Driving agility into your customer experience

Driving agility into your customer experienceMarc McNeill
@dancingmango

My journey
Head of XD
Experience designer
Branch Hit Squad
Retail in-store experience
Interaction design group
Participatory technology design
Human factors PhD.
Nat West summer placements
2011
2005
2004
2003
1999
1998
1997
1989

Coming soon
18th November 2011

ThoughtWorks
Design and deliver software fast and predictably

be our customers’ most recommended brand
I want to start with a publically stated vision from Aviva. Recommended. That’s not best, most profitable etc, Recommended is a human concept. It is based upon experience. Aviva compete in a crowded marketplace, FS products are not the sort of thing you recommend. Insurance. Pension. Hardly sexy products. The one thing they have to be recommended is a good experience. And that is based upon a fantastic, customer centric service experience

Courageous leadership
Not every company has a Steve Jobs or a Jeff Bezos of amazon. .But real change is only going to be driven from the top. leaders with a deep-seeded passion and intuition around total customer experiences and relationships drive their organizations to experiment and innovate and invest to improve them. And leaders who are able to bring technology along with them. Gail Kelly, CEO at West Pac is a good example of this. She is building the West Pac brand around the customer. As part of that journey she is building team of service designers, experience designers, placing the customer at the heart of what they are doing. Anthony Thomson of Metro bank is another, putting the customer at the heart of the banking proposition.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanwick/3461850112
Vision
You need to start with a vision. And the vision needs to be rooted in the customer. CRM, SEO, CMS, single sign-on… they are not a vision. The vision should be focused upon customer outcomes that are profitable for the organization and easy and delightful for the customer. And as a vision it should be visible. Look at www.businessmodelgeneration.com/ for a one page business model.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/talatlas/2338990355/
Listen & see
To be recommended means understanding the customer, who are they what do they do, what are they saying.
How many people here have been into their branches? It is more than monitoring, it is experiencing as the customer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanwieland/225132337/
Respond. Deliver
You can talk as much as you like about customer experience, but can you respond? Can you deliver?
One of the challenges to doing anything at speed is IT being an oil tanker. Slow to respond. Legacy systems. Etc. But if you stare long enough, it is not hard to see that banks are basically technology companies. Yet technology is often held at an arms length from IT.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21323134@N07/2071344711
Drive agility into your customer experience
The oil tanker isn’t going away any time soon. But that shouldn’t stop you from setting out the ribs. Experiment, customer experience spikes on the side. And put your best technical brains on these ribs, empower them. Use the rigor that XP provides- test driven development, continuous integration to maintain the connection with the oil tanker

Agility
Businesses that can successfully transition from being channel-centric to agile commerce will be able to sustain and take advantage of rapid consumer and technological changes
Forrester 03/11

What if?
Learning
Quickly
Delighted
customer
Customer
insight
Ideas
Quickly
This should be your vision, to take your insight, distil it into ideas and deliver those ideas to customer rapidly. Then take the learnings from what you deliver and continuously improve and evolve. Not over years, or months but in weeks or days. And for truly agile organisations, in hours.

NPS
VoC
Analytics
Mystery shopping
Etc.
Analysis
Design
Customer
insight
Ideas
You are good at collecting data. But what do you do with it? You may be able to affect marketing campaigns or small process changes, but how quickly are you able to turn it into something that IT will deliver? Do you have to go through analysis, and design and then…

What happens next?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasrak/3905589810

Over the fence for IT to deliver

And IT are slow, aren’t they?

£££
And go over budget…

Delighted
customer
Customer
insight
Ideas
Quickly
So instead of this virtuous cycle…

Unhappy
customer
Customer
insight
Compromised
Ideas
Slowly
We end up with this. Ideas implemented months or years after the insight. Only part of the idea actually in production, the market has moved on, the customer is only partially satisfied and you rinse and repeat the process. Not the learnings

http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/5500714140
The main obstacles to improved business responsiveness are slow decision-making, conflicting departmental goals and priorities, risk-averse cultures and silo-based information. The Economist Intelligence Unit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtowber/4222787490/
Point issues
Point solutions
We play enterprise whack-a-mole. We’ve got uphappy customers in the branches queuing. Put a phone in and send them to the call centre. whack.! Call centre volumes have increased. Build a new telephony system. Whack. Throw development capacity at that problem. Whack. We need a mobile app. Get the developers off the telephony project to build it. Whack. Etc etc.

Waterfall
Insight
Analysis
Design
Build
Test
Run
This is what we do. The ‘business’ does stuff above the line, IT below the line.

A different way
Ideas
Build
Learn
Measure
Nothing new about this model. But what if the cycle took days rather than months or years?
Quickly

8
Eight ideas for agility
(start small and simple)
Here are some practical things you can think about. Remember to think big, start small and scale fast. (or fail cheaply)

1.
Bridge silos
All done?
Rinse and repeat

You are partners not adversaries
“I’m glad we’re all agreed then.”

“Ah...”

“Ah!”

“I’m glad we’re all agreed then.”
Get all your stakeholders in the same place and use visual artefacts and a focus upon the customer, collaboratively work on solutions. Don’t let the compliance rep destroy your ideas. Together walk through the customer journey on the whiteboard and ask how might wemake this better? The focus is on we and might And in your teams get together with a daily standup. 15 minutes every day reviewing what you are doing and what your issues are. Ditch the status reporting, make feedback a daily occurrence.

2.
Walk in the shoes of the customer
All done?
Rinse and repeat

The customer doesn’t care about you
They don’t care if you are mortgages, or savings or investments or credit card. They see you as a brand. Their bank. (BTW, have you searched for your brand name and #fail recently?)

Journey with touchpoints, not channels
“Cross channel” is just another way of saying we have organisational silos. Start thinking about touchpoints. Map those out. They start outside your brand. My daughter opened up her first bank account last week. We started the journey on google. Then moneysavingexpert. We didn’t use a branch locator on your sites, we used google maps. But your branches didn’t appear there!

Vision
Aspiration
Start
Here!
Time
Multi-touchpoint experiences won’t happen overnight
You take a multi-touchpoint vision/ strategy to your CFO and you’ll almost certainly come back empty handed. Start small. demonstrate ability and success and build from there. EG, a client had distinct products: a current AC and internet banking. These had two separate application forms, two different numbers. It was a first step on the roadmap to reach the vision of integrated banking. This was the first step. And as you go on the journey, your vision WILL change.

3.
Get away from your desk
All done?
Rinse and repeat

Design led
Agency
Agile
Customer
experience
Expert mindset
Customers as subjects
Participatory mindset
Customers as partners
Enterprise
Research led
Move away from thinking you are the expert and engage the customer. Use design rather than research to develop your thinking

It is not enough to just monitor, you need to get yourself into the shoes of your customer and feel the anger that they do when things go wrong. ANGER and PASSION drives deliver far better any good intention. Read this blogpost. http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/61528/Undercover-Boss-Office-Depot

“The wall is the new desk”
Dave Gray
We use the wall as the desk. The wall is the ppt. People go out and come back with insights and design nuggets and we get them up on the wall. And we move the ideas about, and synthesize our thinking, look for themes, affinities…. And we manage our projects on the wall as well. At Lonely Planet management wall the walls. They can see the status of the project from the information radiators. Real time.

4.
Prototype. Simplicity by design
All done?
Rinse and repeat

“Rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store… go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work…”
Apple Store is the most profitable shop in London
Sources: Steve Jobs in Fortune Magazine March 8 2007 Verdict Global Retail Freview Aug 2010
Apple’s approach is an exemplar of design thinking and using that to challenge the rules. When they created the store, they didn’t build a me-too store. They applied the same approach to the way they built the store. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/03/19/8402321/index.htm

Collaborative design
And co-design! It is screen based products we are talking about, so go design the screens! This dude is a chief architect at a bank. He’s got a persona in front of him – Lucy – and he is drawing a portal dashboard for her retail banking needs.

Emergent, tangible feasible ideas
Product ideas are emerging. We are testing and coming up with something we feel is ready to take to the next stage

Bringing ideas to life

Rapid iterations
Rapidly iterating. We are building out the product on paper. How cheap is that?

5.
Focus on value
All done?
Rinse and repeat

Percentage of functionality used
“Do less!”
Source: The Standish Group
We see it all the time. Clients get hung up on features. Ditch the features, think about the experience.

Video
Video calling
TV out
Music ring tones
Voice dialing
Voice commands
GPS
JAVA
Push to talk
Card slot
3g
Bluetooth
Infrared
Decent camera
Secondary camera
Camera flash
MMS
Radio
Look at the iPhone. When it was launched, on paper it was rubbish. Look at all those features it didn’t ship with. Steve Job’s had a vision, (there’s that vision thing again), to reinvent the phone. And he was was right. Four years later, we don’t look at phones the same way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeyparsons/3240169886/
Minimal Viable Product
“Here’s a tip, pack it and halve it” – Lonely Planet
Time to think about what we need. Or rather, what is the minimum the customer will need.

Prioritise
If you can’t agree on the MVP play games to help get you there. Here we’ve laid out all the requirements for a product and put a price on each on. “Create email campaigns” cost 1p. The developers were in the room – they estimated it. They’re going to build it. Doing some crude release planning we can say that the team can only afford 27p worth of requirements… yet there are 97p worth of stuff they want on the table….

6.
Be continuous
All done?
Rinse and repeat

Continuously
Delivering
Reliably
Predictably
At less risk
Ideas
Build
Learn
Measure
Here’s a different way of approaching it. Actually it might not appear new. The difference is the ability to do this continuously. We now have the technology to enable you to launch stuff into production every day. Every hour. The notion of releases is dying. Rapid change is everything. An idea that is 4 years in R&D is 2/3rd the life of Facebook. It is a ¼ of the life of google. It is almost the life of Twitter. Look how those products have metamorphosed since their inception.

This is (one way) of incrementally delivering new products to market.

Guardian started with the Travel section of their site. They learned a lot through the process. And also changed their strategy mid-project to include video. This wasn’t a wold of change-request pain. The process accommodated the change

The site was incrementally delivered. The home page came late in the process.

Execution leads strategy
The way the site was build enabled new business models and new uses of the data. Think about Amazon. They had all this spare capacity that they built to handle the Christmas demand, idle in the summer. From that they built AWS and became synonymous with the cloud. That wasn’t their strategy, that came from execution

Execution leads to strategy
And don’t think that opening up your data is something that banks can’t do.

flickr
Continuous delivery
Code.flickr.com. Can you do that?

>25m customers
~$3m/m
30+ updates /day
IMVU update their site every day. That’s not their brochureware ort public site, that is their core functionality. They can do that not because they are a startup (it helps) but because they have empowered developers, partners to the business, using rigorous engineering practices that support development, (not architectural principles enforced by ivory tower architects!)

Regulated environment
Managing over $200m
Processes over $2m/day
30 updates /day
Continuous delivery in a regulated environment - http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/pascallouis-perez-wealthfront-sllconf-continuous-deployment

~$3m/m
20m customers
30% US peak internet traffic
Netflix do it as well. Look at the volume of their traffic!

Co-author or THE book on continuous delivery works here.

We can’t do agile.
Our legacy systems are far too complicated
But you are still thinking this?

Integrate with over 70 BT, Westpac and third party software systems, many of which had never been integrated beforeFirst release in 8 months
At ThoughtWorks we love legacy systems. We love to strangle them. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html

8.
Experiment

Testing ideas as you go
Test ideas with consumers as you have them, AB test, split test… test test test!!! But more importantly learn

Testing your customer curiosity
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11495839 Not sure if mortgages on your mobile is something that customers will use? Put a button on your homepage with an email capture form, buy some ad words and create a landing page and let the data decide.

9.
It’s an organisational thing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calcock/559583272
Use “hack days” and design jams to energise and accelerate cross touch-point innovation
Developers have passion for software. Can you channel that passion into doing things outside business as usual?
Companies have also used “hack-days” as a means of energizing the organization, indentifying opportunities, and accelerating cross-touchpoint innovation.

Agility gets things done

Key takeaway
Bridge silos
Walk in the shoes of your customer
Get away from your desk
Prototype: simplicity by design
Focus on value
Be continuous
Experiment
It’s an organisational thing

Marc McNeill
mmcneill@thoughtworks.com
dancingmango.com/blog
Twitter: @dancingmango

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Driving agility into your customer experience

by marc mcneill on Sep 15, 2011

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