Tag Archives: cx

Lean CX Vlog 001 – Logging the Journey

July 22, 2018Vlogcustomer experience, cx, David McLachlan, disruptors, ease of use, employee engagement, engagement, leadership, Lean CX, Lean CX Vlog, product design, user experience, uxDavid McLachlan

It’s About Disruptors and Engagement

Welcome to the first vlog on Lean CX. This will follow my journey as a Customer Experience practitioner and author. I’m making these videos to hone the Lean CX message, and log the process of improving companies, people and myself as I go along.

And where do I get to by the end of this video? That it’s all about Disruptors and Engagement. Hope you enjoy!

There is more – much more – coming soon.

Chat to you then – Dave

Transcript:

Dave: It’s still a bit dark in the morning as you can see, but that sunrise even though it’s not as good now was beautiful this morning! The reason I took you out this morning is that I want to talk to you about something really really important.

(About the Quad Bike Rider) What an awesome job. Now that guy wouldn’t
have any problem with engagement – he gets to hoon around on a quad bike all day! That’s pretty cool.

So I want to show you this – I just got – I just got this back from the printers and what it is is a card deck. It’s the customer experience card deck. There’s a leadership card deck as well and it goes through all of those ease-of-use principles to make your job easy to do and to make your product easy to take up as well. But it all comes down to this – I don’t know if you can see it – but a simple action. And the thing about simple actions is most people when they’re, you know designing their work or trying to get you to do some work or trying to get you to buy a product it’s harder to make something simple to do. It’s actually harder for us – it takes more effort and more work for us to design it in a way that is very very simple. And that’s the point – the framework that I’ve designed makes it easier for you to make it easier for
your workmates and for your customers and doing so has a massive impact on your profit.

So I’m sure these first videos are going to be pretty bad, as I just get up to speed and try and hone the message. Because the message is really clear to
me – we need to make things easy and the easier we make things then the more people are going to do them. Whether it’s our workmates or whether it’s the customers we want to buy a product or our application or our service. So ease of use is absolutely everything and these videos are going to help me hone that message and also show you a little bit of Brisbane City which is an
absolutely beautiful city especially in the morning.

If you can imagine when things are easy to do they’re much easier to buy and
much easier for your workmates to perform so you know the profit, the cost
reduction, all those things flow from ease of use in a massive, massive way and
I just want to log the process of me going along this journey and I hope you
enjoy the series because it’s really going to show you how to create
disruptors and also create engagement in your team.

Thank you for watching!

Chat soon – David McLachlan

The CX Card Deck

July 8, 2018CX Cards, Lean CXcustomer experience, cx, cx card deck, cx cards, David McLachlan, Lean CXDavid McLachlan

Below is a 52 card deck of Customer Experience tricks, tips, models, frameworks, psychology and research, specially designed as a cheat sheet for you to use in meetings, as ice breakers, or to help make moves in your company. You can buy the Customer Experience Card Deck now, printed on beautiful, strong, linen paper and delivered anywhere in the world. A great way to brainstorm UX and CX solutions, they are the absolute best cards I have ever seen, so I know you will enjoy them.

w-CX_Card_006_Reduce Customer Effort CX_Card_027_Contagious 3 Emotion CX_Card_037_Slightly Worse Version CX_Card_045_LCX Wastes 4 ExcessiveSteps

Buy the Customer Experience Card Deck now!

Leadership Card 20 – Certainty and Variety, Deep Human Needs

June 12, 2018Ease of Use, Leadership Cards, Lean CXcustomer experience, cx, David McLachlan, ease of use, leadership, leadership card, leadership card deck, Lean CX, six human needsDavid McLachlan

See The Leadership Card Deck Here

Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 20

Leadership Card 020 Certainty Variety - Lean CX Ease of Use

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Give Your Team Happiness, By Meeting Their Core Needs

Happiness. People want it, talk about it, reminisce about it, and miss it when it’s not there. And it can be everything from instant gratification (like a big meal) to deep meaning in a person’s life (like having meaningful work).

Seeing as anyone can eat a big meal or piece of chocolate and get instant gratification, I’m going to talk about the deeper meaning, that you can actually engineer into your team’s work to make them happier, more productive, and ultimately want to do a good job.

In fact, one study I found for the Lean CX Score book showed that people perform around 12% better simply by being happy.

Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs

You’ve probably heard of a few different types of “Needs hierarchies”, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that goes from safety to self-actualization. But in the 1990s Anthony Robbins came up with a deep set of human needs that completely make sense, because they actually conflict with each other.

They make sense because in a way we are all striving for happiness, and the ebb and flow of life, and events that happen over time make it either easy to get or elusive.

The first combination of needs are Certainty and Variety.

Certainty and Variety

We need certainty that what we do will turn out OK. Some people need more certainty than others before they do something, and others need no certainty at all.

The only problem is, having certainty conflicts with our other need, which is to have variety in our life and work. After all, if we have a lot of certainty, doing the same thing in the same way every day, then we don’t have a lot of variety. but if we have a lot of variety – spontaneous things, ideas, and outings – then we don’t have as much certainty.

And yet we need them both for fulfilling work.

How Can We Engineer Both Into Our People’s Work?

Over the years, I’ve experienced a few ways to engineer both of these things into a team’s work. The best ones I’ve seen involve this:

Having clear outcomes, and a clear path or process to get there (certainty)
Allowing (and encouraging) our team to problem solve ways to improve that work regularly (giving variety)

Not everyone is a natural problem solver. It can be hard to work through uncertain territory, and that is why it helps to have a standard process for problem solving and improving our work, making it easier to use.

The Lean CX Score is that framework that improves the ease of use and engages your team at the same time. Using things like a repeatable process, error proofing, visual management and checking in, you can go a long way to building the meaning back into your team’s life and work, no matter what they are doing.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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#6 Lean CX Comic – Complicated Work

October 27, 2017Lean CX Comiccomic, complicated work, customer experience, cx, David McLachlan, lean book, lean comic, Lean CX, make it simpleDavid McLachlan

See all the Lean CX Comics here

The Cycle Of Complicated Work

There’s a vicious cycle damning your business to mediocrity, and it’s the cycle of complicated work.

Whether it’s a product you sell, a website or app User Experience you are guiding people through, or a task that your team needs to complete, you are wasting some of your most precious resources and losing money as a result, if it’s more complicated than it needs to be.

But the worst part about it is if your work is complicated, there’s a higher chance that you will be so busy putting out fires, and not have the time to actually improve the work itself. Many managers don’t even know how to design their team’s work for happiness and engagement, but more on this in a moment.

Not only does unnecessarily complicated work take more time, but time costs money, and the increased complexity also drains the attention and focus of your customers and staff. Research has shown that “cognitive load”, or the brain cycles required to complete a task seriously impacts the likelihood of a person continuing to do something, or making mistakes and setting it aside.

Forming Habits and Complicated Products

That means that complicated things also damn the products you sell into a quagmire of mediocrity. In his book, “Hooked”, Nir Eyal describes one of the key things necessary for forming a habit. It is the action your customers need to take, and it should be as easy as possible for them to learn and engage in quickly.

Sure, some customers might put in a larger amount of effort than others, and they might stick with you when something isn’t immediately obvious, but the majority of people – both team mates and customers – are more likely to leave if the work is unnecessarily complicated.

“Unnecessarily complicated” can actually be quantified, and it has been quantified in the book The Lean CX Score by David McLachlan. In that book are outlined five key scenarios that contribute to complicated work. If you remove them, you are many times more likely to enjoy the benefits of happier employees and returning customers.

They are:

Rework, or having to do something more than once to get the required result,
Waiting, or having to wait too long for something to occur,
Excessive Hand-offs, or passing things around between departments, pages or applications,
Excessive Steps, or having to perform too many steps that may not add value, and;
Not getting what they want, or not receiving the actual outcome that was intended.

Lean CX is absolutely the key to designing your work in a mindful way that improves employee engagement, improves customer retention, reduces customer friction and seriously reduces cost.

That means that if you are one of those leaders who wants to improve their results and their team’s engagement and outcomes, but doesn’t know where to start, the absolute best place to start is with the step-by-step process of the Lean CX Score.

I highly recommend you check it out today.

See all the Lean CX Comics here

Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news! You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time. Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Infographic – The Huge Benefits of Employee Engagement

October 27, 2017Lean CX Infographicbenefits of employee engagement, customer experience, cx, David McLachlan, employee engagement, highly engaged employees, increase productivity, increase profitability, increased sales, Lean, Lean CX, lean infographicDavid McLachlan

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It’s Official: Employee Engagement Has A Huge Impact On Your Profit

For years the greatest leaders have had an inkling that teams who are most engaged actually perform better, and bring more prosperity to their business. Well now it’s official. As the latest numbers from the Gallup Engagement Study show, in the state of the American workforce there is a very telling difference in the productivity, sales, and overall profit of businesses within the top quartile of engagement.

If employee engagement is something that you are struggling with, or even just want to improve, I have some good news.

There Is A Proven Way To Higher Engagement: Design Your Work

The Lean CX Score, a book by David McLachlan, outlines six key steps to creating disruptive products and services, and it also improves the speed, morale and engagement of your teams.

With the latest research pointing to the fact that engagement and profit are inexplicably linked, it may not surprise you that if the Lean CX Score impacts speed and morale, it also has a higher likelihood of creating disruptive products and outstanding businesses.

The six key steps of the Lean CX Score have been linked to research in psychology, business, and plain old motivation. But the main aspect of all of them is the principle of intentionally designing your work, and intentionally designing your product and your experience, so that it meets the needs of your users in a way that keeps them engaged.

When we say “keeping them engaged”, it works for both your customers and your team. Engaged customers are the ones who return to your product, again and again. They are the ones who are your biggest fans, the ones who would walk an extra block to buy from you instead of your competitor.

And engaged team mates are the ones who will go the extra mile for their managers and for their customers – whether it is internal “customers” that they serve with a report or task, or the final, end customer who pays their wage by buying your product or service.

If you haven’t got a copy of the Lean CX Score, I highly recommend you check it out. I guarantee it will have a huge impact on your life.

Get all the infographics here