Customer Experience or Customer Satisfaction

This week I had three separate experiences with three different companies that all provided poor customer experience. I trust that you have similar experiences weekly as well. The whole idea around customer experience is to maintain an ongoing deliberate effort to keeping customers pleased with the service they have received so that continuous improvement is something that exists as a real process. Customer satisfaction (CSAT), on the other hand, has a similar intent but has become relegated to binary measures such as surveys that produce a number (e.g. 95%) and often miss the closed loop requirement of getting under the skin of the survey.

Two of the three experiences I had were related to the company employee not knowing the answers to questions about their product even though they were the person responsible to interact with customers and serve them. Not only did they not know simple answers to questions I had about their product, they kept repeating the same wrong answer and ignored any attempt on my part to keep clarifying my initial question. The third experience was related to a global financial services firm that changed my account password at the request of an employee in my firm who was simply trying to get their access to accounts reinstated for the purpose of reviewing. In all three of these experiences I would provide a fairly low customer satisfaction rating if I were asked. That said, I have used the services of all three of these companies for years and have been fairly pleased. The question then is how does recent customer experience rate as opposed to overall customer satisfaction?

One answer to this question is to recognize that customer satisfaction is captured as a point in time measure that relates to a range of time over which a product or service was procured while customer experience is a real time measure relating to the most recent touch point of a customer with your product or service. While CSAT is important for capturing the high level view of “how we are doing”, customer experience provides us with an opportunity to improve in a rapid fashion.

Perhaps this is better explained in the difference between email and instant messaging. Email is a communication while IM is really a conversation. Many of us have used email for both up until the recent explosion of IM platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, texting, etc. These IM platforms have changed the way we talk to each other but have also become increasingly important for companies and their customers to share instant feedback. When a colleague of mine had a poor purchasing experience with a technology vendor, he tweeted about it on that company’s twitter account and got contacted within a day and was offered a satisfactory resolution. This is customer experience in action because the experience of the customer was dealt with in a real time manner vs. this same customer being sent a survey weeks after the purchase. Even if my colleague completed the survey, rated the company poorly and submitted it, chances are when the company processed all the surveys they received back their rating would still be high and this one customer experience would have been lost in the bunch.

In the enterprise space where large companies are providing services to customers via technology platforms the same holds true. The product development lifecycle (PDLC) takes many steps into consideration from the beginning of an idea through it’s production into a working product or service. The customer experience component needs to be at the heart of the PDLC of any product or service. This goes beyond just including various customer audiences to be part of the review process, it also needs to encompass a mechanism for how customers who use the product/service will interact with the company to resolve matters, improve service and build a better experience as close to real time as possible.

An emphasis on customer experience can bring a level of transparency and accountability that forces a decision, embeds a sense of urgency and causes companies to respond and resolve matters instead of burying the bad ones under the rug or letting them get lost in the survey frenzy of traditional CSAT models.

The continued used of technology platforms like IM will help improve customer experience if it is used correctly and is one mechanism for doing this but more importantly, companies need to remove the obstacles and the noise that prevent them from maintaining the heartbeat of their customers.

Customer experience is a conversation and the connection of voice and touch.

Optimizing the Supply Chain – Distributed Agile

In 2007 the topic of offshore distributed agile was front and center in the outsourcing community. There were lots of differing messages regarding the validity of actually using agile across two or more teams in two or more locations. We can say we’ve come a long way since 2007 but there are some key messages that haven’t changed and then some that have.

I had presented at a venture capital forum that year on the topic and recently pulled out some of the content to contrast what we are saying today. I was interested to see how our learning and thinking has changed. Here are some of the things that haven’t changed since 2007.

Past thinking included messages such as:

• Highly collaborative approach required
• Traditional supplier-client relationship is difficult
• Result: client will drive the supplier to waterfall
• Client must provide/support key roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master) and shares success metrics w/supplier
• Constant attention and guidance is not the same as babysitting
• The traditional approach is often based on “best guess” with contingency built-in
• Agile projects on average are cost competitive
• We’re not just writing “cool code” but rather…
• Requirements that relate to business value
• Shaped daily by the Product Owner and business
• High profile projects are cancelled/written off
• Proven and successful approach to reduce risk
• A framework, metrics and measurements are critical to ensure quality and support the team
• Work to understand the roles needed to support the effort required
• Maximize your budget by choosing the optimum team size.
• Going slower isn’t safer and can cost you more

Current thinking has changed and called out some distinct differences:

In looking at some of the statements being made by enterprises today we hear that that stakeholders are frustrated with slow IT development processes. We’ve also come to realize that adding more people doesn’t necessarily equate to meeting the development demand on IT. If you are someone who is reading this and thinking that you already get this concept then just know it is not prevalent thinking across most large organizations. There is still a very real mindset that more people get more done. While true in some cases, it is proving not to be the case in many IT projects.

Outsourcing is still a very good strategy and not in question, rather it is how we best use our outsourced teams to optimize the entire supply chain that is in question

That said, IT is also realizing that there are many mature processes that are simply not being leveraged. There isn’t a single answer to the problem but there are many narrow approaches companies take to solve problems or to try and deliver projects vs. leveraging a wider set of practices that, when combined, can provide outstanding results.

In terms of extending agile capability in the organization, especially as it relates to distributed teams here are the messages that are relevant today:

• Maximizing the flow of value to the customer vs. Maximize team velocity
• Learning happens at the rate it can be consumed by team, organization, customer
• Increasing value, improving flow and advancing quality far outweigh the “staffing up” approach
• Understanding which practices and approaches are fit for purpose:
• Scrum, as a core agile practice, does indeed “Optimize the Team”…
• But not necessarily the business since it is often limited to application development
• Lean, as an overarching process, teaches us to try and Optimize the whole (or as wide as possible – as far left and as far right in the P/SDLC)
• Kanban, as a tool, is more relevant today – touching the integration into the PDLC in terms of Brand, Marketing, Sales, Operations and all things business being flowed to the customer
• What do the business really want
• To connect with their customers
• To serve them with the right things, at the right time
• Innovation and creativity that creates differentiation
• To create new customer experiences based on new technology
• To move faster – Stop being bound by the legacy of traditional IT
• An engaged organization (including suppliers)
• More value

Some considerations in closing out this topic:

• Invest in an Agile “Enablement” strategy not just Scrum
• Understand the impact that can be made across the organization
• Enablement vs. Consulting
• Emphasize a culture of learning “to do the work” amongst your employees and the extended supplier team
• Education vs. Training
• Develop a learning path for key roles and teams that can include your supplier team