person but the reality is that it is totally unrealistic to exceed Customers expectations at all moments of contact. No organization can afford that. As I sat there I reflected on why companies set these unachievable goals.

In a world where global competition is forcing businesses to work harder, it’s understandable that high level management find it appropriate to set lofty goals to help drive customer experience, sales and – ultimately – profits. The problem, though, is that too many organizations set goals for their employees that aren’t just lofty, but are actually entirely unrealistic. These goals might be admirable in nature, and they might sound great on a piece of paper or as a vision/mission statement on the wall, but they can actually do far more harm than good over the longer term.

A Fresh Perspective: It’s true that “almost” doesn’t count

There’s a well-known saying, or acknowledgement, that “almost doesn’t count.” Regardless of its origins, the phrase is supposed to be both motivational and competitive. If almost doesn’t count, then people need to try harder, play harder, and reach their goals more successfully – essentially, it’s a nice way of telling people to do better next time around. That’s fine, and a great ethos to have, but what if almost achieving the impossible goal still doesn’t count?

Another great example I’ve come across is when people tell me ‘we want to ‘wow’ our Customers’. Firstly, what does “wow” even mean, and secondly how can you ever hope to achieve that while remaining profitable? This shows me that people haven’t thought through the implications of this.

When senior teams proudly share this vision/mission with everyone, one of two things is bound to happen. Either employees are going to be completely demoralised due to their perceived poor performance as only a certain percentage of customers are “wowed”, or they’re going to understand that the goal is impossible, meaningless, and not worth trying for. In either case the end result is likely to be either nothing at all or even a decrease in morale.

The solution? Be aspirational if you are actually going to follow through with the actions to support it. If not, aim for something you are willing to support.

If you can see your mission statement still being on the wall in 5 years time, with little or no progress towards achieving it being made, it’s probably time to come up with something new. Think about your customers and how they interact with your business. Look at where you excel and the areas that you’re weak; identify opportunities; really think about whether you could achieve what you want to, and then come up with a plan to do it.

Having a vision is one thing – knowing that you can get there is an entirely different animal.

Consult employees about their own goals and expectations

Part of being realistic is to understand that numbers and objectives are not human, but employees are. At the end of the day, any new corporate goal will have to be carried out by the employees on the front lines. Do they think it’s achievable? Get them to articulate to you what it will take to get there. In my experience it is the management who do not support the vision/mission with actions, not employees. Will employees be driven to reach a new goal or simply intimidated by how high that goal is? Does a goal line up with the first hand knowledge of their department, their customers, or their past experience?

Goal-setting and defining a corporate vision should both be collaborative, community-based activities that get everyone involved. This exchange of ideas will not only allow the business to set new benchmarks and metrics for itself, but it will also give employees a time to offer their input and advice to more senior levels of management. This two-way exchange breeds success and confidence. It leads to realistic planning that is as human as the company’s own workforce.

 Be ambitious but realistic, aspirational but approachable

There’s nothing wrong with setting high standards and lofty goals, and then putting in place the pieces needed to achieve those things. New strategies, though, should be realistic in nature and in line with what an employee feels they can achieve. By working collaboratively and with realistic expectations grounded in prior goals and growth, businesses will experience better employee morale, higher levels of productivity, and a feeling that everyone is going to make this new benchmark happen together. It’s a winning strategy with real, long-term value.

What Does Your Experience Smell Like?

Regular readers will know that we do not choose between experiences, but we choose between memories of experiences and therefore how your memory is formed becomes important when designing a great Customer Experience. I talked about the difference between experience and memory in my post, “Why Your Memory Matters More Than Your Experience.” In this post we will build off this premise and examine the connection between the memory of smells and the memory of customer experience. Specifically, how smells connect a certain aroma to a customer’s memory of their experience and how that affects customer loyalty with your product or service. In my view this is all about designing an effective subconscious experience and should be thought through and planned as we discussed at a recent webinar of designing experiences.

There is no question that smell is an important aspect of one’s memory. It has the ability to convey us to a moment in time, connecting us in an olfactory sense directly to the experience.

For example, every time I smell the sweet, tropical scent of coconut, I am transported to a sunny beach in the Caribbean sipping daiquiris and listening to the wave’s crash on the sandy shore. Or how the smell of fresh cut grass recalls the long, lazy days of summer in my childhood when responsibility meant being home before the streetlights came on and time was spent looking for things to do with my friends of which my mother may or may not have approved.

Marketing companies have tuned in to the power of scent to enhance the customer experience. Companies like ScentAir charge $99 a month for retail businesses to use machines that pipe in the aromas that the customer will associate pleasantly with their shopping experience  The most successful businesses can do this imperceptibly to their clientele who unwittingly are associating the scent with the store, the product, or the service they are buying.

One example where this practice is succeeding is a supermarket NetCost Grocery store  in Brooklyn, NY, that uses piped in scents for the products they sell. Pleasant smells of chocolate near the candy aisle and fruit near the produce section accompany shoppers as they fill their carts. The store has seen an increase of 7% in their produce sales since they started piping in the scents

Other businesses use scents to keep customers around longer, increasing the opportunity for them to make a purchase. Nike did a study that reported an 80% increase in intent to purchase after piping in a scent to their stores. (Sharrock, pars. 6).

But scent marketing isn’t just for the biggest companies. A small petrol station tried using the scent of coffee in their attached mini-mart and saw an increase in sales of 300 %

Smell can do more than increase sales and shoppers intentions to buy, however smells can also help save lives – particularly unpleasant ones. The department of defense has joined the trend of using scents in their day to day activities, adding the smells of gasoline, burning bodies, gunpowder and exhaust to improve the authenticity of engagement training exercises for ground troops.

Exposure to the negative aromas of the experience prepares the inexperienced soldiers for the ugly reality of battle, helping them focus on the task at hand. This supports the military’s philosophy of “improvise, adapt, and overcome” by giving the trainees a chance to process the unpleasant experience so that it doesn’t overwhelm them during actual operations

Even with all the attention on using scents in retail locations these days, companies could do more using the customer’s olfactory sense to augment the customer experience. This is all part of the subconscious experience that we discuss at our live webinar Customer Experience Certification events. According to Rachel Herz, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and author of the book, The Scent of Desire, a smell is just a scent until a person associates it with a specific experience. After the association, the smell becomes a representation of that experience in the mind of the person.   Businesses should consider the power of this link and choose a ‘smell logo’ to use that associates their experience with its customers every time they encounter it.

As a leader in your industry I ask you to consider how you can use smells to transport, transcend and tweak your customer’s experience.  What does your experience smell like? I challenge you to improve customer loyalty using scents that in turn will create more dollars and cents for your bottom line.

Innovation

In many of my blogs I have emphasised how current business practices are almost being designed to crush innovation. There is in short a severe deficit of Creative Equity in favour of Analytical Equity (see my blog, ‘Manage your Creative Equity’).

The reasons are not hard to fathom. Analytical Equity, if managed well, can support (and I emphasise the word Support) the innovation process.  However, usually it is handled badly. Why? Because analytical equity, over-measurement and many VOC schemes are designed as ‘Job Creation Schemes’.  Sure not all are like this but many are.

Think about it, you have just been given a nice shiny new role in a company. What are you going to do? Well create structures to measure would give me a continuous role and I can blame the person below me for non-performance.

Of course I am being a little trite, but you get the point.

In my previous blogs I have alluded to this and the problem of the Culture of Measurement when it becomes burdensome. I mentioned in my blog ‘What Firm’s can learn from Freestyle Rapping and Jazz Improvisation’  how creative thinking is pushed out when individuals are tied up in knots with measurement.  I demonstrated some evidence of this from Neuroscience.

I also mentioned in my blog ‘Understanding your Tipping Points’ that firms fail to understand measurement itself and its restrictions. In the book Future Trends and Insights I alluded to the point that customer psychology is not like the Natural Sciences and frequently based on ‘future expectations’. I used the example:

“Imagine a Ford car showroom in the 1920s. All cars would have been available in one colour only – black – and in one product type – the Model T. Any decision to buy would have been made on price. If you ask customers directly what they would like, they would say alternative colours and product types.  There is a difference between what is offered and what could drive value.”

In fact in Emotional Signature® we have found a circa 30% difference between what people want and what actually drives value. Remember, most of your traditional statistical tools are based on Natural Science assumptions. You place a rock in the wind and rain you can predict weathering patterns. In the world of Customer Psychology this is only a partial truth, there are no grounded rules. Something ‘not in demand’ can suddenly become de rigeur (think of flat TV screens and the coming trend towards bendable phones today). This isn’t an argument against stats; it is an argument for considering the phenomena you are measuring – customer’s psychology, then apply the right measurement criteria to the phenomena. After all people are not rocks.

So with this in mind, I want to reemphasise the importance of innovation in CEM (something I alluded to in the article: Customer Experience Management: Did Pine and Gilmore Get it Wrong?).

Someone has to manage, control and direct your firm’s future. Someone has to take the risk and pilot new ideas and look for new ways of expressing your Thought Leadership. This isn’t a waste of time, it is only through the idea that you can evolve and be ahead of the game.

Look at Blackberry – resting on their laurels and now in trouble.

One of the prime signs of difficulty is when an organisation just pays lip-service to innovation or does not invest in the leading lights of innovation in your firm whether bought in, at an individual or departmental level. A further sign is ‘too much measurement’ and not enough freedom that crushes innovation.

Remember Innovation is a practical exercise it is about ‘doing’. Generating and piloting an alternative approach and seeing if it delivers.  Analytical Equity is too often about ‘not doing’, measuring to death but keeping your job.

Plans are fine but they need to be dynamic and account for this innovation process and be free to accept the levels of risk that ‘doing something’ entails. After all which is the bigger risk: ‘do nothing except report on a number’ or ‘do something’.

Future Desires

Almost all companies have insight departments that statistically model the drivers and destroyers of consumer behaviour. Yet this predictive modelling is flawed as it assumes that what customers react to today in terms of their drivers to buy are the same as what those customer’s actually desire.

To make this real consider the following:

‘Imagine a Ford car showroom in the 1920s. All cars would have been available in one colour only – black – and in one product type – the Model T. Any decision to buy would have been made on price. However, if you ask customers directly what they would like, they would have said alternative colours and product types.  There is a difference between what is offered and what could drive value.’

My hypothesis therefore is a simple one:

H1: Any model that extrapolates the drivers of customer wants based on their current ratings of an experience does not equate exactly to what customers ‘truly’ want.

Fortunately, here at Beyond Philosophy we have tested this out. Using client samples, we interviewed consumers of products and services across a range of industries. Each sample was asked to complete a scale survey (enabling SEM/PLS based modelling) as well as a Max Diff survey (enabling an assessment of levels of desire towards attributes of an experience).  In each case, customers were asked to provide ratings over 40 attributes of an experience.

Table 1 summarises the results. In this case, the assessment compares  the degree to which the top 10 drivers of value (based on current experience) are also the top 10 stated drivers of what customers would like (i.e., desire).

Table 1: Comparison between current driver assessment and future desire

Over the above 1,050 interviews it has been found that if you were to only focus on those top 10 attributes of an experience that in SEM/PLS based modelling are seen to drive most value, you would only cover 5 out of the top 10 attributes customers most desire!

This means that modelled drivers of value based on past experience only equate to half the value customers actually most desire.  This confirms that you must consider not only current experience drivers but also future desires when designing an experience.

When we look further at the data we can also see what type of attributes are being desired by customers but not seen to drive value. These are shown in Table 2:

Table 2: The types of attributes customers desire but don’t drive current value

The treatment of these items is easy to understand.  They are the result of a statistical mirage, where non-variance is taken to mean not important. Let me give you an example by analogy taken from the paper ‘The Top 10 things wrong with Quantitative Research’.

If you go to a cafe at lunchtime to buy a sandwich, one of the main drivers to purchase will be ‘sandwich quality’ which you score at say 8 out of 10.  Now let’s say you go every day for a month and every day you score 8 out of 10 (you like the cheese and pickle sandwich). Let’s imagine that you are also asked about satisfaction and that tends to vary a little with superfluous short-term effects, such as one day they had some boxes in the way of the entrance. This doesn’t change the fact that when you spend money it’s related to the quality of sandwich.

Unfortunately, because the quality scores are stable over the long-term and there is no or very limited variance, the importance of ‘sandwich quality’ is completely missed, or worse it is considered hygienic when in fact it is critical. You can only see its impact if it changes, and because it hasn’t changed you cannot see its impact. Therefore it does not become a focus for intervention and ideation.  Worse because short-term effects on Customer Satisfaction are deemed more important, money is spent on keeping the aisles clear rather than trying to create new sandwich ranges. This even though the relationship between Customer Satisfaction and spend is not established or poorly established.

Hence, these items, so critical to value, are being treated as hygienic when in fact they can and should be the focus for value creation. Why? Because in the mind of the consumer they are critical to what they want; after all this is what they have stated, never mind our modelled drivers of value.

It may well be the fact that some are difficult to alter, but at least you should ask the question in your experience design.

At this stage you may also be noticing the opposite effect. That 5 out of the top 10 drivers of experience are noticed in the modelling but not in the expressed desires of customers. This is equally valid and something we call a ‘subconscious’ value effect i.e., like advertising, it is an unexpressed driver of value.

Value can now be conceived as not just the result of current experience but also future desire (a combination of what is experienced and what future desires consumers hold).

Finally, I end with a quote that encapsulates how as human beings our mindsets are not just reactive to the current or past but are always looking to what might be; hence we must always take future desires into consideration:

‘To be self aware means you can engage in mental Time Travel. You can think of yourself in relation to things that happened in the past, present and may even happen in the future’  Professor Gordon Gallup, BBC Horizon – The Secret you

Management Implications

1.  Attributes of your experience that are most desired, even though they do not currently drive any value, must be     considered for their potential to drive value.

2.  Managers must drop the concept of hygienic.

3.  Insights must combine SEM/PLS modelling of past/current experience effects with those that model ‘most desired’ i.e., Max Diff and conjoint approaches together!  This is also   beneficial as it highlights areas of desire that are currently non-variant e.g., ‘I’ desire a low interest rate, but the modelling does not see interest rates as important to value as  they are unchanged.

4.  Of course, it should always be remembered that companies can create experiences previously not considered important or even conceived by consumers – look at Apple!

5.  Read the Top 10 things wrong with Quantitative Research.