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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 14

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The Customer Experience Disconnect

In a study by Bain & Co it was revealed that around 80% of firms believed they delivered a “superior customer experience”.  The only trouble was, their customers didn’t agree, with just 8% of customers confirming they were provided a superior customer experience.

The study also found that companies were trying to do a good job – they truly believed they were customer focused and recognized the importance of their customers.  They obviously genuinely wanted to provide a superior customer experience, they just didn’t know how to truly pull it off.

Instead of focusing on improvements that truly value the customer, they do things like relentlessly pursuing new customers at the cost of old ones.  For example, heavy discounts for new customers while more expensive pricing for existing customers.  Or they gathered immense loads of data on their customer’s habits without actually talking to them, understanding what makes them want to stay.

How Easy Was It To Get What You Wanted, Really?

Research and consulting firm Forrester has found that making it easy for your customer to get what they want goes a long, long way to providing them that “Superior” customer experience.  In fact, customers are more likely see your company as competent and to forgive any mistakes that happen along the way.

Part of making it easy for a customer to get what they want is reducing the steps to getting what they want.  The more “steps” a customer has to take, whether it’s talking to different people or departments, filling out multiple forms or needing to gather multiple pieces of information, all affects the ease of use and the likelihood of a good customer experience.

Checking in with your most profitable customers to understand what went well, and what didn’t go well, also helped the best companies design their experiences to attract more profitable clients.

Getting Intentional About Designing Your Work

The research by Bain & Co also found that companies who outperformed others when it came to customer experience had intentionally designed their work (i.e. the operations of their business) and customer experience.  They called it Design, Delivery and Developing Capabilities, and this is where it is handy to have a simple yet powerful framework to work through decisions with.  The Ease of Use framework first outlined in the book The Lean CX Score can immediately improve the ease of use for your customers and your team in a few simple ways.

First, it brings clarity to a process by making it repeatable.  Then it reduces the steps to a customer getting what they want, by making hidden things visible and making it impossible to make a mistake.  Finally, by checking in to see if the customer got what they wanted they can reduce the steps further and make things easier again.

Don’t fall into the trap of a complicated programme of work to improve the retention of your customers – make it easy with an easy framework and focus on the ease of use for your customers.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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