The chief executive waited until the waiter had cleared the plates before he asked the question he’d clearly been saving all evening.
“We’ve been listening to our customers for years,” he said. “Surveys, focus groups, journey maps, advisory panels, the lot. So why aren’t we connecting with them any better?”
I gave him the kind of answer consultants give you when they need a moment to think. “Hmm… What do you do with what they tell you?”
“We report it,” he said. “Monthly. In colour.”
That turned out to be the main problem.
The chief executive was a thorough man. His company was by no means short of customer insight. Their surveys ran like clockwork and the journeys had been mapped with loving care. Leadership cared about the customer experience, too, well beyond the pages of the annual report. And yet what customers said they were getting bore little resemblance to what the organisation believed it was delivering.
In my experience that gap almost never lies in the quality of the feedback. Most companies do listen, and often very hard. What they lack is areliable way of turning what they hear into what they do.
When Listening Becomes Execution
Early in my career I made the same mistake he had. I assumed that great customer experience came from listening closely. After all, it seems obvious. Customers tell you what they want, so you give them more of it. And if they complain? You put it right.
But in company after company, what I found was a rather different routine. The customer who paid the firm a compliment was thanked, and nothing about operations changed. The customer who complained got an apology, and his or her complaint was addressed, but nothing about operations changed there either (unless the complaints swelled into a howling torrent, that is). Almost no one went looking for the business processes that had produced the compliment or the complaint in the first place.
A complaint is a flashing oil light on the dashboard. You need to do something about it. Thanking your automobile dashboard won’t do anything about it, and while a strip of tape over the light may reduce the tension for the moment, it won’t in the long run. Neither does a thing for the engine. Only prompt attention from a trained mechanic will do that.
Listening is where the work starts. The organisations that improve customer experience year after year don’t just listen: they connect everything they hear to the way the organisation makes decisions and acts.
Think about who shapes the customer’s experience. Customer Service hears the customer, and Operations delivers the product or service. Supply Chain gets the materials to the factory in time to make it. Marketing sets the expectations the customer arrives with. Each function contributes something different, and the strongest organisations make sure each one starts from the same place, which is a focus on, and an understanding of, the customer. What we call Voice of Customer can be a great deal more than feedback. It should be an input that shapes how the business runs.
Here’s why that matters. Suppose customers say delivery reliability is poor. Fine, but where’s the cause? It might lie in demand planning or production scheduling, in order management or inventory policy, or out in logistics. Most likely it’s some not immediately apparent combination of several of these.
Or suppose a customer complains that resolving an issue takes far too long. Often the culprit is ownership. Who deals with the problem? Customer Service or Quality, Supply Chain or Finance? Each one assumes one of the others has the ball, so nobody steps up to it.
The customer experiences the outcome. The organisation, meanwhile, may barely experience its own processes as a whole, since each department goes about its business in cheerful and even highly competent ignorance of the others.
Therein lies the challenge, and the opportunity.
An Observation That Changed My Thinking
I remember working on a customer experience problem at a company whose customers were unhappy in a sustained and angry way. The firm, quite reasonably, wanted to make things better, and began where most firms begin, with the people taking the calls.
As we dug in, we found ourselves tracing the customer’s experience backwards through the organisation. The front line was taking the heat, but the dissatisfaction had started much earlier. An availability problem had begun in planning. Someone had made a delivery commitment with no real assurance of supply, and orders had gone far afield along the way. The process had let the customer down, and the customer service rep was left holding the bag.
Not one of the teams involved thought of itself as creating a poor customer experience. Each had its own goals and priorities, its own measures and benchmarks, and often it met them. Its focus was internal throughout, fixed on a quota or a deadline, with no line of sight to the end customer.
I asked one of the planners about the order that had caused the most grief.
“We hit our forecast accuracy target that month,” she said, a little defensively.
“Yes, fine. But the customer?”
She shrugged. “Nobody’s ever asked me about the customer.”
The customer? What customer?
Customer Service, needless to say, was well aware of the customer. Customers were beating them to a pulp. The customer knew nothing about forecast accuracy, and cared less. The customer neither knew nor cared about the constraints the firm was wrestling with. All the customer was that the product arrived late and didn’t work. They didn’t blame the planners or the warehouse, or even the product. They blamed the company, and soured on it as a whole.
That should not have been a revelation to me. But it was. I realized that customer experience is created along the whole chain of decisions and handoffs, processes and behaviours that determines what the customer receives, and the point where the firm touches the customer is only the last link in it, the period at the end of a very, very long sentence. Improving the experience meant working backwards, and correcting the things further upstream that made it what it was.
The Pattern
Look at customer experience through that lens and a pattern appears. You’ll see that a great many customer experience problems turn out to be execution problems that only show themselves vividly at the customer interface.
The organisation sees reports on forecast accuracy and inventory, production and order processing, transport performance and a long parade of functional KPIs. The customer’s view is much simpler. He wants to know whether you got it to him on time and did what you said you would, whether it works as advertised and (if something went wrong) whether you put it right, and quickly.
It’s hard to overstate how much hangs on that last point.
[Dave Carroll learned how complaints gets answered the hard way. In March 2008 the Canadian singer and his band, Sons of Maxwell, were changing planes at Chicago’s O’Hare when a passenger behind them looked out of the window and cried out that the baggage handlers were throwing guitar cases into piles of baggage as though they were basketballs. One of them was Carroll’s $3,500 Taylor, and when he opened the case in Omaha, its base was smashed. There followed nine months of being passed between United’s baggage offices in Chicago and New York, with calls to a call centre in India and a detour via Air Canada, which had operated the first leg and said the damage was United’s business, not theirs. All Carroll wanted was the $1,200 needed to repair the damage. In the end a United employee told him to stop sending emails, because he wasn’t going to get a penny.
So Carroll did what any pop songwriter would. He wrote a song called “United Breaks Guitars,” put the video on YouTube in July 2009 and watched it pass 150,000 views on its first day. United’s spokeswoman said the video had “struck a chord,” which may be the only pun ever issued by an airline press office in distress. Needless to say, no one at United had done anything violating their guidelines. Each office had followed its own procedure, and between them they turned a $1,200 repair into a video watched by millions. How much did it cost United in the long run? Unknown. How much time and money would it have saved by providing better service in the first place? Also unknown. Probably a lot. But the cause was not ‘bad service’? The cause was systemic: an operational process that neither attended to nor corrected poor baggage handling, or reasonable customer complaints.]
Sources: ABC News, “Musician Makes Music Out of Feud With United Airlines” (2009); Now I Know, “The Musician Whose Big Break Was a Broken Instrument”.
Customer experience and operational excellence belong in the same conversation. Operational excellence with no clear connection to customer value may give you efficient processes, but if those processes do nothing for the customer, or leave him worse off, you’ll lose him, and probably a good many of his friends.
But that same connection is also an opportunity. Once we see how operational performance shapes customer experience, we can find the processes that make customers happy and improve them. Enhanced profitability follows.
The customer tells us what matters, and execution is how the organisation delivers it.
A Question Worth Asking
Whenever I work with a leadership team, sooner or later I ask a question that changes the tone of the room. Where, inside our organisation, is customer experience being created?
The first answers are the obvious ones: from the people who talk to customers. Sales and Customer Service get named first, and Marketing usually follows. Then the conversation widens. Planning decides whether the product will be available, and Manufacturing whether it will be made reliably and to specification. Logistics decides whether it arrives. IT decides whether information moves with the customer’s journey or gets stuck halfway. Finance shapes how easily disputes and credits are settled, and leadership decides the trade-offs when priorities collide.
At that point customer experience stops being the responsibility of one department. It becomes a matter of orchestration, an outcome of execution across the whole enterprise, and that’s a very different conversation.
An Executive Reflection
This way of looking at things changes what leaders ought to look for. Customer satisfaction scores and journey maps are still useful, and Voice of Customer is still essential. But we should also look just as hard at what sits behind them. Where do customers keep running into exceptions, and where do internal handoffs create delay? I’d want to know where ownership is unclear and where employees are improvising workarounds, where promises are being made without the capability to keep them, and where customers have to chase us to get things done.
Most important of all, where does the organisation already know about a recurring customer problem and still fail to turn that knowledge into lasting action?
Listening to customers is the easy part. The hard part is converting what we hear into decisions and ownership, process changes, behaviours and measures that solve the problem, and then making sure the improvement outlasts the crisis that prompted it, so the same problem doesn’t come round again. That’s execution.
Customer Experience Is an Outcome of the System
I no longer think of customer experience as a discipline standing on its own. The customer journey runs straight through the operating model, and anyone who pictures it sitting neatly at the end has been looking at the wrong diagram. Every promise crosses functions; and every exception tests someone’s decision rights. Every complaint exposes some part of the system, and every workaround tells you how execution happens in practice, as distinct from how it was meant to happen. And every consistently good customer experience is evidence that the parts of the organisation that matter are working together.
Customer experience is what execution feels like to the customer. It’s the outward expression of thousands of internal decisions and actions. When those decisions connect and ownership is clear across functional boundaries, the customer feels it as reliability and trust. He buys again and tells his friends, and the company’s profits grow.
From Speculation to Execution
Too many leaders still think of customer experience as something that happens at the far end of operations, a murky after-the-fact business of buyer psychology best left to the marketing department. It’s nothing of the kind. Used properly, it’s a precise instrument for examining those operations and improving them in ways that lift customer satisfaction and, with it, profitability. The question for leaders becomes what we must do differently inside the organisation for the customer to experience something better outside it.
That moves the conversation from speculation to execution, which is where meaningful change for customers begins.
The chief executive, as it happens, cancelled the monthly report in colour. In its place he asked for a single page listing the top five customer problems the company understood and hadn’t yet fixed, with the name of the person who owned each one. Those top five got addressed the next day.
James Amoah
Executive Observation #001
Customer Experience
Executive Observations are practical reflections from more than twenty-five years of leading and supporting operational, supply chain and business improvement. They explore the connections between reliable execution, leadership, operational excellence and customer experience — and what those connections mean for those endeavouring to make their businesses better, stronger, more profitable leaders in their field.
