Category Archives: Lean CX Book Excerpt

Lean CX Score – What is Lean CX Anyway?

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptcustomer experience, lean book, Lean CX, The Lean CX Score, what is lean cxDavid McLachlan

This is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score." Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition.

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All Right, What Is CX Anyway?

If CX is the difference between success and failure, then let’s delve into it more deeply.

CX, as you might have guessed already, stands for Customer Experience. As the world evolves into an era of global trade, a few new terms have also developed: UX, CX, Lean, Agile, Kanban, AI, WIP and dozens more. Often no one really knows what to do with them, even though everyone says to each other that they are really, really important.

So to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s begin with a quick definition.

CX is Customer Experience. It’s very popular, even if most people don’t really understand what it is. If your business doesn’t have a framework for CX, then it is really just a broad description for everything to do with your customer and how they interact with you. CX Specialists will often map out “Customer Journeys” and “Moments of Truth”, and other intricate terms that mean a lot to them. The good news is that the Lean CX Score steps get right to the common denominator of all those things. The even better news is, this book will give you a framework and a way to measure Customer Experience that actually works, so you can tell how well you are doing.

Often confused with CX is UX. UX is User Experience. It’s also a very popular term. For a User to have an Experience, they need to be using something. That something is most often a website – but it can be a product of yours too. UX specialists often do up wireframes and look at where a user clicks or touches, in an effort to manage where a customer is going. The good news here is, customers go where it is easy to go, and that’s exactly what the Lean CX Score is designed to do.

Finally, let’s not forget Customer Service, which is service given to your customers by an actual person. It used to be the largest part of CX, and it has shrunk with the use of technology. But it still remains extremely important.

Because a person can have a “CX” without engaging in a website or product “UX” (but not the other way around), Customer Experience becomes the more important of the two. And because feedback from Customer Service can help improve a product’s User Experience, the way they all interact looks like this:

Now, when we say “Customer”, who do we mean exactly? Most people make the mistake of thinking that we are only talking about the end customer – our paying customer. But customers exist within everything we do. Customer is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as:

“A person of a specified kind with whom one has to deal.”

In other words – anyone you provide a service to, whether it’s within your company or outside your company, can be classed as your customer: your boss, your team, other departments or more. Improving those interactions often improves your job prospects (makes you more employable), your business (brings you more customers), and your bottom line (makes you more money).

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Introducing The Lean CX Score by David McLachlan

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptcustomer experience, David McLachlan, disruptor, how to create a disruptor, lean book, Lean CX, Lean CX Research, Lean CX Score, Lean CX Score book, Lean CX Steps, Lean CX WastesDavid McLachlan

“I am absolutely thrilled to introduce the Lean CX Score, and an excerpt from the Introduction of the book below. The book starts with a bang and never lets go, and even within this short piece of the Lean CX Score you will hear stories and see research with the power to help you create disruptive products and services. I hope you enjoy it!”

– David McLachlan

Introduction

Tom Corley woke up early one morning and realised something incredible.

He had spent the past five years following more than 300 people with the aim of answering a very specific question, and he finally had the answer. You see, Tom had always wanted to know if our habits – the things we did every day – really did have an effect on our lives.

More specifically, Tom wanted to know if there were certain habits that separated the country’s wealthiest people – with a net worth of $3.2 million or more, and those who were just getting by, with a net worth of $5,000 or less.

Was the difference to do with their family? Was it where they lived? Or where they went to school? No, it wasn’t any of those things. In fact, when Tom finally found it, it surprised even him.

The number one habit of the country’s wealthiest people was something that anyone could do, although most people don’t. It was reading. But not just any reading. It was reading for self-improvement *¹.

It was something that you are doing right now.

I told you this story because I believe by reading this book you are doing something special. After all, how often is it that someone picks up a book like this? It could have been that person you work with, the person browsing the books next to you or maybe someone else in your family. But it was you.

Reading for self-improvement was also what I was doing, before the discovery of the Lean CX Score. I was searching for answers, and I was searching for improvement just like you. I read hundreds of books on ways to improve life and business, and in fields such as strategy, team building, personal psychology, business improvement and project management.

It’s no accident that this number one habit makes such a difference. It works because the more you learn, the more people you can help. And the more people you can help, the more you, too, are rewarded – with a better business, happier team-mates, more paying customers, a better income, and a happier life.

The most successful companies provide a service to thousands (if not millions) of people, and are rewarded with millions (or billions) of dollars in return. Apple, Uber, Amazon, Zappos, Microsoft, Google, Netflix – the names may change but the principles stay the same. It was in studying these companies that were a success that I discovered the six key things anyone can do to make their own lives a success.

These six key things not only created businesses that completely outdid their competition, but they also improved the morale, speed and productivity of normal teams and tasks as well. It was something that needed to be revealed so all could benefit, instead of just a chosen few.

It was something that needed to be shared.

The Customer is Always Right… Right?

It needed to be shared because most people aren’t getting the full story, and even then, the information is often conflicting.

Take just two recent examples, both from first class institutions. The Harvard Business Review revealed that while “delighting customers” was the focus of many CEOs and leadership teams, it wasn’t the key to keeping customers coming back. Reducing their effort – the work they had to do to get their problem solved – was the real solution to repeated sales *².

But research by a firm called Ebiquity took the opposite view, where they found in 2014 that 75% of customers who received a “delightful” customer experience were willing to spend more with the companies that gave it to them *³.

Which one is right?

You’ll have to read on for the answer. But when you do, you will see exactly how this research works, and how you can use them both to seriously improve your own results. We will use real life stories and research, and it will be a handy resource to keep and have all this information in the one place.

If you’re curious to learn more about it, let’s reveal a little piece of the Lean CX Score to get started.

What is the Lean CX Score?

The Lean CX Score is a set of six separate, actionable steps, all equally important to your CX. Each step in the Lean CX Score has one question. If you answer the question positively you get a point, but if you answer the question negatively you have some work to do to improve. Five out of six points means you are delivering an outstanding customer experience. Anything below that means you have an opportunity for greater profit by improving – or face the threat of your competition stealing your customers. It’s that simple.

Here are the steps…

To see the rest of the Lean CX Framework, its research and stories, you can get the full Lean CX Score on Amazon now, and be the disruptor, not the disrupted!

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – Lean CX Shows You How To Create A Disruptor

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptbusiness leader, create a disruptor, disruptor framework, lean book, Lean CX, netflix versus blockbuster, strategic framework, strategic leader, The Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

Lean CX Shows You How to Create a Disruptor in Your Industry

Over the past forty years there have been a handful of standout disruptive companies and products in the great world of business. A disruptor, as we see it, is something that changes the rules of the game – often in an existing field – so that it is seen as better, can grow faster, and sell more than anything in its industry. Traditional businesses are afraid of disruptors, because disruptors can seriously reduce the profit of those companies and they don’t understand what it takes to make one.

The Lean CX Score will give you the exact framework you need to create disruptors instead of fearing them. And the good news is, many disruptors are created in already existing fields.

You may or may not remember what it was like to operate a computer in the late 1980s. Computers used an operating system called MS DOS, where you had to physically type in everything you wanted to do on your computer. Want to play your favourite game? (Take the original “Prince of Persia” for example, one of my personal favourites). Well, you had to:

Type in “C:\dir/p” – this would show you all the directories, one page at a time so you could find the one with your game in it.
Then “cd pop”, which would take you to the “Prince of Persia” directory.
Then “adlib.exe” to ensure the music was toggled correctly (you had to know the exact port your sound card was set to), and finally;
“prince.exe” to play the game.

Sounds tedious, doesn’t it? And then Microsoft Windows came along. It was a graphical user interface that made things much easier, and people flocked to it in droves. Now to play the same game you did one thing: Click on the game icon on the home screen. The founder of this software, Bill Gates, enjoyed (and at the time of writing, still enjoys) many years as the world’s richest man. Bill Gates didn’t know it at the time, but he had met all the criteria for a 100% Lean CX Score, and that’s why people used it. It was a disruptor.

Remember when you had dozens (if not hundreds) of cassette tapes or CDs, and had to avoid scratching them, getting the tape tangled or worse? Then the Apple iPod came along and put 1000 songs in your pocket, in the one place which you could play with one click. All of a sudden it was impossible to make a mistake (i.e. tangle your cassette tapes or scratch your CDs), and instead of changing CDs every time you wanted to listen to something you only had to click the song you liked. It completely upended the industry. Many people focussed on the technology as being the agent of change, but they missed the point of the principles – the Lean CX principles – that were used to get there.

How about this one: In the late 1990s it was common on a Friday night to get into your car, drive down to the local “Blockbuster Video” store, have a browse through the latest movies and then pay for one or two to watch that night. But it was around that time that NetFlix was born, where instead of going to all that effort and driving around, all you had to do was subscribe and then browse any movie you liked online from the comfort of your own home, without the need to go anywhere. DVDs were mailed to your home, and returned whenever you liked for free. Then in 2007 it released online streaming of its movies which you could sign up for and watch immediately, reducing customers’ effort even further. Was this simple, easy, and fast? You bet. And the stock prices of the two companies over the years (unfortunately for Blockbuster) tell the story better than I ever could. In 2003 Blockbuster peaked and began to fall, while Netflix began to rise. Their prices crossed over some time in 2008, and a few years later Blockbuster Video went bankrupt.

There are many more standout examples that we’ll look at in the next few chapters – Amazon Kindle disrupting the book industry, ZipRecruiter disrupting the recruitment industry, Frank disrupting the Energy industry – and you will see exactly how to create your own “disruptor” using the Lean CX Score.

The key takeaway is that amateurs focus on the technology, or the end result when these businesses come to light and then wonder how they did it, while professionals understand the philosophy behind their ideas so they can create them again and again. These were all things that were being done already – songs, games, movies, driving – the entrepreneurs behind these disruptors just looked at them with a different lens in order to move into new “blue ocean” areas. And this, dear reader, is just a fraction of what the Lean CX Score can do.

The Strategic Lens, The Business Lens and The Team Lens

Looking at something through a magnifying glass can give you an enhanced view, seeing greater detail than if you were viewing something with the naked eye. In the same way, by looking at your products, your business, and even your teams through the lens of the Lean CX Score you can see ways to improve them that weren’t there before.

With the disruptors example previously, it might look like this:But it also works at reducing costs, increasing speed and improving morale within your business by using it as a management system to lead your teams.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – Someone Can Always Make A Better Burger

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptcompeting on price, customer experience, lean book, Lean CX, Lean CX Score, McDonalds storyDavid McLachlan

Someone Can Always Make a Better Burger

Let me ask you a question. Can you make a better hamburger than McDonalds?

If you’re anything like me, I’m hearing a resounding “Yes!” You might be a master of the barbeque, or a culinary queen. You know all the pieces – choice of patty, lettuce, tomato, maybe onions, sundried tomatoes or vintage cheese – and you can put them all together and create a masterpiece to outdo the creations of even the best teenagers working under the golden arches.

You see, most people can make a better burger than McDonalds. But here’s the kicker. Can you SELL a burger, better than McDonalds?

For most people when I tell this story, the penny starts to drop. And it doesn’t hit the floor completely until they finish the last step of the Lean CX Score, when they have an exact formula for “selling a burger better”, and continuing to give a better experience every time they interact with a customer. But by that time they are out the door in a rush to put it to use, with barely even a goodbye.

It is all those parts that go into “selling the burger” that make the difference between success and failure. After all, iPhones and Apple products make up 43% of the mobile market in the U.S *⁴. Yet a factory in China could easily make a phone that looks very similar to an Apple iPhone, for a fraction of the cost. So why don’t they, and what’s the real difference? Hmmm… it might have something to do with our burger example above. Their patented software, their app store, their Genius Bars and ease of use all contribute to the Customer Experience, and you will see exactly why they work by the time you reach the end of this book.

Could you drive a car, better than some Uber drivers out there? Considering 85% of American drivers on the road today believe they are a better driver than others *⁵ (we’ve all thought this at some point, haven’t we?) I’m again imagining that the answer is yes.

You, or someone like you, could do all these things. Of course you can. But can you scale a business and sell a car ride better? Can you deliver the same complete customer experience that keeps people coming back? Not without the right framework, and that’s where the Lean CX Score comes in.

Simply being able to do something isn’t enough to bring you success, because the world is on the verge of the greatest time in history. Global trade has opened up like never before, and someone in England or any other country can sell someone in America exactly what they want and have it shipped there in record time. Many of the old-world businesses are becoming crowded as new people enter the market, and it seems that no one is safe.

Yet there are always a small few businesses, teams and individuals that make it – the ones that buck the trend and not only survive, but thrive in the face of competition. The unique pastry shop with lines around the block. The outstanding painters with a high demand for their work. The latest phone or gadget people have to have, the ice cream store, the energy provider, the bank. All of them fit the Lean CX model and are examples we will see.

What is it that makes them succeed where others fail?

Let’s start with a simple view of it. In many cases you have two choices:

Compete on Price (and put yourself out of business)

– Or –

Compete on Customer Experience (and stand out and become world-class)

What happens when you compete on Price?

Well, this is where most people start. And it’s most often the easiest thing to do – after all, if you drop your price, maybe more people will buy your product. The only problem is, your competition can drop their price too, and so the outcome of this scenario usually looks like this:

Competing on price is often done because a business doesn’t have the imagination or the know-how to create a remarkable Customer Experience. Luckily with the Lean CX Score, that’s simple to remedy, but it can also just be a mistake made by people who would usually know better.

Driving service Uber did a lot of things right when creating its business – so much so that it was able to scale and grow with lightning speed around the world. When it entered the Chinese market, it was able to do so with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it, and it went into China in a large way competing on price where ride subsidies, cheap promotions and more the order of the day.

Uber lasted three years before having to retreat completely after losing close to one billion dollars a year, selling their market share to local driving app Didi Chuxing *⁶. Understanding the customers you serve, whether it’s an individual, a society, government or country, matters. When you compete on price, no-one wins. The customer may get a better price, but at what cost? A sub-par product, an average customer experience and a company that won’t be around long enough to make a difference.

If products can be copied, price wars aren’t the answer and the world of trade is coming closer together, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a future where the only thing separating the bad from the good, the good from the great and the great from the remarkable is Customer Experience, otherwise known as CX. CX is the next and last great frontier, where the real battles will be fought and won. This is great news, as creating an amazing Customer Experience can be comparatively cheap to do (as opposed to developing a new smart phone from scratch, for example). And the steps in this book will show you how to keep it simple, and how to know when you’re winning. They lead the way to taking an ordinary product and creating an industry disruptor – something that is truly world-class.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – They’re All Moments Of Truth

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptlean book, Lean CX, moments of truth, The Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

They’re All Moments of Truth

Many of these same consultants we noted earlier will tell you that “Moments of Truth” are only those touch points where a customer interacts with you or your company. Wrong. In the Lean CX Score, they’re all moments of truth. Every. Single. Step.

Now surely I don’t mean photocopying, filling out paperwork, or other mundane things? Yep. Every tiny action we take in a customer experience journey, whether we interact directly with the customer or not, is a moment of truth. Because – and this is important – bad experiences that are hidden from view, lead to bad experiences that are within the customer view.

Let’s say Joan is having a bad day. She just spent an hour filling in the paperwork for a customer, going back and forth between departments to get the answers she needed, and having to beg her manager for approval because she didn’t have the authority herself. By the time it’s all done and she’s ready to call the customer, her energy is low, and her tone is short. She may not really mean it, but right in this moment, she hates her job. Unfortunately it’s in this moment where the call to the customer is made. The conversation goes badly, and at the end of it our customer is a lot less happy than they were and makes moves to leave the company as soon as they can.

Every person in a business has an effect on someone else, whether it’s positive or negative, and at the end of all of those interactions is the customer. The CEO affects the managers, the senior technician affects the junior technician. It’s all related, and your customers are always judging, either consciously or subconsciously. Whether they know it or not, they are weighing up the pros and cons of continuing to do business with you. If you don’t make it easy to get the things they want fast, there’s a good chance they’ll be heading for the door.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – Using The Waste Basket

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptexcessive hand offs, excessive steps, lean book, Lean CX, Lean CX Wastes, rework, The Lean CX Score, WaitingDavid McLachlan

Using the Waste Basket

If you’ve read anything about Lean or the Toyota Production System before, you will likely have heard mention of removing “wasteful” steps in your work to improve profit, speed, morale and more. In the old-world Lean, there were eight Wastes listed for you to remove and improve your business.

We’re not going to use the traditional Wastes, because they often don’t fit in a modern business and there’s a good chance you’re not a car manufacturing plant from the 1970s.

Instead I’m going to give you something better. Much better.

In our new method of Lean CX, we will look at waste from the Customer Experience point of view – remembering that customers are anyone that we, or our business, serves. The new Lean CX Wastes are also more streamlined, simpler, faster, and guaranteed to improve your Customer Experience once they are removed.

So what are these so-called CX Wastes that we can refer to quickly, to see if our process is winning or lagging behind? An easy way to remember them is with this handy acronym: NEWER.

Not getting what I want
Excessive Steps
Waiting
Excessive hand-offs
Rework

Let’s go through them in a bit more detail, starting with my favourite first.

Waiting

First of all, waiting is the devil when it comes to Customer Experience. You are more likely to lose a customer before you have even begun if they can’t get what they want quickly. With the rise of “digital natives”, those born into an era of technology and encouraged to use it from a young age, we have a whole generation of people used to “getting it now”. And here’s a hint – they’re not going to wait around for you.

As you’ll see in some of the stories coming up, there are companies in traditional industries where waiting is the norm (like call centres or product deliveries) which are coming up with ways to give an amazing customer experience by using the Lean CX Score and removing this waste.

Excessive Steps

Part of working with customers who “want it now” means removing excessive steps or actions to getting what they want. If something takes more than one “step” for a customer to get what they want, I can guarantee you that they will be looking for better alternatives. Not to mention having excessive steps or actions paves the way for other wastes to creep into the process too. Things like rework, hand-offs, queues or waiting are all things that drive your customer away.

Excessive Steps is also a closely related cousin of Excessive Hand-Offs, and it has just as high an impact on your Customer Experience.

Excessive Hand-offs

Have you ever played Chinese Whispers? It’s an old schoolyard game, but the results of the game are usually well known. For those of you who haven’t played it, you sit in a circle and whisper a message to the person on your right, who then whispers it to the person on their right – continuing until it comes all the way back to you. The final message is usually quite distorted from your original message, because different people mishear and change the words ever so slightly with each hand-off.

It is the same with this Waste – if you have too many hand-offs or people, departments or companies being a part of your customer’s experience, then you risk losing things, misinterpreting things, queueing for things, having to redo things and much more.

If the thing they want is not done in the same place and time, there’s a good chance more CX Waste will appear to scare your customers away.

Rework

Have you ever filled out a form on a website from top to bottom, only to have the webpage time out so you had to refresh it instead of submitting it? Then when you reloaded the page the form was empty again. What a pain.

While this scenario is the cause of many angry cat pictures screaming at their monitors (and maybe some real-life angry people too), the effects of this kind of rework on your customer experience is devastating, and highly likely to send your customers packing (you guessed it – right across to your competition).

Rework also allows things like queues or waiting, excessive hand-offs and excessive steps to creep into your work.

Not getting what I want

Here is the final and most important one of all – your customer not getting what they actually wanted. Even with the fastest, most streamlined, most friendly, incredible customer experience it’s all for nought if your customer didn’t get what they really wanted!

You could have the fastest shipping in the world, but if you’re not shipping what the customer wants, forget it. And you simply don’t know if your customer got what they wanted unless you ask them.

Research shows that a full 96% of customers won’t tell a company they had a bad experience *¹⁷, they will simply leave and take their business elsewhere (and then tell all their friends how horrible that business was when they next meet). This is absolutely crucial to remember. If your customers are not getting what they want and getting it quickly, easily, without fuss and preferably in a way that makes them feel good, then they are just one cold-call away from leaving your company behind.

So there you have the Lean CX Wastes. As you start to remove these CX wastes in your own business you will see a dramatic rise in customer and employee happiness, and both of those things have an impact on your bottom line. Removing the Lean CX Wastes is exactly what the steps in this book are designed to do.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – Good Customer Experience Engages Your Team By More Than 25%

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptengagement, highly engaged team, improve engagement, Lean, lean book, Lean CX, The Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

Good Customer Experience Engages Your Team by More Than 25%

Good customer experience also engages your team, and increases retention and productivity of your team members by a significant amount.

Now you might be thinking, “Surely that can’t be true.” After all, it’s easy to see how CX can affect the end customer, but improving our team engagement and retention too? It certainly can. If anyone you provide a service to is your “customer”, then that means the people you work with all have experiences that can be improved too.

Here’s a quick example. One of the key steps in the Lean CX Score, as you will soon see, is “Check and Stop”. Check and Stop means we get feedback quickly and we use it just as fast. One report by the Gallup Business Journal found that a key factor of highly engaged team-mates was receiving feedback at least once a week *¹².

It helped them to know if what they were doing was working; they could adjust where necessary, and it made them want to stay and do a good job.

Compare this with team members where there was no regular check-in. The research showed they were 97% more likely to be disengaged in their work *¹³.

Increasing your team’s engagement doesn’t just benefit you if you’re a leader. Having engaged team-mates has been a huge focus of powerhouses like Google over the past few years because engaged team-mates are happier, have more workplace friends, generally enjoy their lives more and also perform way better than teams that aren’t engaged.

You may have heard the study from Gallup International that found 70% of employees are disengaged at work *¹⁴. But what you may not have heard is that disengaged team members are at least six times more likely to leave their job than team members who are engaged in their work *¹⁵. If you think it’s expensive to acquire customers, it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff. It’s much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.

Engaged team members will also make you more money. A separate study by the firm Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees achieved twice the annual net revenue on average than businesses with lower engagement scores *¹⁶. That’s a 100% difference in percentage terms of revenue.

All of this comes from just one step in the Lean CX Score. Can you imagine what will happen when you put them all together?

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – 80% of CEOs Believe They Provide Superior Service: Just 8% of Customers Agree

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptceos believe superior, Lean CX, Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

80% of CEOs Believe They Provide Superior Service

Remember how 85% of people think they are above average, and better drivers than everyone else on the road? This effect extends to companies and CEOs too. Bain & Co surveyed 362 companies and found that 80% of those companies’ CEOs believed their company provided a superior customer experience to their peers. *⁷

However, when customers of those companies were asked the same question, only 8% believed that the company provided a superior customer experience. CEOs versus customers. 80% versus 8%. That’s quite a difference!

The Lean CX Score will actually help you get an 80% score from your customers (who ultimately pay your bills by buying your product or service), and not just your managers at the next board meeting.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – Good Customer Experience Is Worth More Than 140%

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptcustomer experience, lean book, Lean CX, The Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

Good Customer Experience is Worth More Than 140%

If getting more approval from your customers isn’t enough, a study in the Harvard Business Review also found that customers who had the best customer experiences spent up to 140% more than those who received a poor customer experience *⁸. This means that Customer Experience has a significant effect on your profit as a company, and your success as a team.

The same Harvard research found that customers who gave the poorest ratings for customer service had a much lower chance of staying as customers in the following year. Fewer than half of customers who rated a company poorly stayed with that company, and overall they only stayed for a year on average *⁹.

On the other hand, customers who rated their experience the highest were way more likely to remain as customers the following year (31% more, to be exact), and on average had a likelihood of staying for six years *¹⁰.

A customer staying for one year, or six years. Which would you prefer?

It’s not just about customers staying with you a long time. Keeping customers can also significantly improve your bottom line and profit. Research done by Frederick Reichheld (the inventor of the Net Promoter Score) found that increasing customer retention by just five percent, increased profit to the company by over 25% *¹¹.

Isn’t that amazing? Keep an extra five percent of your customers instead of letting them leave, and your profit could go up by 25%. Most companies would be ecstatic with a 25% jump in profit. Why was there such a difference?

Well, existing customers of a company tend to spend more over time. The trust is already there – there is less of a need for the “hard sell”. And the cost to acquire them as a customer has already been spent, a figure that for brand new customers can be quite large when adding up the cost of marketing, advertising, sales teams, service teams and more to get them on board.

Keeping your customers is even more powerful than you think, and good Customer Experience is the key that unlocks that power for you.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX Score – A New Way To Tell If What You’re Doing Works

September 22, 2017Lean CX Book Excerptcustomer experience, lean book, Lean CX, simple fast easy to do, The Lean CX ScoreDavid McLachlan

A New Way to Tell If What You’re Doing Works

By now I hope you’re coming on this journey and you’re keen to improve your Customer Experience. But how do we tell if what we’re doing works? Well, let’s break it down.

What works? You could say that if your product is selling, it works. If customers are not complaining, it works. If customers are coming back time and time again with a smile on their face, it works (that’s true for old bricks-and-mortar businesses and disruptive new products – they all need customers). And, if your team is happy and productive, it works. That sounds fair, right?

But how do we get there? That place where customers are lining up to buy from us? Let’s break it down further.

A Bad Customer Experience – Ever Had One?

Businesses that fail at Customer Experience make it complicated, slow, or difficult. Which means that logically, good CX is exactly the opposite.

After all, have you ever had a bad customer experience? Silly question, I know. Of course you have. Like that time you tried buying something, but the experience was so bad it just ended up being too much hassle? These days it can seem as though many interactions we have are like this. Maybe the store clerk was bored, or just didn’t care. Maybe the call centre operator was particularly rude. Maybe the website didn’t have enough information, or the wait time to be served was 10 times longer than you wanted.

So in our imaginary example, if you did manage to buy it, the experience was tainted and you would be unlikely to return. Most people simply give up and go somewhere else (i.e. to the competition).

Now if you had a choice between these, which would you choose?

Simple, Faster, and Easy to Do

We’ve seen what good CX isn’t. So let’s flip it around and look at what it is.

If something is simple and easy to do, then the natural path is for people to do it. If your work process is easy to do, you’ll probably get it done. After all, why wouldn’t you do something that’s easy?

If a product is easy to use, then people will use it. If it’s easy to buy, then they are more likely to buy it. In other words, if “slow and complicated” are a good reasons to leave a business, then “Simple, Fast and Easy to do” are good reasons to stay.

So that becomes our aim in creating an incredible CX.

We’ve already looked at simple, but why should it be fast? Time is quickly becoming one of the most precious commodities on earth, with people used to getting instant gratification for the things they want. In fact, time is so precious that people will pay other people to walk their dogs for them, go shopping for them, and would rather jump online to order something and have it delivered if it means they can save the time and effort of getting dressed and going out.

Another way of saying this is: If your product or service takes a long time, your customer will be looking at their watch and heading for the door (i.e. to your competition again. Getting the picture?). Simple, Fast and Easy to do are all equally important.

Sure, “Simple and Easy” Sounds Good, But How Can I Actually Put It Into Practice?

That’s a good question. Like any of these new terms, the idea of “Simple, Fast and Easy to Do” can easily lose its meaning.

That’s why the Lean CX Score was created.

The Lean CX Score is a single score for your business or team, taken from the absolute best parts of the most customer-centric improvement system discovered in the past century. It’s easy to do, and it’s fast. You can quickly see if you’re winning or failing, and you can also see exactly what to do about it.

Because every business has customers, and you need them to keep coming back so you can stay in business, the Lean CX Score fits seamlessly over any company you can think of.

As we go through this book and you learn more about the Lean CX Score, you’ll see that by putting the steps into practice you will be making things easy for your customer to do, and easy for them to buy.

In fact, removing anything that is wasteful – that doesn’t add value to a customer experience – is our true aim. As you will see in the coming examples and stories, by doing this we automatically compel our customers to work with us.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book: