OUTPERFORMING THE MARKET
Companies that lead with customer experience generate more revenue, have more engaged employees, and are more profitable. Period. Let's dive in below.
Experience-driven companies become what I like to call Definitive Brands. They are the companies against which all other companies in an industry are measured.
People want to work for a company that does meaningful work and has a reputation for excellence. They give more of themselves because their work becomes more than just a job.
According to a study by Deloitte and Touche, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. People are willing to pay more, more often for a better experience.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” – Steve Jobs
You've probably seen the clip of Steve Jobs taking a question from an angry developer who insulted him while simultaneously questioning the direction of the company. Jobs' measured, thoughtful response became an instant golden nugget of product strategy wisdom: start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.
Your customers don’t care about features, functionality, or technology. They care about the experience that those things collectively enable. That’s why it is critical to start your product and service development endeavors with a vision of the experience you want to create for your customers, based on an intimate knowledge of the progress your customers are trying to make, and work backwards to everything that needs to happen to enable that experience.
By focusing on what you want your customer experience to be, you instantly gain strategic clarity and insight into what has to happen in order to have a successful product.
By focusing on what you want your customer experience to be, you instantly gain strategic clarity and insight into what has to happen in order to have a successful product. That can uncover operational changes that have to be made to optimize for the customer experience.
Even administrative requirements by non-customer-facing teams asking for something as seemingly innocuous as a cover sheet on all the TPS Reports affects the customer experience, because it could—and probably does—take away from someone's ability to serve the customer. It might also take a tiny piece of their soul, but that's another issue.
Orchestrating operations towards the customer is not easy, which is why I created a framework for systematically focusing your organization's go-to-market efforts on creating great customer experiences. I call it the Five Forces of Customer Experience.
If you nail these five things, you are on your way to creating fierce customer loyalty, and all of the rewards that come with it—and that is because you are taking the time to give people your very best.
Why does your company exist? What does it stand for? The real, honest answers to these questions collectively drive your company culture without fail. This cannot be escaped.
Companies with a strong purpose outperform their markets by 400%. In other words, Purpose is important and it drives everything that follows.
At the core of why a customer does business with you is a product or service that a customer hires to make progress on a job that they need done. Your product can be fired the moment a customer finds a better one to hire, which is why understanding that Job gives you the edge.
It should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: you have to have an excellent product and service to lead. In the enterprise space, the focus on excellence can sometimes go by the wayside, which means that if you are willing to put in the work, there is marketshare ripe for the taking.
You can't have good customer service without creating an environment where your employees can deliver that. This is a deep topic that involves a lot of moving parts, each if which we will cover in this assessment:
The late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School said in a book he co-authored with several of his colleagues that, “Products can be copied, but it’s difficult to copy experiences.” Your business operations are critical to enabling a great customer experience.
Are your business operations aligned with creating the highest internal efficiency, or the greatest customer experience? Those two objectives don't have to be at odds, but one definitely takes precedence, and I bet you can guess which one it is.
Every person in your organization should know how their job impacts the customer. There is simply no role at a company that does not impact the customer, and your culture should reflect that.
Make the Five Forces of Customer Experience work to create more value than ever, with happier employees than ever, and be rewarded by the market as a result.
For more information about my core business philosophies, check out these podcasts.
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