These posts are duplicated from LinkedIn, where they’re seen by tens of thousands of people each week. They often spark lively, valuable debate and your voice would be welcome. Visit my profile to connect with me.
There are five things that influence a customer’s perception of value:
1. Brand
A strong brand has value because of its associations with certain qualities and performance standards or how it reflects the customer’s identity.
2. Awareness and communications
People can’t value something they don’t know exists, and what people hear about a product — through advertising or word of mouth — sets their expectations.
3. The sales or purchase process
Great sales people understand their customer’s needs and match them to the right product. The better the match, the more value is realized. An easy purchase, onboarding and first time user experience also improves the perception of value.
4. The product or service itself
What it does, how it does it, and what it costs — this is the meat in the burger.
5. Customer service
Everything post purchase — returns, support enquiries, changing your address or billing — also creates or diminishes value.
Here are a three worth implications worth drawing your attention to:
1. Where is customer experience in the above?
It’s not one of the five, so where is it? What does your CX team do to create more value for customers? You need to answer that for your own organization and figure out the operating model for any CX function in the context of these five things. The CX teams that do this succeed. The teams that don’t find themselves scrapping for turf and influence amid confusion over their role.
2. Which of these value creation activities are the force multipliers?
There’s no point improving customer service if your weak point is sales conversion. Very few people actually consider what the weakest link is and focus on that, instead just strengthening their strengths and ignoring their weaknesses.
3. How intentional are you about your brand?
If you want to be known for “ease”, for example, it should be expressed across comms, sales, product and service. Again few people are consistent which limits the formation of strong associations with the brand.
This stuff is explained in greater detail in the leader's guide to customer experience. If you’ve got challenges with any of the three points above, the course is gonna help you!
Link in the comments :)
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Just got home from a great trip to New Zealand.
Caught up with old friends, made a load of new ones, and introduced some kindred spirits to one another. It was a lot of fun.
Networking doesn’t have to be a cringefest, and social media doesn’t have to be about harvesting attention.
If you play your cards right you can show up in a city 6,500 miles from home, reserve a table at a bar, invite a bunch of people and have a great time hanging out.
Thanks to everyone who made my trip so special. Mentioning no names:
Ben Smith, James Kirkus-Lamont, Megan Butler, Matt Tane, Clarke "the bottleneck guy" Ching, Dr. Dani Chesson, Vajini Pannila, Waruna Kirimetiyawa, Priscila Bernardes, Warwick Eade, Fleur Hodgkinson, Megan Sheerin, Jeff Vollebregt, Courtney M., Louisa Dallow, Jason Draxler SadlerDave Coles, Paul Phillips and of course Jason Momoa, who doesn't use linkedin.
Now you can find each other here :)
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“The data-driven enterprise is an oxymoron.” And from a former actuary no less!
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3. Pay with grace
Dear Marlowe,
When I was a teenager we had a neighour called Pete. He was a successful entrepreneur of retirement age, and I’d often sit with him in his garden while he regaled me with entertaining stories and anecdotes.
The only one I can remember, and it has always stuck with me, is this: “When you have to pay, pay with grace.”
People are sensitive about money. It can easily cause relationships to collapse, friends to fall out, business partners to argue — the list goes on.
An easy way to avoid conflicts over money is simply to pay with grace. Whether you’re running a business and must pay a supplier, have borrowed money you must return, or any other transaction, do not mess people around over money. When you have to pay, pay with grace.
Love,
Dad
****
Letters to Marlowe is a personal project to pass on valuable life advice to my son.
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When I was thirteen or fourteen years old I went with my dad to visit a friend of his.
As soon as I walked into the living room I was captivated by a Bang & Olufsen CD player where the disc was spinning behind a pair of glass doors.
I asked how you changed the CD, and Dad’s friend said to walk over to it and outstretch my hand. As I did the doors magically parted and the machine lit up with a warm glow.
A light bulb went off in my own mind at the same time.
It was the first time I realized that we could be intentional about the experience we wanted to create for the user of a product or service. That somebody had deliberately set out to make something playful and theatrical out of a typically mundane and perfunctory interaction.
I realized, by extension, that we could consciously evoke any feeling we liked through the design of the products or services we made. They could be fun, silly, or calming. They could feel expensive, solid, or functional. They could evoke excitement and speed, or stability. Isn’t that amazing?
My perennial frustration with most brands, products and services is that this opportunity to be deliberate, intentional, distinctive and evocative is wasted.
And when brands spin up customer experience programs they often also lack this intentionality — about what exactly they want interactions with their brand to be like.
This is a huge opportunity to create a greater perception of value; create more memorable, distinctive and engaging interactions; and help your brand stand out from the crowd.
The leader’s guide to CX e-learning course can get you started down this road. Link in the comments.
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How many products do we use a day? According to designer Karim Rashid, it’s over 600.
Think about it. Just lying in bed you’re using a mattress, duvet, pillow, sheets, headboard, and bed frame.
Getting up, going to the bathroom, and getting dressed you'll use dozens more, from the light switch (and bulbs!) to the toilet, tap, sink, toothpaste, toothbrush, bathroom mirror, flooring, and so on.
We also use hundreds of services a day without even thinking about it, from basic utilities to email, banking or checking the weather.
Each one of these products or services has the potential to enrich our experience. To make life easier or less stressful. To be a source of joy or pleasure. To bring some beauty or a splash of colour to our day.
They also have the potential to infuriate, frustrate us, or get in the way. To create stress by being unreliable or confusing. To waste our time by being cumbersome to use or needlessly complicated.
The reason that I became a designer in the first place — and the reason I devoted the last ten years to learning and teaching about customer experience — has nothing to do with NPS or satisfaction scores, return on investment calculations, loyalty, retention, brand advocacy, growth, share of wallet or any of the other stuff that dominates the conversation today.
It’s because I fundamentally believe that the interactions we have with those hundreds of products and services each day affects our quality of life. There’s nothing more to it than that.
I want to make beautiful things that work well with people who care, and help others to do the same. Not because of any commercial rationale — although those are certainly compelling — but because I consider good design to be a service to humanity.
#cx #customerexperience #design
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Travis Kalanick became a billionaire by founding Uber. Yet during his tenure the firm lost staggering amounts of money and never came close to making a profit.
Hitachi are best known for making heavy industrial equipment. They also make “the Rolls Royce of vibrators” the Magic Wand.
Airbnb completely rebranded in 2014, adopting a new logo and visual language. The brand went from strength to strength.
For every established precept in business — you must generate a profit, you should never over-stretch the brand, changing your logo is a terrible idea, etc. — there are people who've had tremendous success doing the opposite.
It is easy to waste time and energy attempting to craft the perfect strategy or chase a definitive, sure-fire prescription for success. In reality, however, such things do not exist and there are many possible strategies that might work.
Don’t succumb to analysis paralysis — pick the path forward you think is best then take action. The only way to know if something will succeed is to try it and see.
#innovation #entrepreneurship #strategy
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2. Concordance
Dear Marlowe,
Everybody has something in life that they’re naturally suited to. Something that plays to their physical or mental strengths, or is fuelled by an insatiable passion.
This fit — between an activity and our unique persona — is called concordance. And the more concordant we are with what we’re doing, the more we’ll enjoy it and the better we’ll perform.
I am lucky to have discovered several things in life that I’m concordant with. For example, I’m concordant with writing and teaching, which is part of the reason why I love writing these letters to you!
Understand this. Concordance is fundamental to your happiness and fulfillment. Doing jobs or tasks that go against the grain of your brain is frustrating, exhausting and can easily become a waste of a life.
A big step towards achieving your potential and living a meaningful life is discovering activities that you’re concordant with. The things that feel natural to you and spark your interest. That you want to immerse yourself in for hours at a time. That never feel like work, even if you’re paid to do them.
Where you find concordance, you’ll find meaning.
Love,
Dad
****
Letters to Marlowe is a personal project to pass on valuable life advice to my son.
To learn more about concordance I highly recommend James A. King's book Accelerating Excellence. I learned much from this book, including this.
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When presented with a new business theory, claim or fad, ask yourself three questions:
1. Is doing the opposite viable?
If not, it’s just a banal truism that won’t offer much real world advantage.
2. Can the claim actually be tested?
If not, it’s probably just a generalization that might or might not work, depending on the circumstances.
3. Is there clear evidence to the contrary?
If a claim can easily be falsified — with an example of somebody having great success by doing the opposite — the idea might still have some value but is hardly a definitive prescription for success.
You may be surprised at how few of the ideas you are exposed to withstand such simple scrutiny. That doesn’t mean they aren’t completely without merit. It just means you should investigate carefully — digging deeper into their research and taking your particular context into account — before jumping on the bandwagon.
#strategy #entrepreneurship #theory #management
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What is the point of a business?
Is it to earn a profit? To make and keep a customer? To maximize returns to shareholders?
To provide meaning and purpose for employees? To contribute to society? To have some fun with your friends? To seek personal fulfillment? To feed your family?
The truth is there isn’t really a right or wrong answer. Some people have no desire to scale up. Others don’t see any point in an enterprise that doesn’t have the potential to make them a billionaire. One of the greatest things about running your own business is that you get to choose your own philosophy — and philosophy is the key word.
Last week some people took offense when I suggested that business is not a science. But if science is concerned with the domain of facts, evidence and objectivity, and the humanities are concerned with subjectivity, opinion, and values, then any commercial activity is more firmly rooted in the latter than the former.
Whatever science people like to think exists in business — the data gathering, analyzing, structured experimentation, and formulating of principles — is relatively insignificant compared to how much the philosophical realm dominates our decision-making, the activities we undertake, and the reasons we undertake them.
Perhaps it’s time we shifted our mental model appropriately and stopped deluding ourselves that detached objectivity is the holy-grail of business decision-making, and instead embraced a more expansive, not to mention balanced view of the world.
Maybe if we did we’d actually create more fulfilling and meaningful places to work, while setting our organizations up for greater success in the long term.
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Linkedin is better in real life.
Last week I had the pleasure of hosting John James and Mike Taylor on one evening, and Ryan Hart on another, here in Santa Monica.
It's an open invite. If you find yourself in the area and would like some recommendations for things to do, or some great food and questionable company let me know!
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One of the reasons CX programs often struggle to deliver real-world results is because they don’t prioritize opportunities effectively.
We all have limited resources — time, money, and people — so have no choice but to prioritize the things that matter most, but how do we do that?
There are five components to effective prioritization that you should work through sequentially:
1. The business strategy or ambition.
If an opportunity isn’t clearly aligned to what you’re trying to achieve as a company or your growth strategy it is not a priority, even if it's a good idea.
2. The customer.
Not all customers are created equal. Some will have greater growth potential, influence, desirability, etc. Opportunities need to be aligned to the customers that matter most.
3. The usage scenario.
Every customer finds themselves in a scenario when they interact with a business. For example, “I’ve been mugged and I’m reporting my card stolen” or “I’m booking a business flight”. These scenarios vary in frequency of occurrence, volume of customers they apply to, and importance, and must be prioritized.
4. The specific interactions or journey stages.
A scenario plays out over a continuum of interactions or a customer journey. There will be certain stages of that journey that offer greater potential for improvement than others.
5. The specific interventions.
As our analysis proceeds we will identify many possible solutions or opportunities that have different costs and benefits. This is our final means of prioritization.
Work through these five steps and you’ll always be working on those things that create the greatest value for both the customers and the business. It’s a win:win. Make it up as you go along and you’ll flail then fail.
More on this in The Leader’s Guide to Customer Experience! Link in the comments.
#customerexperience #cxstrategy #cx
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If you’re looking for a new job — maybe you’ve been laid off, or it's time for pastures new — here’s something to bear in mind.
Most of what goes on in the world is beyond your control.
Yes. You can polish your resume, apply to roles you think are a great fit, research the company in question, show up on time, and come up with smart questions to ask.
But you don't have any say over who the other candidates are and their relationship with the decision-makers, your chemistry with the people who interview you, their exact hiring criteria or process (they might think you are over or under qualified), the political landscape at the company, whether they have a sudden headcount freeze…the list goes on.
Seen in this light, it becomes obvious that what you can control pales into insignificance compared to what you can’t, and this has a big implication I’d like to draw your attention to.
If you apply and do not get the offer you hope for — even if it happens over and over again — you must realize that this is not an indictment of your abilities, skill or value as a person. It may just be the hand you’ve been dealt.
The best salespeople, the best entrepreneurs, the best sportsmen and women often get rejected, fail, or lose because they face similar uncertainties. It’s normal. No top performer has a 100% success record or even close. Reminding yourself of what is and isn’t in your control liberates you from endless hand-wringing and rumination.
Focus on what you can do — brushing up your skills, building your profile, finessing your technique, expanding your network, sharpening your resume, taking expert advice on where you can improve — and keep trying until the outcome takes care of itself.
Good luck! 🤞
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1. All events are neutral
Dear Marlowe,
As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Here’s an example. We once lived in a lovely home with beautiful views of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was idyllic. Eventually, however, the landlady’s aberrant behaviour forced us to move out. I was furious at the time. A few months later though, a wildfire burned that house to the ground. Rage gave way to gratitude in an instant.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Time often changes our perspective. Don’t get too carried away by success nor discouraged by failure — the universe seeks to be in balance. Seeing all events as neutral will help you keep a level head, stay positive, and accumulate less emotional baggage.
Love,
Dad.
****
Letters to Marlowe is a personal project to pass on valuable life advice to my son.
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Intelligent people are often savagely self-critical when things don’t go as planned.
That big brain of yours means you’re capable of analyzing how events unfolded and pinpointing your mistakes along the way. But however clever you are, unless you’re consciously aware of it, you’re most likely succumbing to the hindsight bias.
Once an outcome is known our brains airbrush out all the uncertainty we confronted, all the unknowns we faced, all the ways things could have gone, and paths that could have been taken. As soon as we have complete information we forget that we didn’t at the time.
If you find yourself thinking: Why didn’t I think of that sooner? Why didn’t I see the red flags? How could I have been so stupid? Go easy. More often than not, these thoughts are just the hindsight bias talking, and being aware of its pernicious effects will reduce your tendency to indulge in shoulda-woulda-coulda self-flagellation.
Remember: hindsight is not foresight. You didn’t know then what you did now. Beating yourself up about unintended outcomes doesn’t change anything. Onwards!
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Brands are rightly interested in customer advocacy: they want positive word of mouth. The question is, which customers generate the most of it? If you think it’s long-standing, loyal customers you’re in for a surprise.
Research shows that the amount of positive word of mouth customers generate tends to either stay neutral or decline with brand tenure. As something becomes part of the fabric of our lives we become less likely to proactively mention it. Why is that?
It’s simple really — we share the news not the olds. We tend to talk about things that are novel, current, fresh, or different.
Think about your own behaviour: you might talk about a restaurant that you’ve just been to, a movie you just watched, or a product you just bought because they’re topical.
You’re less likely to start a discussion about the brand of coffee you’ve bought every day for ten years, for example.
This means that if we’re trying to drive advocacy we might want to focus on the experience for new or first time buyers and ensure their path to purchase, on-boarding and initial product or service usage experience is exemplary, and not expect our current customers to act as a megaphone.
The Leader’s Guide to Customer Experience gets into more detail. Link in the comments.
#customerexperience #cx
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Business is not and never will be a science.
There is no el-dorado magic equation for success. And if such a formula existed, as soon as people became aware of it, it wouldn’t offer any advantage — in business, playing the game has a nasty habit of changing the rules.
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he said, “There is nothing reliable to be learned about making money. If there were, study would be intense and everyone with a positive IQ would be rich.”
That doesn’t mean we don’t employ something akin to the scientific method — testing ideas with experiments — and it doesn’t mean there aren’t well-evidenced, discipline specific theories or patterns. It just means there is no overarching set of reliable truths that can serve as the basis for predictable action in the future, or that can determine the success of a business overall — whether you're just starting out or growing a global enterprise.
Henri Poincaré put it best: “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” In business we may have an accumulation of facts, but there is no science.
Realizing this is liberating. It will stop you from falling into the trap of thinking that if you just have the right analysis, the right data, the right strategy, the right theory, or if you just read more books, or get more qualifications, success is guaranteed.
It is not, it never will be. The only way to know for sure whether something will succeed is to try it and see what happens.
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