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To start things off, we publish a review of Thomas Lockwell's book «Design Thinking». This is a start to a review series of 10 of the newest books on Customer Experience.

Since we are focussing mainly on the German speaking community, we will be publishing in German from now on. If you are speaking English only, please get in touch with us. We'll find a way on how we can support you in still getting updates from us.

We are looking forward to continuing the dialogue in the new location with you.


«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.

Lorenz joined Stimmt this year after finishing his master thesis on online banking at the University of Basel's Departement of Psychology.

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.

Helmut Kazmaier joined Stimmt in 2005. His passion and enthusiasm for technology and customer experience has made him an expert on topics such as social media. He will be in charge of marketing and public relations in his new position and will still continue his consulting work with our clients.

Marc Sturzenegger is leaving Stimmt after 5 years to head his family's business. We would like to thank Marc for his dedication and contribution during his time with us. Marc took a major role in repositioning Stimmt from a company focussing primarily on user centered development to a strategic customer experience consultancy. 

This week, I have seen four independent case studies by leading Swiss companies presenting impressive new intranet platforms. All have shifted their design to a personalized, iGoogle-like Start page. Is this a coincidence? I doubt it!

Fig. 1 Intranet start page Raiffeisen

 Just as can be seen with iGoogle, the intranet Start page features several tabs containing widgets (or ‘gadgets’, to use the iGoogle term). The tabs are pre-populated with a general set of useful widgets. The user may reposition or remove widgets, or select new ones.

Adopting an iGoogle-like approach to the intranet Start page solves many issues:

Limited real estate on intranet Start page for an ever-growing number of stakeholders

Have you ever had to moderate disputes about the allocation of real estate on the Start page? Unfortunately, these discussions can seldom be resolved with facts and figures. Too often, real estate is distributed according to the requester's influence.

With an iGoogle-like intranet Start page, the user takes the final decision about which widget goes where on the Start page. Content providers must therefore work hard to create widgets that are of value to users. Additionally, having the possibility to present statistics about usage and widget position brings objectivity into the discussion.

Role-based Start pages replace "one size fits all" approach

Intranets are changing from reading things to doing things. To support a user to perform their most important tasks, there is no way around personalizing the Start page. The needs of a client relationship manager at a bank are completely different to the needs of an internal project manager. With an iGoogle-like approach, the Start page can be easily tailored to fit the specific needs of different roles.

Breaking down information silos

Users often complain that the information they need is dispersed among multiple information silos. Great efficiency gains can be achieved by better supporting a user's end-to-end processes. Mashing up information that originates from different sources tears down boundaries and provides all the required information to successfully complete a task.

Unifying and simplifying the user interface of applications can leverage an additional benefit. Applications are often optimized for power users who use the app on a daily basis. As a result, sporadic users are often overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface. Most tasks performed by a general audience (e.g. looking up a client contact or a recent proposal) do not require all of an application’s functionality. Providing a simplified and consistent interface to applications within an iGoogle-like widget on the Start page speeds up simple tasks and reduces user training requirements. This reduces the burden created by different user interfaces within different applications.

Fig. 3 CRM Lookup combined with VOIP and SMS Functionality in Stimmt Intranet

Why strain your intranet budget?

Three out of four of the case presentations I mentioned earlier featured open APIs, so that interested parties could build their own widgets. Arguably, this openness brings great benefit to intranet managers. If other stakeholders can implement intranet additions at their own cost, this reduces the strain on limited intranet budgets. In one presentation, decentralized development was accelerated further by enabling users to vote for the most helpful addition to the intranet.

Tap the existing knowledge of your employees

The concept of "wisdom of the crowd" often crops up in relation to Amazon’s "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…". What if this idea could be applied to the intranet Start page? This is easily achieved using the iGoogle approach – “Other people working in Research and Development also found these widgets to be useful…”. All you need are some statistics that could be used to add or remove widgets from the Start page.

Any downsides?

Besides technical complexity, I cannot really see any disadvantages. An often-heard argument is that users are not web-savvy enough to fully benefit from this approach. In my opinion, this is not really an issue. Since the Start page is pre-populated with widgets, new users are never confronted with a blank page.

On the other hand, Power-users can fully benefit from the flexible, user selected approach.

Using screencasts or brief presentations, users can be trained to make use of the new possibilities. Managing widgets decentrally further accelerates this process. Team leaders who have developed specific widgets for their job functions can train their teams to use the resource in an optimal fashion. This way, training is decentralized and the burden is taken off the shoulders of the intranet manager.

Disclaimer: Stimmt has consulted to two out of the four intranet projects mentioned above.

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.

As global supporter for both initiatives, I can highly recommend these reports to every manager looking for input to advance their intranet and create value for their company.

Global Intranet Strategies Survey

The Global Intranet Strategies Survey is an annual worldwide survey about intranet strategies and practices. This research leads to the annual Global Intranet Trends report which is published each autumn.

Jane proposes five hypothesis which will influence intranet concepts in the years to come:

- The front-door intranet
- The team-oriented intranet
- The people-focused intranet
- The real-time intranet
- The place-independent intranet

For more info, browse to http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/about.htm

Intranet Innovations Awards

Step Two together with an international judging panel of intranet experts celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets.

The publication is an indispensable source of great innovations to leap forward with the value your intranet creates for your company!

As a supporter, we are proud to offer a 10% rebate to all Stimmt clients planning to buy the report.

For more info, browse to http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia

Specially worth mentioning are two entries by Swiss companies. Both the Swiss Post's Distropolis as well as the Raiffeisen Bank's RAIweb are commended in this year's award.

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.

On the first wednesday every month, the Customer Experience Network -
Xchange takes place at the Stimmt offices. This time, 12 customer
experience believers talked about a case study of a project and
possibilities of promoting Customer Experience in large companies.

The case: The language travel booking experience

Stimmt's project with Switzerland's largest language school operator
brought the following learnings:

• Analyzing customer needs through emotion-centered interviews enabled the client to get a much more detailed picture of the customer decision process than classic market research or internal process analysis.
• The client understood in more detail about important drivers and influencing factors for purchase decisions.
• By identifing the «moments of truth» and the related feelings of the customers we were able to suggest pragmatic quick fixes as well as long term initiatives with high impact on a positive customer experience.
• Overall the client gained insights to on how to focus investments on things that enhance the customer experience

Find the case study here.

Discussion: How do I convince my organization of customer experience.

The second part focused on the challenge of convincing other people –
namely management – of the benefits of CX. Here are some key points:

•  A top management sponsor makes life easier
• Internal marketing and high visibility projects are important to capture management’ attention
• Convince through cases: «we reduced the error rate by X which will save us Y dollars due to reduced support time» will make a great case for future projects. Therefore: Establish clear KPIs at the beginning of every CX project.
• Back yourself up with numbers: Backing up findings with quantitative data convinces management much more.
• Fighting battles and justify your position consumes a lot of energy without creating any value. Don’t fight for positions and don’t try to impose your opinion. Rather invest your energy at the beginning of a project for the stakeholders to realize that focusing on customers is much more than an add on.
• Involve stakeholders in the analysis phase: immersion is especially powerful. Put your stakeholders in their customer’s shoes and let your stakeholders participate in extracting the findings.
• CX is not about tools or processes. It’s about empathy for customers

The next CEN-Xchange meeting will take on December 2. We discuss methods to analyse and measure customer experience which we tried in at Hotel Seefeld in Zurich

Get in touch with Helmut Kazmaier (helmut.kazmaier@stimmt.ch) to attend.