Tag Archives: lean book

#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 – Employee Engagement (and Disengagement)

October 27, 2017Lean CX Infographiccustomer experience, David McLachlan, disengaged employees, disruptor, effect of low engagement, employee engagement, engagement scores, Lean, lean book, lean customer experience, Lean CX, lean infographicDavid McLachlan

Get all the infographics here

That’s Right – 67% Of Employees Are Disengaged At Work

And that’s just in the U.S, where people get coffee breaks and are paid more than two dollars an hour. It’s even worse if we look at the broader world where those things aren’t guaranteed, factories can pay a handful of dollars with inhumane conditions and employees are not protected by basic laws.

But having 67% of your employees be disengaged is still pretty bad. After all, disengaged employees are the ones who are more likely to leave, more likely to be sick on average, and even (according to the research) more likely to steal.

But there’s more, and it is discovered and outlined in the book, “The Lean CX Score” by David McLachlan. In the Lean CX Score, David outlines the benefits of designing your work, and your products, properly. And they all point to improved engagement and improved profit as a result.

For a start, disengaged team members or employees are six times more likely to leave their job than their engaged counterparts. That’s a 600% difference. Do you think it’s expensive to acquire customers? Well it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff. Between the downtime caused with a lost employee, to the cost of advertising, vetting resumes, interviewing, and training, it is much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.

Engaged team members are also more likely to make you more money. A study by Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees – those in the top quartile of engagement – achieved twice the annual net revenue on average, when compared to businesses with lower engagement scores.

It’s for these reasons that there are entire companies dedicated to the discovery of employee engagement around the world, and companies are lining up to buy their services. Engagement matters.

But You Don’t Have To Suffer Through Low Engagement

If you’d prefer to live in the higher engagement end of town, there is good news. You don’t have to suffer through low engagement scores, as a business owner, a leader managing a team, or a “leader without a title” inside a team of your own where you feel engagement could be higher.

Designing your work for happiness has been proven to have a huge effect on your employees, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Take just two steps in the Lean CX Score book – a Repeatable Process, and Checking In.

In 1961, a US psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihali interviewed 1000 peole, asking them about the circumstances that made them happy. He called this happiness a state of “Flow”, when things went well, and things just seemed to flow well – when participants felt on top of the world. Mihaly found five main things in common when it came to creating happiness. It happened when his subjects were:

Intensely focused on an activity,
Had control over the outcome,
That was neither too easy not too hard,
That had a clear objective, and;
That gave immediate feedback

The good news about this is having a Repeatable Process, whether it’s interacting with a product in a predictable way each time, or knowing the boundaries of your work so you can easily move into a flow state, has a deep impact on happiness and flow.

And Checking In, which is step five in the Lean CX Score, means we check regularly to see if we’re on track – with our customers, our users, or our team.

There are many more stories and a lot more research in the Lean CX Score book, making it a nice, easy read that will have a huge impact on your results.

I highly recommend you get yourself a copy today.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX Infographic – The Ideal Shopping Cart Experience

October 21, 2017Lean CX Infographiccreate a disruptor, customer experience, disruptor, Lean, lean book, lean customer experience, Lean CX, lean infographic, online customer experience, shopping cart statisticsDavid McLachlan

Get all the infographics here

Customers Are Leaving Your Online Shopping Cart

Recent research by the Baymard Institute found that up to 69% of customers were leaving your online shopping cart instead of buying your product or service.

They also found that 35% of those online abandonments were recoverable solely through a better checkout flow and design – in other words most businesses are making things more complicated than they should be, and customers are leaving as a result.

Needless to say, keeping even a small portion of these abandoned orders would have a significant effect on your profit as a business. But the best part about it is that it makes sense, because I know I have been guilty of leaving a complicated shopping cart, and there’s a good chance you have too.

Fast and Easy, or Long and Complicated, Which Would You Prefer?

If you had a choice between your checkout experience being fast and easy, or long and complicated, which would you choose? It might seem like a silly question – even an obvious one – when we put it like that, but the truth is most companies are answering “Long and Complicated” without even knowing it.

They’re answering “Long and Complicated” because they haven’t put in the work or thinking necessary to reduce the complexity in their shopping cart and make it as simple as it needs to be. And they haven’t put in the thinking because they don’t have a simple step-by-step framework like the Lean CX Score that is proven to make it simple and improve their profit as a result.

Reduce The Steps, Reduce The Checkout Fields

The latest research by the Baymard Institute found that the average online shopping cart had more than 14 form fields for a customer to fill out. But the shocking thing is they also found that the ideal customer flow included just seven form fields – around half of what most companies had.

Companies were making it more complicated than it needed to be, which prompted a reduction of 35% of customers in buying their product or service.

Amazon Did It In One Step

Of course you know the story by now – there’e a good chance you have used Amazon.com’s online shopping cart and in many cases, such as with their prime service or Kindle store, you can buy what you want in just one click. If customers leave too often with 14 fields, and a checkout can be done in 7, then Amazon have taken it to the next level and reduced the steps to one.

Do you think that had an effect on their profit? Of course.

Doing things in “One Step” is also one of the recommendations in “The Lean CX Score”, by David McLachlan. In that book there are many more real life examples of companies getting things to a customer in “One Step” instead of many, and gaining stellar results.

There are also five scenarios similar to the “too many fields” dilemma, where customers are prompted to leave a company. Outlined in the “The Lean CX Score”, they are scenarios where a customer leaves because their experience is harder than it needed to be. Apart from extra steps, it might mean extra hand-offs, having to redo things over and over, and having to wait too long to get what they wanted.

If you haven’t read The Lean CX Score yet, I highly recommend you get a copy today.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX: (un)Complicate

October 21, 2017Lean CXcreate a disruptor, customer experience, disruptor, Lean, lean book, lean customer experience, Lean CX, Lean CX Score, simplify, uncomplicateDavid McLachlan

(un)Complicate – Don’t Be Fooled By Complicated Things

Have you ever had someone explain something to you, but the way they explained it was just too complicated? And no matter how they tried, it just got more confusing, not less.

Here’s some good news – it’s not your fault that it seemed complicated. It’s not uncommon for some people to try and confuse things to make you comply, or to try and make you feel less because you don’t understand. But the real reason something might seem complicated is that if someone doesn’t understand a topic well enough, then they cannot explain it simply.

Einstein Agrees

Einstein wrote: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” In other words, complicated things, products and complicated explanations are not the result of people being smarter than you – they are actually the result of people not understanding it well enough to make it as simple as it should be. Complicated things are the result of lazy thinking – things that haven’t been thought through well enough to be explained in simple terms.

And the same goes for your business, your products, and your team.

Uncomplicate

The Simple Truth About Complicated Things

It might seem like a paradox then, that in making things simple it actually takes more work, more thinking, and more intelligence initially. You have to do the thinking on where to reduce steps, where to perform steps more concisely, or how to get the outcome more quickly and efficiently.

And that is the kind of thinking that most people either don’t know how to do, or worse, can’t be bothered doing. After all, how many times have you been forced to do something at work in a more complicated way than it should be, or forced to jump through more hoops in getting a product from a company than you needed to? And it wasn’t because it had to be done that way – many times it was simply because it had always been done that way, and the complicated way became the default over time.

The good news is that The Lean CX Score offers you a repeatable framework for making things simple – the opposite of complicated – (un)Complicated. You can improve your work, your business and your products, and improve the opportunity for customers to buy from you as a result, using a simple, step-by-step method.

(un)Complicating Things Also Improves Sales Significantly

Every time a process is more complicated than it should be, and your customer is forced to go through it, you are increasing the chance that they will leave you.

“Breakpoints” are those places in your customer experience where a customer will leave, never to return. The Lean CX Score outlines five of the most common customer breakpoints, and how to solve them. Here are some examples:

By having too many steps in the customer experience – every extra step is another “breakpoint”, that could be a prompt for a customer to leave.

By having too many hand-offs in the customer experience – every extra hand-off is a breakpoint that is an opportunity for a customer to leave.

By making a customer redo things more than once – every extra time they have to redo it is a breakpoint that will frustrate a customer to the point of leaving, and;

By making customers wait too long for something – every minute longer is another reason for a customer to break up with you and leave.

(un)Complicating Things Also Reduces Costs Significantly

Let’s think about simplicity from a cost perspective. By reducing steps in your customer experience you are reducing the work to be done to get the customer what they wanted. By reducing the work to be done you are reducing the cost of the work. By reducing the cost of the work you are improving the profit of your business.

It’s the same principle whether you’re thinking about your supply chain in business, or your value chain in delivering goods and services, or the processes you go through to get the outcomes you want. Every time you reduce steps, reduce hand-offs, reduce waiting and any other Lean CX Waste, you are giving yourself the opportunity to get ahead.

You Don’t Have To Start From Scratch

If you’re ready to (un)complicate your business and your products, and put in the initial thinking required to make things more simple, the good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch.

The Lean CX Score provides you with the exact, step-by-step framework you need to (un)complicate and start seeing the success you deserve. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you get a copy.

Lean CX Infographics

October 17, 2017Lean CX Infographicbusiness, create a disruptor, customer experience, David McLachlan, disruptor, entrepreneur, Lean, lean book, lean customer experience, Lean CX, lean infographicDavid McLachlan

Click the pictures for more info

Lean CX Comics

October 17, 2017Lean CX Comicbusiness, comic, create a disruptor, customer experience, cx, David McLachlan, disruptor, entrepreneur, Lean, lean book, lean comic, lean customer experience, Lean CXDavid McLachlan

Click the pictures for more info

#4 Lean CX Comic – Remove Rework

October 13, 2017Lean CX Comiccustomer experience, disruptor, how to create a disruptor, lean book, lean comic, Lean CX, Lean CX Waste, lean waste, reworkDavid McLachlan

#4 Lean CX Comic – Remove Rework

Click to Enlarge – or – Right Click and “Save As” to save.

See all the Lean CX Comics here

Have you ever had to do something, and then do it over again? Maybe the first time wasn’t too bad, but by the third or forth time you have to redo something you might be just about ready to rage-quit. This kind of thing is happening to your customers – and guess what? When it happens they are ready to leave, and when they leave they are neither buying your product nor likely to return.

There are certain scenarios and behaviours that drive your customers away, and they have been captured in the five Lean CX Wastes within the Lean CX Score Framework.

“Rework” is one of those Lean CX Wastes – wastes that drive your customers and your team and employees crazy. Having to redo things is also a huge cost to businesses every year – in many cases simply by reducing the amount of times you have to redo something by one can cut a company’s cost and improve its speed by 30 to 50%.

Rework – Has It Ever Happened To You?

More importantly, you and I can most likely relate to Rework because it has happened to us before. Has your boss ever asked you to redo something thirty times, with micromanaged “improvements” that don’t actually move the needle of improvement that much? Or have you ever had to call a company back three, four, five times or more just to get what they should have been able to give you the first time?

Or what about a website, where is wasn’t clear what you needed to do to get what you wanted, so you had to click a dozen different places before you discovered the “right” thing?

All of this adds up to wasted time, wasted effort, which is why it is one of the Lean CX “Wastes”.

Lean CX Removes those Lean CX Wastes

If gaining and keeping customers is important to you (and if you’re in the business of making a profit, it should be), then removing the Lean CX Wastes will definitely be important to you. The Lean CX Wastes are:

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

They can be remembered with the acronym: RENEW (or NEWER). The five Lean CX Wastes are outlined in the book: The Lean CX Score, by David McLachlan, but this comic and article should give you a basic outline of one of the most important ones: Rework.

See all the Lean CX Comics here

Lean CX Infographic – Would You Like A Piece Of $260 Billion?

October 13, 2017Lean CX Infographiccreate a disruptor, disruptor, disruptor framework, infographic, Lean, lean book, Lean CX, lean infographic, online shopping cart abandonment, online shopping cart statisticsDavid McLachlan

Get all the infographics here

Would You Like A Piece of $260 Billion?

Recent research by the Baymard Institute found that more than 69 percent of customers abandon their shopping cart instead of buying a product or service. From that same research Baymard Institute found that companies with an online checkout experience could see a 35% increase in conversion (read: sales) just by having a better checkout design.

That means reducing areas that can go wrong for a customer, making things easier to buy, and making the experience more streamlined.

In fact, they found that the average online checkout had around 14 fields, while they needed only 7. Amazon, of course, are doing it with just one, using their “one click buy” buttons, and reaping huge rewards as a result.

How Do You Quantify “Better Checkout Flow and Design”?

Just saying they need a better checkout flow and design is one thing, but how to you actually quantify that? How do you measure better flow or reduced complexities? How do you measure the Customer’s Experience?

The good news is there is a book called “The Lean CX Score” which combines the most customer-centric improvement system from the last century with the most important life-blood of any business – its customers. And it also contains an exact framework for measuring the usability of your customer’s experience and knowing whether they are likely to return, or likely to abandon you.

You see, without customers paying for your product or service, and returning time and time again, there is a good chance you won’t be able to pay the bills to keep the lights on, and will subsequently go bust. It’s not exactly rocket science. And as we’ve seen, by making things easy for our customer to do and easy for them to buy, we can significantly increase the number of customers and the number of times they return. More customers, more profit, means keeping and thriving in your business.

Lean CX Is The Key To The $260 Billion Door

All of which means that if you want a piece of that $260 billion, you’d better start making things easy. For the price of a couple of cups of coffee, you can get “The Lean CX Score” by David McLachlan which outlines, step-by-step, how to create disruptive products and services that are more streamlined, faster, and easier to use than your competition. And when you use it, get ready to see your business thrive and your competition bite the dust.

Lean CX Is The Key To Creating Disruptors

A disruptor is a product, service, or entire business that changes the rules of the game, so that it is seen as better, can scale and grow faster, and sell more than anything in its industry. But what people don’t realise is that disruptors are most commonly created in fields that are already existing – selling products or services that already exist and we know that customers want anyway. The disruptive business just finds ways to streamline the process of creating and delivering what the customer wants. As the Baymard Institute research showed, that can start with an increase of 27% to your online sales channel, but as you continue to use the Lean CX framework to improve and if you ultimately become a disruptor, history has shown us that the sky is the limit.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX Infographic – 27% Of Checkouts Are Too Long Or Complicated

October 13, 2017Lean CX Infographicbaymard research, complicated process, customer experience, infographic, Lean, lean book, Lean CX, Lean CX Score, online business, online shopping cart abandon, shopping cartDavid McLachlan

Get all the infographics here

Your Complicated Process Is Driving Customers Away

Have you ever tried to buy something online recently? With online business taking off like never before, there is a good chance that your answer is “Yes”.

And just like 69% of people, there’s also a good chance that you’ve tried to buy something online but abandoned your shopping cart before you were able to buy.

Did you know that 27 percent of those people who abandoned their online shopping cart, and who weren’t just browsing, abandoned it because the checkout was too long or complicated? That’s a lot of people leaving you at the most critical time, and the good news is “long and complicated” is actually something we can fix.

The Lean CX Score Fixes “Long and Complicated”

What would it mean to you if you had a proven, step-by-step framework for reducing that time and complexity in your checkout experience? For one (as we’ve just seen), you would have a good chance of improving the online sales to your business by up to 27% or even more, which would mean a very tidy jump in profit for you too.

The Lean CX Score is that proven framework. Revealed in the book of the same name by David McLachlan in 2017, the step-by-step framework of Lean CX combines the most important asset of your business (your customers, who pay your bills by buying your product or service, remember?), and Lean or the Toyota Production System, which is one of the most incredible customer-centric improvement methods of the last century. Lean CX has modified both in a ground breaking way to suit Customer Experience and white collar jobs, reduce time and improve ease of use.

Reducing Waste Improves Speed and Happiness

The Lean CX Score outlines five Customer Experience “wastes” – common scenarios that when you fix will have customers clamouring to buy from you. Just a few of those wastes that you need to remove are:

Waiting
Extra Steps
Extra Hand-offs, and;
Rework

While reading the book will give you the full outline of those Lean CX wastes and how to remove them by using the Lean CX Score, you can get an idea of them just with the list above. Let’s take a look:

Rework, or having to redo things, can easily happen on an Online Shopping Cart experience when you have to enter your payment details more than once, or after making a mistake, or having to refresh a form that times out.

Extra Steps could be extra form fields that aren’t really necessary, or that could easily be reduced. In fact Amazon got rid of its form fields completely with its “One Click Buy”. How is that for reducing extra steps?

Excessive Hand-offs could be too many online screens to travel through, where further mistakes can be made.

Are You Ready To Improve Speed and Make Things Easy?

The Lean CX Score is the first book of its kind, that completely outlines an exact step-by-step framework for improving the speed and simplicity of your customer’s experience, helping them buy easily and buy more often.

When you’re ready to profit more, enjoy more happiness and easier work, then I highly recommend you get the book.

Get all the infographics here

#3 Lean CX Comic – Be The Disruptor, Not The Disrupted

October 4, 2017Lean CX Comicamazon, borders, customer experience, disruptor, facebook, how to create a disruptor, lean book, Lean CX, Lean CX Comic, Lean CX Score, myspaceDavid McLachlan

#3 Lean CX Comic – Be The Disruptor, Not The DisruptedClick to Enlarge – or – Right Click and “Save As” to save.

See all the Lean CX Comics here

You are either becoming a disruptor, or you’re about to be put out of business by one. So many industries have already been completely changed in the past 10 years, and the disruption is not going to stop. If you don’t discover a formula now for creating disruptive products and services yourself, there’s a good chance your team or business won’t be around to see the next 10 years.

But what exactly is a disruptor? A disruptor, as we see it, is something that changes the rules of the game, so that it is seen as better, can scale and grow faster, and sell more than anything in its industry. As a result, other brands and products fall by the wayside, and ultimately disappear, often within a matter of only a few years.

The good news is, the Lean CX Score is an exact framework for creating disruptors out of normal products or services. In other words, you can be the Amazon, instead of the Borders. You can be the Netflix, instead of the Blockbuster. You can be the Facebook, instead of MySpace. And using these steps actually improves your team speed, morale and engagement at the same time. The rewards are incredible. It’s time to get your copy of the Lean CX Score today.

See all the Lean CX Comics here