7 Reasons Why It's Not The Journey

So it's been a long trip. 3 continents and 100 hours of travelling. I love the destinations but I now hate the travel bit. Odd really because in most everything else I do it's the whole journey bit that liberates the creativity in me. 

That suggests that the travel journey lacks some vital ingredients these days. 

Fo sho!

1. The generosity of those around you disappears when travelling. It seems everyone is totally just out for themselves.

2. The lack of contact - eye, mind, spirit and emotion. "Don't come close to me! I will maim you."

3. The idea that it has been designed to work. Like at all. The whole place, space, system and experience is not designed for humans.

4. Lack of valuable information. It seems that unless you are a professional detective then you had better just be lucky. If anything goes wrong the likelihood is that you won't know about it until you arrive in the worng place and without your luggage. 

5. The space and time to think quietly. The whole idea of travelling seems to come with an acoustic hell all it's own.

6. The assumption that I'm permanently shopping. While it may seem like it - I'm not - so please get all this dreadful tack out of my way. I'm not a 'thing' to be sucked dry by your samey bland rubbish at every turn.

7. The realisation that we are indeed simply sausage meat. Designed to be processed with little or no taste or regard to our civil liberties.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Beauty & The Brand

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Customer Experience - Drilling for New Gold

There is nothing that explains dynamics or complexity quite as directly as 'customer experience'. 

If you think about it we are all users, audiences and consumers. We all either love or hate the experience we get. As businesses, and in order to design the best possible experience for our customers, we had better get to grips with the moving parts under our c

ontrol

Today there is a real focus on 'customer experience' – because it's the foundation of how every business transacts right? Very few companies have managed to get this right. The language of customer experience has changed dramatically too. The advent of the 'smart' mobile device (and its new supremacy) has caught many businesses out.

I argue that if the business cannot enable their entire marketing proposition and brand through a smart mobile screen then they are probably out of the game.

Whether direct or indirect, an internal division supporting the main firm – or externally it's important to get the idea of customer experience understood and in place all the way along the value chain.

The bigger point of course is that the customers experience is a responsibility of the entire business. Everyone is directly or indirectly accountable and that is now the challenge for leadership. How do we enable everyone to service the experience, how do we get everyone to engage in making it a seamless thing. How do we ensure the experience is the right one in the myriad of devices and channels open to us.

Our approach to achieving all this is simple but not too simple. 

"By understanding the moving parts inside the firm and how they are implicated by what's going on in the world then we can engineer the optimal operation to deliver excellent customer experiences across every channel."

Our Customer Experience Framework effectively builds an operating model for customer excellence in the 21st Century. 

 

• The optimal experiences across the right channels and meaningful to the most valued customers…
• The correct value propositions and messages designed to explain the correct services and solutions. 
• Understand the important moments of truth - the life-cycles of valued customers - where, when and how best to service real needs. 

All our frameworks are about insights.

They start with the consumer in mind and that enables us to think from 

that standpoint and ensures that we keep that focus at all times. 

Explaining Customer Excellence

Understanding the best possible experience for the audiences

 is just as much about internal processes as it is about external perceptions and realities. Our approach to this fully explores how to design the experience at the the touch points.

Understanding the mood and the modes, the 

traits, demands and the need profiles of consumers we can begin to think about the design of the best possible experience. Armed with this we can match the offers, propositions with the intercept points. And then as it evolves it establishes meaningful quality standards, baselines and sustainable design criteria.

Applied Framework Approach

We build these frameworks within facilitated sessions preceded by rich preparation and team collaboration. We and the team work through the series of modules below. We do it in conversations designed to optimize effectiveness and reduce barriers to customer excellence. The end result is a powerful and highly visual decision framework with practical and deliverable next steps.

As a result the recommended changes are applied to everything. The interfaces, the products and services, each process and system change. Changes to peoples roles and infrastructure may emerge in order to reach that new desired state. During the whole approach we use scenarios and examples of best practice to be sure that the team think hard about new competitive positioning or opportunities.

After such sessions it is often the case that new data will be required - other stakeholder sessions and iterative events may be identified/delivered to widen awareness, check assumptions and improve newly uncovered opportunity.

Left to Right Sequence

The following Modules explain the order in which this framework is developed.

1. The Touch Points: What are the possible opportunities to ‘touch’ and generate an experience with the segments we would choose? How would we decide on the right touch point to appeal to varied moods and modes? Social Media, Devices, Platforms, Channels.

2. Segmentation/Profiles and Traits Analysis: How would we choose to micro-segment our customers and what are the primary traits which marks out these segments? How have we decided to macro-segment our customers and what are the primary traits/attributes which marks out these segments?

3. Value Proposition and Touch Point Correlation: What are the value propositions that are going to attract the macro-segments? What are the priority touch-points that we believe best enables us to create the right experience as we market, sell and serve?

4. Product Prioritisation: What are the priority products/services/solutions that we feel will appeal to each of our macro-segments? If I were a customer what do I get?

5. Service Prioritisation: What are the priority services for each of our macro-segments? What do we mean by Service? If I were a customer what do I get?

6. Service Vision: What are the values, principles standards and policies that make up our vision for the highest quality of service?

7. Partner Vision: What are the values, principles standards and policies that make up our vision for the right kind of partnership? Do we include our partners and suppliers in our experience for our customers? Probably right?

8. Customer Journeys: What and when are the moments that make up the key events – (life/opportunity events) of our primary macro–segments. The moments of truth?

9. Acquisition, Retention and Penetration strategies: What are the detailed strategies for Acquisition, Retention and Penetration?

10. The efficiencies - observed or required: What impacts, implications or other observable effects or opportunities can we imagine/expect? Across the dimensions of People, Process and Infrastructure and in each module.

11. Experience Design: Q. What are the technical aspects of the experience we need to build in every touch-point? The ultimate design of the experience that by now we know will alter and delight the audiences that we have defined.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Murdering Your Subjectivity Molecule

Someone sent me a link to the idea of the trust molecule the other day. 

I tweeted it. But here is is again. Neat idea.

It got me thinking about a pet bug of mine. Does the following scenario sound familiar?

"I'm so close to this I can't see it anymore. In fact I can't even think, hear taste or touch it any more. I just can't value the thing before me. I'm so bored I could suck a bat. My mind, in fact all my senses are so utterly fried by this bloody thing that I want to drive a truck over it. Familiarity breeds contempt."

And it goes on...

"Whether it's a decision not to change, a relationship that's failing - I'm way too close to it to fix it. In this state I can easily start to make up excuses to others around me that I'm attending to it but I'm not. My brain has developed a split personality over it. If i'm honest i'm defending why things have been left the way the way they are. I cross the road to avoid dealing with it because my stupid mind has told me that it's all ok. "

I see folk so far gone in that state of subjectivity that no one can shake them free. 

The subjective soporific mind freeze that causes blindness. Denial. It can be about anything, people, stuff, work things, product choice, holiday destinations, behaviour, cultural issues - politics. Anything.

That's the problem - we can all get to that state of dangerous subjectivity if we lose objectivity. In our chemistry set of a brain there must be a molecule (or weird formula) that clicks in and zap we are screwed. Too darned close to be any use.

The good news is that we should be able to exercise our objectivity muscles. Practice lifting with impartiality every day. Stop applying the judgement linament. Eat a diet of fresh thinking and stop with the leaps of conclusion. That's the demon subjective molecule tricking your mind. 

Mind The Pattern

Stay away from any familiar pattern because that's what lets the demon in in the first place. Stay awake to what's new and do things that are just unlike what you do every day. Climb a tree when you should be on a phone conference. Count to 1000 before blurting that immediate thought in your mind.

Oh and turn off e-mail - use Twitter instead. 

Posted via email from Just Thinking!