Customer Experience
Marketing Executives’ Conference 2011
Elisabeth Brinton
Chief Business & Public Affairs Officer
Powering forward. Together.
SMUD
• Community owned
electric service provider
since 1946
• 900 square mile service
territory serves 1.4 million
people in the greater
Sacramento area
• Sixth largest public utility
in the U.S.
• Seven wards represented
by publically elected
board
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The Times They Are A-Changing
“The curious thing is that with these exponential changes, so much of
what we currently know is just getting to be wrong. So many of our
assumptions are getting to be wrong. As such, as we move forward, not
only is it going to be a question of learning, it is also going to be a
question of unlearning.”
John Seely Brown
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It’s about people
“Lesson’s from Apple – Do simple things well; be obsessive about
quality and attention to detail; no matter how good you are, you can
always do it better; it’s not about technology – it is about users and
their personal experience.”
The Apple Effect by Alan M. Webber in The Christian Science
Monitor, Sept 19th 2011
“Defining how computers are used, not how they are manufactured,
will create real value … the computer is a thing, but what people
want is not a thing, but to do things.”
Steve Jobs 1991
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Empowered Consumers
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State of The Customer Experience
Forrester Research’s 2010 Customer Experience Index asked
more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with
133 firms across 14 different industries.
Only 13 firms received "excellent" customer experience ratings and
45 were rated either “poor” or “very poor.”
“There is a considerable opportunity for companies to drive better
business results by improving their customer experience
management efforts.”
Bruce Temkin, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester
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Customer Experience by Industry
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Source: Forrester’s 2010 Consumer Experience Index
Customer Experience Defined
“A Customer Experience is an interaction between an organization and
a Customer. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the
senses stimulated and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured
against customer expectations across all moments of contact.”
www.beyondphilosophy.com
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Rise of the Experience Economy
Experiences
Stage
Services
Customization
Deliver
Goods
Make
Commodities
Extract
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Commoditization
What is the Customer Experience Worth?
About $4 Billion
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Positive Experiences…
Strengthen the
Brand
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Improve
Marketing
Effectiveness
and Satisfaction
Differentiates,
Improves
Competitive
Position and
Loyalty
Thinking Outside In
What are
customers
experiencing?
How do we
measure the
experiences?
How do we
deliver these
experiences and
emotions?
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What
experience do
we want to
deliver?
What emotions
are we trying to
evoke?
How Do You Want Your Customer to Feel?
Emotional
Advocacy
Valued, Special, Ownership
Recommendation
Responsible, Leader, Community
Focused
Operational Effectiveness
Responsiveness, Resolution,
Knowledgeable
Rational
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Core Emotions
Reliability, Safety, Integrity
What Customers Want
Harvard Business Review – Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Fast and easy problem resolution is valued more
than exceeding customer expectations
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What Customers Want
Harvard Business Review – Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Customers want to contact the company once,
provide their information once, speak to one person,
and use only one channel to resolve their problem
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What Customers Want
Harvard Business Review – Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
67% prefer self-service channels, 33% prefer
talking to person. Just three years ago, these
numbers were reversed.
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What Customers Want
Harvard Business Review – Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Become
customers
because of
the brand and
quality
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But leave
because of
poor
customer
service
Three Organizational Pitfalls
1. Lack of cooperation across departments
2. Limited understanding of customer
needs across the organization
3. The general power of inertia within a
business.
“These three pitfalls often share one root cause: a company is too
internally focused.”
Elizabeth Glagowski, Peppers and Rogers - “What is Wrecking Your
Customer Experience”
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Customer Experience Strategies
1. A seat in the C-suite
“The customer experience should be the responsibility of all
departments, ideally with a C-level executive overseeing the
cross-departmental communication and projects.”
Elizabeth Glagowski, Peppers and Rogers
SMUD: That would be my seat.
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Customer Experience Strategies
2. Cross-channel alignment
A customer thinks of a company as one entity and today expects
alignment across channels. Meanwhile, most companies still
think of themselves as a series of departments.
Elizabeth Glagowski, Peppers and Rogers - “What is Wrecking
Your Customer Experience”
SMUD: CRM, integrating marketing efforts, cross functional
matrixed teams for Smart Meter rollout, and aligning web,
IVR, and, contact center with rebranding efforts
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Customer Experience Strategies
3. Sustaining a customer-focused culture
“The trick is for the brand to live in the hearts and minds of all
employees,“
Bruce Temkin, Forrester
"Customer experience focus is a culture that needs to sit in all
parts of the organization, and is driven on a daily basis by all
employees."
Paul de Laat, Vodafone
SMUD: Rebranding efforts and work with Gallup
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Customer Experience Strategies
4. Customer-based metrics
"Companies should develop a set of customer-centric loyalty
metrics that they track in the same way and at the same level
that they track business metrics like sales and profitability,“
Bruce Temkin, Forrester
SMUD: First call resolution, employee and customer
engagement, and gauging loyalty through the propensity to
switch and recommend SMUD
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The Future
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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New and faster devices
Additional touch points
More interaction and conversations
More demand for self service options
More demand for rich web content
More informing and less selling
Less patience, higher expectations
Sources
• Elizabeth Glagowski, Peppers and Rogers’ 1 to 1 Magazine,
http://www.1to1media.com/view.aspx?docid=32178
• Bruce Temkin, Forrester Research, The 2010 Customer
Experience Index, 2010
• Kerry Bodine, Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research, 2011
Customer Experience Predictions
• Beyond Philosophy - www.beyondphilosopy.com
• Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman,
Harvard Business Review, "Stop Trying to Delight Your
Customers”
• Joseph Pine, TED Video
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html
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APPENDIX
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What Customers Want
Harvard Business Review – Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
• Purchase because of quality and brand, but leave because of
poor customer service
• Loyalty driven by quick and easy problem resolution rather than
exceeding expectations
• Contact the company once, no repeating information or switching
service channels
• 67% prefer self-service channels, 33% prefer talking to person
• 57% of inbound calls visited website first
• 30% of inbound calls are simultaneously on your website
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