(This post is also published in my #5 UnCXNewsletter)
Frame your thinking before designing your strategy
These discussions help challenge thinking before scoping a strategy. What does it mean to frame the challenge? It’s integral to starting your work. I always start strategy workshops with a series of discussions that help explore, challenge and frame/position thinking and help bring clarity to your Why and What.
If you’re developing your strategy, my list may help guide you. If you already have a strategy, try using my list to test it. (And please let me know how it fits).
Most importantly, read this through a strategy lens.
My topic framework
#1: Do you have a ‘Reason to Choose’?
A ‘good brand’ tells explicit, meaningful stories; engaging consumers on an emotional level and influencing how they perceive our brand. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most valuable brands are amongst the world’s most universally recognised and successful ones.
Brand experience is your customers (and future customers) feelings as they interact with you, see or hear about you. These feelings and expectations sum up how your brand is perceived across touchpoints, from ads, online UX, and storytelling, to support, product reliability and more - and the best brand experiences encourage consumers to buy into you on an emotional level.
Discussion Topic: What feelings, beliefs and behaviours is your brand demonstrating as distinctive differences. Can these frame our CX design thinking?
#2: Are you Being Un-Stupid?
A CX strategy is not merely to be un-stupid. (See my Un-Stupid Strategy Rule #1 here). Merely being un-stupid is the booby prize. It doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may meet the standards customers expect of you in your service layer, but unless all of your competitors are rubbish in their service layer, you’re failing to create a meaningful difference for yourself. Your difference will lie across price, product or emotion, or a combination of the three.
Your brand’s strength is - but not always - built through your customers' experiences, succeeding best when meeting needs. And this is your starting point - knowing your customers’ needs. You may satisfy them through your product, pricing, emotions or all three. If you want to consistently outperform, emotional engagement is stickier, because long-term, most Product, Price and Service standards can be copied or matched. For a strategy that outperforms you often must design experiences that reflect your brand's essence and create meaningful, brand-reinforcing memories – branded experiences.
Discussion Topic: Are you earning the right to offer experiences by first competing very effectively in the service layer?
The opposite must also be a strategy.
Roger L. Martin’s simple strategy test asks, “Is the opposite of our strategy also a strategy?”
The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the same strategy as you.
That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors.
#3: Are Interactions Engagement?
Don’t mistake interactions for engagement. Interactions happen in your ‘service layer’. Experiences happen in your ‘experience’ layer. It’s different across sectors but, typically, 80-90 per cent of your customer interactions will take place in your service layer. This is your table stakes layer where a bill is paid, a delivery made, a call answered, a contract signed, and so on. Customers don’t want to remember these ‘experiences’, but they are important - don’t diminish them as they build consumer trust - but they’re not usually critical to a customer’s experience unless done badly. Consistency creates trust – a crucial enabler because you can’t have long-term engagement without it. Trust breaks if promises aren’t kept or when poor service is inexcusable. Interactions normally need to be frictionless, must work, and must work consistently. You have to get the service layer dead-on right. Because you have to earn the right to offer experiences, the 10-20 per cent where you create preference, memory, and emotion.
Discussion Topic: What are the consequences if all remembered experiences by your customers are the same as everyone else’s? How can we change that?
#4: Is Thinking Archetypes Better?
My preference is to think of archetypes, not demographics. When thinking archetypes, you’ll unearth common needs and wants across age, sex, religion, geography, education or income. Archetypes humanise the customer - they have common needs and beliefs across different ethnicities, ages, locations, education and so on.
While demographics answer the question “Who,” archetypes answer “Why.”
Find your archetypes. You may have several, and you must recognise them, their behaviours, and their needs. Then you can cut through with relevant messages and experiences to attract their attention and work out the channels to communicate in. (For example, confident traditionalists don’t follow social media or interact with brands or retailers on social media).
Today’s largest archetype (cohort) can be described as confident traditionalist. At around 18 per cent of the population they display distinct behavioural characteristics different to other archetypes. Difficult to influence, they rarely make impulse buys nor are early triers of new products. They’re frugal, frequently focusing on low prices and saving money. Discounts and sales can sometimes influence their purchasing habits, causing them to choose the cheapest alternative. Traditionalists don’t enjoy the shopping experience. The more convenient and efficient the buying process, the more likely they are to repeat purchase. They value in-store shopping above online, and are more likely to do their research and make purchases in-store. Source: Euromonitor International
Discussion Topic: Do you have archetypes? What are they? What can they be?
#5: Are We Different?
Clearly articulating what is different about your brand, and using that as a framework for all elements of your CX, gets you to target memorable and distinctive experiences that matter to your customers. And, more closely connecting customer experience to your brand identity will also supercharge your brand and pricing power. When customers feel an emotional bond between their needs, expectations, and experiences, they are likelier to be loyal. Your brand ‘feels’ right.
So for experiences to succeed, you should aim to create a strong emotive identity rooted in what makes your brand meaningfully different. Identify what makes you stand out from the crowd, then communicate it and execute it.
An effective CX strategy doesn’t have to be unique in every way but is something in a consumer’s memory separating your brand from another. Different is hard to substitute, not easily copied, and more readily comes to mind (saliency) when building mental connections with consumers.
There are, of course, many ways to be different. Some are more obvious - lowest price, for example (think Ryanair). Or the highest price (think Loius Vitton). Others exist in the minds of consumers as memories, knowledge, feelings, and experiences. Differences can also lie in product design, your purpose, convenience, packaging, speed, or other factors, and some may interact with each other. (Think Apple, Patagonia, Amazon, Dove and Ferrari).
For Ferrari, it wasn’t simply about fast/luxury. Wanting to evoke Thrill as a key emotive difference, they re-engineered their perfect exhaust to evoke the exact noise, without any performance loss, that research informed them was most aurally thrilling for their customers. It took them three years to get the noise exactly right.
Discussion Topic: What are your differences, what can they be, and how are they/can they be delivered?
#6: Is Digital a channel?
This may surprise you. (I’m sure to get some emails about this statement). And, indeed, everyone and everything is doing digital, right?
But my point is, digital is a mindset. And how you use it is the strategy. Your way of doing things. It’s thinking about how to use digital’s capabilities to improve how your customers are served. This should be grounded in understanding each step of your customer’s purchasing journey—regardless of channel—and thinking about how digital capabilities can design and deliver the best possible experience, across all parts of the business. For example, Nike uses their mobile app to go beyond ‘selling sports shoes and other gear ’ to become a motivational coaching companion to help us reach our goals. In this way, they use the channel to bring innovation and inspiration to us, embedding itself in our day-to-day life. That’s Personalisation and Purpose. But there are other examples - Speed (Amazon’s app and web), Loyalty (Starbucks’ app) and more.
Discussion Topic: Think of examples about how to use digital to strengthen your engagement and extend your customers’ experience beyond just mobile-first thinking.
#7: Should We Choose Wisely, not epically?
You’ll likely have limited resources. This is one reason not to try to be epic in everything you do. Why? With limited resources, you must choose how to spend your resources to the best effect in a few standout ways. But one reason I eschew everything epic is that ‘epic’ wanes as a memorable experience - over time it becomes routine, not epic, forcing you to raise the bar further. An experience gap occurs whenever a customer expects a promise and doesn’t get it.
Discussion Topic: Can you identify where your biggest investments offer the biggest payback?
#8: Are We In The “Better” trap?
You may be a better version than X, but that does little to differentiate you. (Better may actually be worse if it costs you more). Different and Distinctive is what matters.
Discussion Topic:Can you identify Different or Distinctive elements to your experiences and promise?
#9: Do Our Customers care?
They always want you to be fit for purpose. Table stakes, and executed well. But they don’t always need to care.
Far too many of us talk about delivering the most basic, simple, and essential of customer tasks as if we’re innovating, even caring. But there’s a BUT - being merely functional won’t get you first prize.
Discussion Topic: Are your metrics driving operational functionality or the stickiness of your customers engagement?
#10: Are we defining ourselves by our competitors?
Defining yourself against your competitors ties your identity to theirs, which can be limiting. Where can you be different? Even better, where can you be distinctive? Strong brands are unique. They say and do something distinctive compared to other brands.
If you’re genuinely a brand-led company, you need to send the signal that your competition shouldn’t register on your consumers’ radar.
Discussion Topic: Challenge yourself to dig deeper. Go past the obvious and discover an approach that excites you just as much as it scares you.
#11: Are we in ‘The Dive’?
One common and fatal mistake with CX strategy is ‘the dive’ - we jump in and waste resources on ‘experiences’ without context, that don’t add value, create brand dissonance by confusing consumers, or supercharges your service layer to the status of ‘epic’ when it doesn’t matter.
Discussion Topic: Are you driving ‘experiences’ for their own sake? Do you have target financial objective - for example, improving loyalty or more mobile sales?
#12: Are We Slaves to ‘best practice’?
When thinking strategically, the only best practice you should follow is what is appropriate to your competitive context, what customer needs your competition is missing, how you will meet them, how you’ll meet your company’s financial objectives and how you best use the resources you have available.
Discussion Topic: Are you finding the gaps? And in the areas where you want to be standout – those fundamental to how you will differentiate – are you aiming to be better than best practice and keep improving to remain ahead.
#13: Do we understand some key principles?
Have you read these two books?
A colleague, the late Sampson Lee, was the proponent of the PIG theory, Pain Is Good, and I recommend reading his articles, starting here, and if you like the theory, follow it up with his book.
Discussion Topic: Do you understand the thinking behind JTBD (Jobs To Be Done)?
#14: Why is Ryanair so hated, but so successful?
Ryanair is one of Europe's low-cost airlines. It consistently ranks near or on the bottom in customer satisfaction surveys. Yet, it’s grown into Europe’s biggest airline by far, by most any metric.
Discussion Topic: Why is this? (This discussion explores price, expectation management, and other influencing factors on choice).
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