People NOT Customer Experience – Are we missing a trick?

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Thin Thinking – One Word Business Strategy – Emotion

Customers & Colleagues Are People

It’s great to see all the activity on this subject – not least as it gives me a prod to share one of my ‘models I keep coming back to’. I actually created a draft one of this 20 years ago, to explain the core role of Marketing to a group of Kingfisher Finance guys.

Before We Get Started

Straight out of the box I just want to get this clear:
By People Experience I am NOT talking about the bit HR are increasingly doing. I AM talking about the bit some involved in Customer Experience, in my view, get wrong. Wrong in the context of only considering one stakeholder’s needs when trying to create an enduring business in a competitive marketplace.

I am a firm believer in CX. In fact, our Co-Founder Nicola Collister was the first Ftse top 100 CX Main Board Director nearly 15 years ago.

But for us CX thinking is can be fundamentally flawed, which is why we pioneered People Experience. NOT as a methodology – we are far too interested in creating outcomes for that – but as a mindset and approach to getting and maintaining competitive advantage.

The only Goal That Matters

To succeed in a competitive marketplace, and to be honest provide a more enjoyable place to work, you need to:

Provide an emotionally compelling reason for people to ‘deal’ with you in preference to a competitor.

You do this by working out what you do best (your proposition), that ‘your’ customers want most, and then delivering it as consistently, efficiently & effectively as possible. It’s a 360 degree all stakeholder thing… not just a customer thing…

Context Is King – Or a Camel will only beat a Horse in a desert

Before I do share my thin thinking one-word strategy approach, a bit of context. We ask the CEO’s we come across – honestly you can talk to them, after all they are People just like you and me – how much time they spend on strategy, and the usual answer is not much.
They are universally more focussed on the delivery of strategy and looking for accountable ways of ‘directing’ the business to do so.

I say this up front as I do not want to denigrate strategy, just put it into context. Oh, and as an aside, if you are spending ages on your strategy (time & money), you most likely don’t have a compelling Proposition you believe in. Or you are engaged in vast amounts of political infighting between siloed business functions Vs delivering stuff your customers want.

A Good Place To Start

The reason why a step to considering your Colleagues and Customers as People (as long as you then go onto recognise how they might behave differently in certain context – hence why you create ‘Persona’s) is because ‘People Buy From People Like Themselves’.

Also, every single transaction we have as humans irrespective of a physical product changing hands, is a purchase/exchange – “I’ll do something for you, if you do something for me”.

And they make this judgement based on something often referred to as intuition, which can be better articulated as – I’m likely to feel better (or worse) about myself by dealing with this person/company.

Fig 1 Why People Buy – Or Talk to – Or Socialise With – Certain PeoplWhy People Buy Graphice

And just for absolute clarity if anyone states you can trust them… Do please start looking for the small print. Trust is earned by one party and bestowed by the other. It’s not a value that can be stated.

So Emotion Is Present In All Transactions – So It’s A Given?

Here is the odd bit. Many companies find emotion at work a really hard thing to allow though the door. I suspect most associate it with either conflict (something often associated with change – and unavoidable + necessary by the way). Or woolly rubbish best left to Marketing and their overcharging agencies.

But if you are going to leverage the next big differentiator which is your Colleagues – don’t forget they are people – then you are going to have to spend significantly more time and effort of understanding how they can feel a lot better about themselves by coming to work.

The Easy Bit

Luckily identifying this is very easy to do. It’s the execution bit that gets hard because we exist in a ‘doing loads of stuff differently all the time’ culture and most executives are penalised for finding new and exciting and engaging ways of doing the same things differently – you know, like promoting the core values in ways all employees can understand and contribute to so that they can help the managers & directors deliver exceptional service intuitively to the Customers, who spend more, for longer, so driving shareholder value.

Fig 2 People Centric Change

People Led Change

So simply put, the emotion that ‘People’ should be engaging with comes from your Business purpose via your Proposition. And the engine house of emotional engagement are your Values.

The reason it’s easier than you think to get at these, even if like most you are sceptical, and/or can’t remember your brand values because (completely wrongly by the way!) most organisations again feel Values are the woolly stuff marketing come up with, is that the values that make up your ‘Brand’ can be found in the People – Customer & Colleagues – who transact with you now.

Why… Emotionally… Should I Buy From You?

If you only ponder one question on you, please try to give the above one some headspace. And do so in the context of Customers, Colleagues, Managers, Directors & Shareholders… after all, are we not all people.

Simon Norie
Co-Founder
Custerian.com
PS: As a final thought Simon has done a short (3 minute) video which you can view HERE

Simon Norie
I started my working life in retail financial services. However I was very fortunate to be led by someone who believed in the power of a team to 'punch' above their weight by having a shared sense of purpose. So whilst my main focus was brand led data marketing tasked with creating footfall for the Kingfisher group brands, I actually learned the power of cross functional teams (built across both internal and external silos) driving competitive advantage by aligning what companies did best, with what customers wanted most.. though colleagues.

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