A consultant friend recently asked me to put together a questionnaire for a discovery workshop on website customer experience. So I started writing questions: Who is your target audience? What are your business goals? How do you gather customer feedback? And so on.
As I wrote these questions, I started getting bummed out. I’ve asked questions like these many times and then led projects based on the answers. Far more often than I’d like to admit, these projects achieved the kind of “success” in which you highlight anecdotal improvements and discreetly avoid mentioning what the original goals were. I’ve had this experience despite working with talented strategists, writers, designers, and developers.
It’s not that those are bad questions; in fact, they’re essential. But there is another set of questions, less often asked, whose answers influence the customer experience just as much. Here are the questions I added to the questionnaire:
o Is there an overall owner of your digital presence? Who are the owners and approvers of:
· drive-to?
· content?
· experience design?
· technology?
· production?
o Are there different owners/approvers by business unit? By country?
o How well do these owners/approvers work together? How easy is it to make changes?
o Where do you [the client] fit into the model?
The answers to these questions reveal organizational silos – which can be the greatest barrier to good customer experience. Here are some examples that may sound familiar:
o Each business unit owns its own part of the company’s website. Any global change requires buy-in from the business units.
o Advertising teams create ad banners and landing pages that aren’t integrated into the organic experience.
o Critical tools that span business units (analytics tools, registration systems, customer databases) are deprioritized and treated as “infrastructure” – a cost center.
o When a project fails, it’s hard to say whose fault it was because authority was so fragmented.
To some extent this is the nature of human institutions – but there’s a lot you can do to improve it. Here’s what you can do, at both the team level and the organizational level:
GET BASELINE METRICS. Make sure you have good analytics tools in place, and that you have accurate data on the current state. I know: You don’t have the right tools, and gathering data takes time, and you just want to get on with the work, and your execs are breathing down your neck. But without data, you will fail. OK, maybe you’ll limp along. But if you’re trying to drive real change, you will fail. Read on to see why.
START SMALL. This one’s easy: Do something small, that you know you can do, and that you think will improve the experience.
PROVE THAT IT WORKS. This is by far the hardest part, for two reasons. First … you didn’t actually gather those baseline metrics, did you? So even if you made a huge improvement in customer satisfaction, you can’t prove it. You have nothing concrete to show to stakeholders or senior executives, and they have no reason to trust you with anything bigger.
Second, maybe your great idea actually didn’t work. But as long as you have the data, you’re OK: You learned something, and the change you made was small, so you didn’t waste too much time on it. Plus, when your next hypothesis turns out to be right, the fact that you admitted you were wrong the first time will give you credibility.
BUILD FROM THERE. Now you’ve made one good (small) change, and you proved that it moved the needle. What’s next? Do another small thing, and another. Then start doing bigger things, but still in small steps. That is, be Agile: Go through the Build – Measure – Learn cycle in rapid iterations.
A boss of mine used to say, “Herding cats is hard. But if you make good cat food, they’ll come to you.” By building a track record of proven accomplishments, you’re creating an environment where people will want you to take on bigger and bigger things …up to a point. Which brings us to the other half of the equation.
INSIST ON DATA. If you’re a senior leader, you have to demand that your teams bring you customer data. If they can’t, ask them why not. What’s the blocker? If they don’t have the right tools to gather the data, invest in the right tools. If customer research needs to be sponsored at a higher level, sponsor it. If you have both quantitative and qualitative data on what customers think and want, you have a major advantage.
FOLLOW AGILE PRINCIPLES. Agile is about working in rapid iterations. The marriage of data and rapid iteration is why Agile is sometimes described as “a learning system”: You’re continually making small, incremental changes, gathering data on the results, and evolving.
What this means for you as a leader is a different (and better) focus. You’ll probably be more engaged in setting priorities and answering strategic questions about outcomes; you’ll be less involved in reviewing and approving outputs (deliverables).
CREATE A VIRTUAL TEAM TO MANAGE THE EXPERIENCE. It’s unlikely that you can prompt a reorganization that will create more centralized control of the digital space. But what you can do is create a virtual team of practitioners from across the company. Ideally, create one for each practice area: content creators, designers, advertising folks, developers, and so on. This has many advantages:
o Communities of practice naturally facilitate peer-to-peer coaching and skills development. Talented people become thought leaders in their field, which facilitates their career growth.That’s good for them – and for the organization.
o Collaboration becomes natural. A community of peers will see the benefits of, for example, coordinated editorial calendars or reusing great stories across external and internal channels.
o Communities empower practitioners. The voice of one practitioner only carries so much weight with leaders. A practitioner who can say, “This is a best practice recognized by all of our metrics people” will be much more influential.
Recognize silo-driven thinking and the issues it creates for your customers. Call it out. And let the voice of the customer, proven by data, drive the ways you address it.
