Customer Centricity
Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots — Rumi
Reducing the Customer-Engineer gap
I wrote recently at cio.com about the importance of reducing the customer-engineer gap. In my mind, the best engineers are ‘product engineers’ who deeply understand and care about the customer experience in addition to being proficient in technology. Avoiding proxies is key: engineers need to hear customer problems directly, and not via intermediaries who reinterpret messages. Establishing processes like On-Call programs helps establish direct connections with customers. Engineering ‘cheat days’ allow unstructured time for working on their discoveries. An interview process that allows you to discover traits such as curiosity and empathy ensures that you have the right talent.
The Forest and the Trees
In a typical metrics review, different parts of the organization will present metrics related to their organization. Product will talk about adoption of new features. Finance will talk about revenue and cost KPI’s. Customer Support will present numbers around Average Hold Time and transactional Net Promoter scores.
These are all valid and important metrics. But these are the trees in an interconnected forest — are you seeing the forest? You responsibility is to ask: How are these related? Are we optimizing for local maximas, where there is a global maxima to be solved for?
What you pay attention to is what you see.
See, this is us, wandering around in the forest and seeing the trees.
But.. you are not seeing how the forest is interconnected, mycelium connecting the trees, or how the trees are arranged. Zooming out will give you a different picture, as will zooming in. This is how I see the forest when I zoom out:
The customer is at the center of what we do, and all we do should be focused on optimizing the customer experience. Of course, if you go the opposite direction and look for the roots, you will get a different perspective.
Given this, how should you think about the forest (the big picture)? I like to think about the customer experience associated with product development as represented in this picture: (sorry for the image size — medium does not allow a full width one apparently. for something more readable click on it or it can be found here)
From left to right, this graphic shows the customer experience, and the expected emotions that they have associated with their experience. If they feel that the product ‘just works’, they are happy. As they move to the right — using in product help in column 2, chatbots in column 3 , all the way to the right, where they are forced to get on a phone call — their sentiment deteriorates towards frustration and anger. The goal of customer centricity is not just to optimize the metrics in a column, but solve for this bigger picture. Let’s say the Customer Support team proudly says that their Average Hold time is 60 seconds. This is reason to applaud. But if 10% of all customers are forced to make a phone call, you have solved for the Customer support team locally, which failing to optimize the customer experience overall. Moving Customers further to the left will increase your NPS score. Moving customers to the right will generally increase their dissatisfaction.
Moving Customers to the left
Moving Customer leftwards requires certain organizational capabilities. I have shown some of the common capabilities, but you may have to contextualize it. Deep Customer empathy, for example, is essential to get a great In product experience. Each one of these organizational capabilities need tactics to enable those capabilities — For example, a Customer review board, the on call program mentioned earlier, or a weekly customer call to hear directly from customers. The tactics for each column needs to be contextualized.
So design your metrics program taking the forest into account, and ensure that you are weaving all the departmental metrics into a cohesive, big picture centered around the Customer.
