The #1 Concept That Changes Customer Experience Forever

Customer Experience, as it is most commonly viewed should be retired, put out to pasture - whatever you want to call it. We are entering a completely new phase of Customer Experience and those companies who grasp it will revolutionise their business.

It’s called Customer Outcome Management. Don’t dismiss this as just another business term with a slight flavour of what’s already out there - it’s a 180 degrees flip. It takes the world of Customer Experience as we know it, turns it around completely on its head and pushes it into a completely different dimension!

•  It creates the basis for business performance change that puts every other change approach in the shade

•  It represents a 180 degree turn in defining how we drive change

•  It creates the focus and basis of innovation

•  It defines the battleground for competitive differentiation

•  It creates the basis of our strategies, structures, processes and our performance indicators. In fact this thinking impacts every aspect of the organisation

•  It places the customer truly at the center of a Company’s operations

•  It makes Customer Experience, as we traditionally know it, a secondary consideration

•  It explains why so many of our accepted best in class approaches fail or underperform

Less than 1% of Companies practice it - but those who do are either dominating their markets or moving towards a leading position.

Let's be clear here, I have not invented the concept. All I have done is codify the behaviour of the succeeding Organisations into a winning strategy we can all use and benefit from.

Before I explain exactly what Customer Outcome Management is - let me put into context exactly how Customer Experience is traditionally practised.

Brutally - and I know this will attract the detractors - Customer Experience in business today is like icing on a cake – the icing makes the cake taste better but it does not fundamentally change the cake or its basic ingredients.

Customer experience (currently) does not change enough of what a company fundamentally does. A well-executed customer experience strategy will have some impact on products, services and basic processes but fundamentally the company remains the same. Where it has more impact is around the process of making all these connections we have to the customer that little bit sweeter i.e. the icing. Companies who call themselves customer obsessed will look at these interactions, define where they came from, measure them.  They will ask customers what they want and need and then figure ways to make the icing (customer journey) taste better. The company (or cake) is still structured the same way. It's still in the business of maximising revenues and minimising costs and pushing to make their employees engaged, motivated, empowered and focused on the cog in the wheel that is their job.

Companies are all trying really hard at it. I know many companies who have a bad reputation for Customer Experience, but I don't know too many Companies who are not trying.

Now let me ask you a couple of questions.

Why is it only 3% of companies (in the eyes of the customer) create a good enough customer experience to make it a genuine differentiator?

In 2016, Really?

Why do some Companies who have been associated with really poor customer service seem to flourish? RyanAir is one great example, and although they have changed their attitude it has only been in the last year or so.

Ryanair has been chastised for poor Customer Experience, in fact at one stage they were voted one of the most complained about companies in the world. Yet during all that time their business was flourishing. People responded by saying it was only because their fares are cheap, but there is actually a lot more to it than that. 

Incredulous though it may seem, this is a company that understands their customer really well. Their level of understanding however is very different to other companies, and this difference has lead to the business model and undoubted success they have gained. Ryanair have created great outcomes for their customers - they just have not factored much experience along the way - at least not until recently. There is something more to be understood here than just Customer Experience.

So what is Customer Outcome Management? And Why is it Different to what Customer Experience Does Today?

Customer Outcome Management starts with gaining an in-depth understanding of wants and needs. The integral thing to grasp here is that the 'understanding of customer outcomes is a process of unpacking an understanding of customer'.

Confused? Don't be:

The word “unpacking” is deliberate. It goes way further than asking customers about wants, needs and preferences. It goes to a deeper level of understanding, one that goes beyond even the customers own understanding. This does however, throw a light on traditional insight tools and techniques and reveals them to be inadequate.

If you ask a customer a few questions you will get some insight, but not a lot. If you do a detailed qualification or verbal assessment you will get a deeper assessment. Now add some of the newer outcome based techniques and you will get an even deeper understanding - in fact way deeper and more intimate than any questioning based technique - no matter how detailed!

The outcome unpacking process gives you an understanding of customer that looks at the customer from different perspectives and each perspective unlocks ideas on how these outcomes can be created.

Let me give you an example to illustrate why the concept of outcome is so important:

Go back to Macworld 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the first version of what we know as the iPhone. He started by saying that this was going to be a ground breaking year for Apple. They were introducing 3 innovative products. A revolutionary wide screen ipod with touch controls, a pioneering mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. He said it twice again. An ipod, a phone and an internet communications device. An ipod, a phone and an internet communications device. Then he asked the Apple audience “are you now getting it”. This was not 3 separate devices – this was one device! That was the moment that he took his customers to a completely different outcome. He had moved them from mobile telephony into a much wider domain around lifestyle management. The customer could now use the iphone to read articles. They could check the weather. They could send emails. They could play games. Had he invented the concept,-of course not! The origins of bringing the concept of PDA and telephony together had been introduced 13 or 14 years previously. What Steve Jobs had done was not only created a lifestyle management outcome, but made it extremely user friendly. That meant doing away with the traditional qwerty keyboard which Nokia, Palm and Blackberry were using at the time. Seems so obvious now, but what Apple had done was create a massively enhanced package of outcomes, re-defining “ease of use” and “convenience” along the way. This was way in advance of what was already out there. Sure the customer had a great experience, but it was the outcomes that made that massive difference and helped to revolutionise communications into what it is today. 

This is why I used the analogy of Customer Experience being akin to icing on a cake. The concept of Customer Experience without outcome does not change things anywhere near enough, which is why we focus on outcomes first and experience- associated- with- those- outcomes second.

We are now in the era of Customer Outcome Management.

Innovators naturally look at opportunity from a completely different direction. Part of this is looking at what a customer needs/wants and working backwards. Not from a capability perspective and working forward.

Think of the customer outcome framework as peeling an onion. Your understanding deepens as you peel layer after layer. All this thinking is easily learnable but it goes way beyond customer experience as it is currently practiced.

A more formal definition now probably makes a bit more sense.

Customer Outcome Management is the process of aligning everything you do to the Successful Customer Outcomes, plus the experience associated with each outcome:

a)    those Outcomes that you have chosen to deliver at a particular time point (this evolves so you competitively stay ahead)

b)   That maximizes the P&L, ROI and every important KPI of the organization

c)    That aligns/harmonises customer to employee outcome, stakeholder outcomes (could be internal or external), social agenda and company outcome (P&L)

This concept impacts how you research, how you develop, what products you build, how you drive your processes and how you define your structures.

This is completely different to how we have worked with Customer Experience previously.

•  This is a 180 degree shift from where you start change

•  If the Desired Outcomes and Experience associated with those outcomes is better than any of your competition - guess what- potential customers are going to seek you out, rather than them

•  This approach impacts revenue, cost, service, ROI in fact every single performance indicator important to the organisation

The bad news is - your traditional Customer Experience tools and techniques will NOT help you achieve this!

The good news is, the techniques required to move towards this:

•  will identify opportunity ahead of any other Customer Experience techniques currently out there

•  are available now,

•  are quick to learn

•  are easy to understand.

I would go as far to say they are revolutionary.

The great news is within a very short amount of time we can teach you how to use them.

Charles Bennett