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All customer experience is local
American readers of a certain age will remember the late Tip O'Neill - the white-haired, bulbous-nosed Speaker of the House throughout most of the 1980s. For many people he's best known for his dictum that "all politics is local." Elections are won and lost - legislation is passed or defeated - through person-to-person relationships, not grand announcements or abstract frameworks.
I'd argue that the same holds for customer experience. Anything the customer sees or uses - be it on a website, iPhone app, social media project, or in some offline context - is conceived, designed, negotiated, and launched on the basis of person-to-person relationships. These relationships include stakeholders cooperating with each other, communicating with developers, and listening - one-on-one - to customers.
To put it another way: All customer experience is local.
In contrast, a good customer experience is not built via grand pronouncements, or strategies from on high (from the consultant who plops the fat printed report on the desk and leaves), or echoing the headlines, or chasing the latest fad. None of those are built from a relationship.
If you want to build a good customer experience, go local. Sit down with the person you need to work with. Listen to them. Come up with common goals. And always remember to include the customer. (For help on that, of course, you might contact Creative Good.)
Yours locally, -mark
Agreed!
I just spoke with a new client this morning. They're a value added reseller (VAR) for an extremely well known national brand. My client's challenge is typical. The large "mother ship" brand is cannibalizing the VAR's online advertising and marketing efforts.
What to do?
My suggestion was that we focus on where we can make the biggest impact, and that's the local experience. Ultimately, their customers are local, and end up working with one of just a couple of people on their team. There's lots we can do to expose that good experience.
It turns out that most of the changes they should make are tactical, small adjustments.
Keep up the great insights, Mark!
There is nothing as effective as one on one no matter what you are trying to accomplish. Let your customers know that you value them by taking the time to listen to them and let them know they are important. Remember, without your customer, you would not be in business.
Exactly. When we were going to do a focusgroup for a site redesign and I said that I and a colleague were going to visit the focus group members at their own homes first, many frowned.
It turned out to be truly worthwhile! Even if, in theory, you know about user behavior, it's an entirely different kind of understanding when you see an actual person, who you've just had a cup of coffee with on their couch in their home, open up a creaky IE with five toolbars on their laptop and pull up your website in a 300px high viewport and hear them complain about how all websites make you scroll and how awkward scrolling is on a laptop where you have to put the mouse pointer over the scroll bar, press the mouse button and then drag it.
A propos user experience: when commenting, there is no indication that Email address is a required field and when you don't fill that field and submit the comment, you get an error message that allows you to click back to the original article, but when you arrive there, your comment is gone...
Mark, good thought!
I also thought recently on similar lines and arrived at: all our life is local, though we may think global/universal, being humans.
Perfect! I too think the same, before engineering anything, not only the stake holders but also the people for whom the product is going to be launched should be consulted.
Involving customers at an early phase of the project startup will help not only in business growth but also help in building the reputation and trustworthiness among the customers.