Tag Archives: Lean CX Wastes

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

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

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 – 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: