One sentence in an article in BusinessWeek made me understand what a great computer gaming experience is all about:

Simple to learn, difficult to master is the holy grail of game design.

This sentence reminds me of the power of clear and simple statements to summarizes the challenges, requirements and goals of a great computer gaming experience. Of course one could create a framework that incorporates all the different factors and dimensions that make a computer game great but at the end it would be too complicated and nobody could understand it, not to mention apply it.

Methods, frameworks, models, best-practices - too often things are over-complicated. Sometimes the reasons are failed efforts to create a model that "explains the world", sometimes because the problem is not yet fully understood. This quote from Leonardo da Vinci gets to the point:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci

Why does that matter? If one can’t express in a simple statement what constitutes a remarkable customer experience, things are either artificially complicated or - more probable - customers are not fully understood.

Read the full article in BusinessWeek.

Image courtesy of [TheAlieness]

Posted in customer experience, thoughtful | Permalink | 3 Comments »

When we talk about remarkable customer experiences, we usually think about creating something that is "bigger, better, more". I often argue in conversations about customer experience that “you don’t need fireworks to deliver remarkable customer experiences". Bigger, better, more is not the only way to deliver great customer experiences.

It might be the most fashionable approach to improve customer experience (everybody wants to work on projects that make a brand more "premium" and "exclusive") but this is not the only possible path. Let’s look at two different philosophies for creating remarkable customer experiences.

The Ritz-Carlton Philosophy

The Ritz-Carlton Hotels are famous for their exclusive interior, world-class service and the extraordinary customer experiences that are delivered by each-and-every employee. The biggest challenge with this “Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" is that in order to provide more benefits to the customer, organizations are confronted with additional costs to provide them. More employees, better technology, more exclusive interior require higher prices if profit margins want to be sustained.

The effect of higher prices is that customer-perceived value, the ratio between perceived benefits and perceived sacrifice, is only slightly improved. Perceived sacrifice includes all the costs a buyer faces when making a purchase while the perceived benefits are the combination of physical attributes, service attributes and technical support.

 

This "premium" strategy only works when you target a price-insensitive customer segments that is willing to pay more for these additional benefits. The remarkable experience comes from the accumulation of these benefits into "peak experiences".

The "Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

The IKEA Philosophy

Another approach, which I call "The IKEA Philosophy", is to deliver extraordinary customer experiences by increasing customer perceived value through reducing perceived sacrifice for the customer.

IKEA creates remarkable experiences through its modern, utilitarian furniture and store design while at the same time ensuring lowest-prices through reduced shipping and inventory costs and self-assembly.

The IKEA approach increases customer perceived value primarily by decreasing sacrifice (the same benefits at a lower price) and secondarily by increasing benefits with constant sacrifice (more benefits at the same price).

 

When following such an approach, the focus shifts from "bigger, better, more" to "easier, cheaper, faster". The necessary tactics to realize this are well known: process optimization and cost-cutting. Usually we only think of these tactics when we are facing a recession, serious competitive pressure or when profit margins are sinking.

Organizations that can leverage process-optimization and cost-cutting to increase customer perceived value have a powerful tool to create remarkable customer experiences.

The "IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy" creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company’s products and services.

What does this mean for your organization?

Instead of pursuing a "Ritz-Carlton" customer experience strategy that focuses on "bigger, better, more", think about what you could achieve in your organization if you pursue an IKEA "easier, cheaper, faster" philosophy to deliver remarkable customer experiences?

Which processes could be improved to reduce perceived sacrifice? Instead of lowering prices, could you deliver more benefits to the customer through operational efficiency?

While this is not an either/or decision, it is necessary to understand these two different options for designing remarkable customer experiences. The Ritz-Carlton philosophy might be more “fun” to work on, you can probably have a bigger impact on the bottom-line by following the IKEA philosophy for customer experience design.

 

Further Links:

Examples of companies, products and services that follow the "Ritz-Carlton experience philosophy" can be found in the trend report "ÜBERPREMIUM".

Examples of companies, products and services that follow the "IKEA experience philosophy" can be found in the trend report NO FRILLS CHIC.

Posted in customer experience | Permalink | 5 Comments »

Jeneanne Rae observes in a recent article in BusinessWeek that "Design Thinking" is receiving increasing attention in the corporate world to crack difficult business problems where current approaches to innovation don’t deliver results. After Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), is Design Thinking yet another fad or is there truly something fundamental behind the "way designers think"?

First of all, I don’t think that all these are simply random management fads. Many companies have applied TQM, Six Sigma or BPR to increase operational efficiency and increase profits (See this post from Prof. Tom Davenport on the sustainability of these "Next Big Things") . Nevertheless corporations are still struggling with innovation and a set of "design thinking" methods and tools will not do the job.

This quote from A.G. Leafley, CEO of Procter&Gamble , summarizes the challenge:

"Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence)," he writes. "Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them."

Procter&Gamble might become the case study how organizations, the leadership team, managers and employees can adopt and introduce design thinking into their organization. At least this sounds interesting:

"It has been transformative for our leadership teams," says Cindy Tripp, marketing director at P&G Global Design, as she describes her work rolling out the company’s Design Thinking Initiative. With a cadre of 100 internal facilitators, more than 40 design thinking workshops have been held in P&G business units across the globe during the past year. The design thinking facilitation team comes from every function at P&G (such as marketing, research and development, info tech, and product supply as well as design). Perhaps most important, half of the workshops focused on something other than new product initiatives to include other types of pressing business issues such as strategy, retail relationship building, and matters of operational excellence.

I haven’t read A.G.Leafley’s book "The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation" yet, but I already ordered it. Check back for a review in a few weeks.

Read the full article in BusinessWeek.

Posted in design thinking | Permalink | 1 Comment »

Companies are increasingly shifting to self-service technology as a way to substitute expensive “human services” with cheaper solutions that empower customers to use an organization’s products or services.

Examples can be found at airports (check in counters), train stations (ticket counters), banks (ATMs and Internet banking) and even in selected McDonalds restaurants where you are able to order your BigMac with a self-service terminal in a restaurant.

Many customers prefer self-service over traditional service interfaces because when working properly they help to save time. When you look at it holistically, a service designer should try to reduce the number of human interactions to increase the efficiency of a service system. But while focusing on continuously increasing efficiency, service designers should not forget about effectiveness.

When “human services” fail, there is usually somebody around who could at least help you. If a self-service system fails, there is nobody around who might help (that’s the point of self-service) and customers are usually lost. Obviously you should design for self-service failures but not everyone is doing it. But how do “smart” companies solve that problem? By assigning employees that help customers with the self-service system.

Three of my personal experiences with such “workarounds” were at the Swiss Air check-in counters in Zurich, Deutsche Bahn (German railways) ticket counter in Cologne and United Airlines check-in counters in San Francisco. Why would you put a “half-baked” self-service terminal there, when you know that you probably need employees that can help customer’s to use them?

If you want to make a difference, first you have to ensure that you do everything possible to prevent self-service failures (a.k.a. user testing, user testing, user testing). Additionally you have to plan for self-service failures and design for self-service recovery through the self-service terminal.Designing a self-service terminal with “human backup” is only the last solution. If designer ignore this and something goes wrong, your customers will be lost and without any recovery efforts they will become ambassadors of negative word of mouth.

Image courtesy of [HippiHippo]

Posted in customer service, service design | Permalink | No Comments »

Strada del sole, a Swiss manufacturer of sunglasses, is offering service on their website that allows you to try different models with the help of their webcam and a small program that projects the sunglasses on your face. Here is what it looks like, if you have a webcam you can check it out at their website.

While the software is not perfect (the glasses could be more realistic and resize automatically to the size of your head) this is nevertheless an interesting approach to solve the problem of allowing customers to virtually experience a real-world product.

Shoppers want to experience a product before they buy it. If we don’t have a chance to test a product before we buy it we have to trust others through recommendations and base our buying decision on these recommendations. Online retailers face the challenge that even though it is easy to order products on the Internet, the process of finding the right product is difficult for customers if they don’t have any prior experience with the product they intend to buy.

Innovative solutions are needed that allow customers to experience products in a digital environment and to form a purchase decision. Strada del sole made a first step into this direction.

Do you know any other examples of companies successfully bridging this gap? Let us know in the comments.

Posted in innovation, retail | Permalink | No Comments »