How to Master Your Customers’ Experience

Theodore Levitt taught us that “People don’t want to buy a ¼ inch drill; they want to make a ¼ inch hole!”  In other words, solutions (drills) are totally separate and distinct from true customer needs (making holes). For example:

• P&G understood that people don’t want to buy a mop; they want to clean the floor. Understanding this enabled P&G to invent Swiffer, a billion-dollar product that sits in many of our homes.
• Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, understood that people don’t want to buy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software; they want to be more productive managing their business relationships. This insight enabled him to create a Software-as-a-Service platform so we don’t have to deal with the hassles of software ownership and maintenance.
• Nike understands that people don’t want to buy athletic shoes and apparel; they want to become better athletes.

As Clayton Christensen said, “When people realize that they have a job that needs to get done, they look around for a product or service to “hire” to do the job.” So people buy products and services to get tasks done.  This thinking can be applied to the task of “obtaining a service” as well. To do so, you must discover the steps customers go through to enjoy the benefits of your offerings and the criteria they use to measure success executing those steps. For example, every patient who wants to obtain health care services must:

• Determine what help they want, e.g., remove a pain, heal a wound, etc.
• Determine what provider to see
• Schedule an appointment
• Travel to the healthcare facility
• Check into the healthcare facility
• Explain the problem to the provider
• Etc.

Unlike a standard process flow or “service blueprinting,” however, the steps (and the patients’ criteria for success in executing each step) are all stated as “end statements,” statements that reflect what patients/customers want to accomplish independent of current solutions. This is important in order to prevent being constrained by current solutions.

The truth is that customers can tell us what they want when we ask them what they want to get done with an offering rather than asking them to define product or service requirements. Keeping this distinction in mind enables us to discover everything that target consumers (your customers and your competitor’s customers) want to accomplish at each step along the path of obtaining service/care. This makes it possible to map the entire customer experience according to what they want to accomplish, experience, feel, and how they want to be perceived, when obtaining service.

Then, once you have captured these inputs and mapped the entire customer experience qualitatively, you can obtain ratings from customers and non-customers on their satisfaction with their current solution’s ability to help them accomplish each step, not according to their expectations. “Expectations” are the wrong standard to rate satisfaction against because expectations are limited to what people know and have experienced. Generally, consumers have no idea what is possible when it comes to generating new solutions. That’s the supplier’s responsibility (see July’s blog post “Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys are the Wrong Tool For Innovation“).

Obtaining customer satisfaction ratings against what they want to accomplish at each step, however, will reveal opportunities for innovation and growth that traditional customer satisfaction surveys cannot. Additionally, because this approach will capture satisfaction rating from non-customers on their satisfaction with your competitors’ services, you’ll be able to understand how to convert non-customers to customers. This provides management with a killer competitive analysis that is highly actionable and enables management to establish a valued and unique position in the marketplace and deliver a world-class customer experience.