Topics | Stimmt AG

You can have the impression that CEN-Xchange 10.02 was all about indulgence. Which might actually be a fair assessment. We learned about different methods uncovering the hotel experience from our «Hotel Seefeld» case. We then devoted our attention to the challenge of making the wine experience transparent on the online wine shop Romazini.com.

«CX Fundstücke»

Our new category unveiled three books and a blog post:

• Preditably Irrational by Dan Ariely
  MIT professor Ariely shows how people tend to act irrational but in a predictable fashion. Important know-how when designing products and services.
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
  Classic on the process of innovation and creativity including the 10 ingredients for "How to create great products and services"
  
• Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
  Focusing on the roles within organizations to make innvoation possible.
• Bold Brands - why now is the time to be brave in business and win by Shaun Smith
  Shaun's blog post features bold movements of businesses relentlessly focusing on their mission of serving their customers even against common business wisdom

Research methods tested at Hotel Seefeld

Marc Blume described the different methods tested in our field study at Hotel Seefeld, the obstacles, results and learnings.

The first method was the photo interview, where customers were documenting their stay with digital cameras and later described their photos, allowing the interviewer to ask questions and gather many findings.

Less intrusive for customers were the audio protocols where they commented on their experiences using a digital voice recorder. Results were less rich and clear since there was only the audio protocol and no opportunity to clarify remarks.

Finally there were short adhoc interviews at breakfast with people not briefed upfront. The findings were less in-depth but were not influenced by the fact, that people were briefed which put them in «hotel tester mode» and surely changed their behaviour as happened with the methods mentioned before.

Marc summarized three key learnings:

1. Recruiting: Pay close attention to the personal context of the participants and adapt recruiting as well as other interactions to it. Choose incentives that benefit the person personally within a short time frame (in our case, the offer of a 50% discount on the hotel room was of little value to business travellers, whose companies fully covered their expenses anyway.)
2. Choose an interative approach involving emplyoees to gather existing knowledge and elicit feedback on your findings.
3. Instead of trying to aim at very broad findings along the whole experience chain, focus on single steps and go in-depth. Many clients already have a good understanding of what's basically going on in their business.

Romazini.com - no lemons

Benjamin and Denis from Romazini explained to us their specialty of selling wine online: we have no lemons. Which was the first learning for us, since we didn't really grasp this USP upfront.

They have 250 different types of wine on stock, each one of them among the best rated in their segment and price range, which sounds very appealing to me.

But having a good product is not enough. There are still many challenges: people can't try your product. Searching for wine is different than for camera model x ABC-300. And wine taste is very subjective which rises the question whether ratings of users are really useful in this context? These are just a few challenges we came across.
All participants were very eager to find solutions and give tips. This effort might have been fueled by the superb German Riesling we very tasting at the same time...

These are some high level findings:
We don't know enough about the customers, therefore we can't specifically address their needs and expectations. Definitely a point to work on.
Romazini has the chance of standing out by the experience of doing business with them. This point has to be emphasized in order to make price less of an argument (my suggestion to dump all customers who ask for reduction might have been a bit rigid though).
Systematic investment in the relationship is key. Again in-depth know-how of customers will provide cues how to intensify this relationship.

I have the feeling we will continue that discussion (maybe along with some red wine...). In the meantime if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to leave them right here.

CEN-Xchange 10.03 will take place March 3. You will learn about BMW Financial Services introducing the company's brand promise «Freude am Fahren» within their financial service offering.

If you want to join in next time please contact helmut.kazmaier@stimmt.ch.

The first CEN-Xchange 2010 attracted many CX pioneers and for the first time we had to stop accepting registrations in order to be able to provide an intimate as well as interactive atmosphere.

Another premiere was the «CX discovery» block allowing anybody to quickly introduce blog post, videos, studies or anything else related to customer experience that might be helpful and interesting to the audience. This time the discovery was the book «Wired to care» by Dev Patnaik which tells many stories about how corparate empathy positively influenced companies, their relations to customers and the customer experience. Well suited to open the eyes of a management detached from their customers.

Lukas Karrer presented the first case study concerning the question of how the Verkehrshaus Luzern can increase cross-selling of mueseum and IMAX ticket sales.
We have seen that a mixture of methods from short interviews to extensive shadowing and in-depth, emotion focused interviews provide a wealth of information. These insights provided not only useful hints for optimization but tackled the business case, market position as well as self-image of the Verkehrshaus Luzern and the IMAX theatre.

The last and surely not least premiere was contributed by Claude Cao from Roche. He was the first who took the chance to bring a challenge and not a case study.
He challenged us by asking the question how customer experience can help Roche engaging their customers and provide access to their products in the hospital special care segment. The challenge triggered an intense and lively discussion. The suggestions and approaches were not dominated by deep industry knowledge since there was nobody else from the pharmaceutical industry. The common principal was not surprising considering the audience: Focus on your customers‘s attitudes, needs, desires, fears and the contexts of their lives. Gain insights about your target customers and from that develop solutions that are helpful and evoke a good customer experience. For that you have to put yourself in your customers shoes and look at yourself from their perspective.

CEN-Xchange 10.02 will take place February 3. You will learn about the customer experience at the Hotel Seefeld and a variety of research methods used to measure and describe it.

If you want to join in next time please contact helmut.kazmaier@stimmt.ch.

Bern, November 20, 2009

In cooperation with Swisscom, Stimmt organized the second big Customer Experience event this year. Nearly 40 Customer Experience practitioners and enthusiasts from 13 companies and organizations gathered in Bern to share cases, insights and experiences.

«The CX Forum is something in between a classic conference and a BarCamp meeting.» one participant noticed, reflecting the idea of the CX Forum.
Customer experiences cases presented reached from product design for insurance companies to the concept of guidelines for moments of truth at a professional service firm. In workshops on strategy, organisation and methodology a wide range of topics was covered ranging from the apparent arrival of the experience economy in Switzerland to possibilities to measuring the success of initiatives in organizations. We provided the framework in which the audience could engage, share and discuss. Our guests took the opportunity to contribute and benefit according to their individual needs.

The aspect of connecting Swiss pioneers in customer experience thinking seems to be a real need. «People working in the field of Customer Experience are a likeable kin and it's very nice to engage with them» a participant stated. The atmosphere among people from different companies and industries was very open and benevolent. «It's almost like an innovation meeting in Silicon Valley – people are exchanging in order to spark new ideas» someone summed up the day.

We would like to thank all participants for their contribution in making the CX Forum an amazing experience. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Swisscom for hosting the Forum at their BrandGym. The tremendous organization and superb infrastructure were the foundation for the success of the Forum.

Join the discussion and become part of the Customer Experience Network to get informed about future events. The next opportunity to get in touch is the CEN-Xchange which takes place every first Wednesday of a month.

by Helmut Kazmaier

From personal observations and talking to customer facing employees:

Observation no. 1: Bad guys win.

It appears to be a good strategy for customers to be inconvenient (from a company's perspective). Never accept anything that doesn't satisfy your expectations, enforce your right, complain, be loud. Most companies will try to calm you down and give you what you want, in order to get rid of the problem. Companies trying to satisfy their customers is basically a good thing. Nobody would argue about that. But there is another side to the story.

Observation no. 2: Nice guys lose.

The quiet customers, those who maybe complain once, but will not really push it when things aren't going their way, are usually worse of. They don't "squeeze" as much service or value out of a company.

The lesson customers are taught is this: demand, be wild, push it to the limits. It often pays off. By giving in to this behaviour companies reward it and make it more likely that customers will come with guns blazing (hopefully just figuratively speaking) instead of playing it nice. Although I am sure, companies prefer customers of the quiet type - because they are very likely also more profitable. But they do little to foster this kind of behaviour.

Food for thought: Business done with nice people is more profitable

In his 2006 book «Killer customers», Larry Selden argues that grouping customers by profitability, understanding their behavior and treating them adequatly will allow you to become more profitable.

Why is there no "Hey, you are a really nice customer that gives us little trouble"-bonus? Or the "You have never been asking for anything special"-gift? Or more simply: «Of course we fix your problem without you giving us a hell of a time.»

And why not tell those angry, choleric grouches: «We are very sorry that we can not serve you the way you deem right. It seems that your expectations and our way of doing business are incompatible so we would like to terminate this business relationship.»

I wonder if there are any companies that reward friendly behaviour. I would definitely appreciate it and I guess their employees as well.

What about you? Share your opinion and leave a comment.

October 7 the first CEN-Xchange took place. We were very happy to welcome «veterans» from the Customer Experience Fair in September as well as CEN «newbies». Guests from GE Money Bank, Kuoni, PwC, Raiffeisen, Sulzer and Swisscom gathered to discuss two case studies.

The project «Future of E-Banking» which we had the pleasure to implement with Raiffeisen was about having a glance at the future and develop personas and scenarios for an e-banking environment in 5 to 8 years. Although we couldn't go too much into the details of the results we shared some interesting learnings about the procedure and methods. Key element was motivating a project team of volunteers to break free from operational limitations and use their creativity to imagine what customers will want to have in the future. We identified visualization as a major success factor during workshops as well as in presenting our results to the organization. Instead of «death by Powerpoint» presentations we chose to conduct info vernissages which allowed visitors to explore the results in their own time and comment on them directly on posters. This way we reached many people from across the organization and invited them to enter into dialog. Raiffeisen was so convinced by the format that other teams use it now as well.

Frank Lubatsch from GE Money Bank presented his approach to keep the customer perspective throughout the software development process from gathering requirements to launching the product. Frank argues that companies invest heavily into research and design to meet customer needs but face great danger of destroying that investment when gradually deviating from the original vision in the realisation phase. Frank identifies the lack of understanding of the product and customer of the software developers as a main source of that risk. Product quality planning is a set of tools and methods that mitigate this risk and help product managers keeping the quality level high from a customer point of view. Anybody interested in learning more about product quality planning can give us a buzz. We will arrange contact with Frank who is happy to share his insights.

We thank all participants for the engaging discussions and the good time we spent together.

In the style of Sepp Herberger I'd like to point out that after CEN-Xchange is before CEN-Xchange. The next event will take place on November 4. Don't hesitate and register here.

How to make your customer praise you - even after five years

I just quit my gym contract. Again. I just didn't like it and didn't go there any longer.
After quitting I received mail. A nice letter. They regret my going away. They will be missing me and are asking me what they could do to make me stay. My answer is short and maybe won't help them a lot: Be like my old gym back in Munich.

I've to told this story to quite a few people. Just recently. This made me wonder. Why do I keep telling about this gym, which I left five years ago when moving to Switzerland?

The obvious reason is I liked it there. It's a very nice gym. I can list a couple of things I liked especially. Great machines, plasma TVs, great courses - the only gym where I actually attended courses - good organization, nice atmosphere. This list continues. Every item on my list sums up to this overall feeling of "I liked it there", but doesn't really explain why I am still thinking about my time there with great affection.

The answer is actually pretty simple: They really cared about and for me. Everything I liked was part of their mission to make me reach my goals.
The staff is always around keeping an eye on you. But it is not just about doing your exercises right. They connect to you and build a relationship. And they do it in a sincere way. They reach out to you, when you don't come as frequently as you used to. They frequently check with you on your goals and results. The nice infrastructure certainly is important. But that's not enough to get the job done. It's more like a prerequisite.

From my point of view there is a clear strategy to focus on customer experience and design everything else to make it happen. Also from my point of view this pays off greatly. First of all the gym still exists. They weren't among the cheapest but I really didn't care. After five years I still recommend them to friends. Now I even blog about them. Since recommendations have great impact on (potential) customers' decisions they are very valuable to companies. Assuming that I am not the only one feeling this way and considering network effects my guess is, that they have many profitable years to come.

Finally there is only one thing left to say. Who are they? Of course I won't hold back this information any longer. So if you live in the south of Munich and are looking for a quality gym that really helps you reaching your goals, you might take a look at Sports & Health.