The two assumptions most CX programmes get wrong
Organisations typically understand the importance of improving the customer experience they provide. The CX mantras have been around for a long time, and most organisations have developed CX capabilities focused on designing and delivering improvements to the customer experience.
In our opinion, these efforts are too myopic and don’t elevate CX to the level of strategic consideration it requires. They typically focus on removing pain points that relate to the existing products and services – they are incremental improvements to the status quo. This approach makes two big assumptions…
Assumption one – that improvements will drive choice
The first assumption is that when improvements are made, customers will see the value and respond accordingly. This assumption is wrong if organisations don’t know why customers are choosing the product or service in the first place. If organisations don’t know what is driving choice for their customers, then it is highly likely that they could improve the related customer experiences in ways that don’t impact these drivers of choice – they have essentially created superfluous value. This ‘wasted’ effort is a big reason why so many CX initiatives fail to deliver on their expectations, and as Eric Ries, of Lean Startup Methodology fame, quotes:
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
Assumption two – that existing products set the ceiling for customer value
The second assumption is that the most value can be created for customers by improving the products or services that currently exist. Our work across New Zealand has repeatedly uncovered opportunities to create new customer value that weren’t visible from within the existing product frame – the kind of reorientation that only becomes possible when you start with what customers are trying to accomplish rather than what you currently sell. Often these are the initiatives that should be prioritised for investment – or at least should be considered as an alternative to just ‘improving’ what’s already there.
Why CX needs to be a growth discipline, not an improvement function
This elevates CX into a far more strategic discipline that isn’t just about addressing customer pain points but actually leads the business in product and service development. Given businesses exist to create value for their customers, and that their existing products and services are just delivery mechanisms for this value creation, this focus on CX as an opportunity to maximise customer value and not just improve the current customer experience mechanisms is, in our view, entirely appropriate.
A Jobs to Be Done approach to customer experience strategy
With Purple Shirt in New Zealand, we have developed a unique approach to CX optimisation, anchored in Professor Clayton Christensen’s Jobs To Be Done methodology. His insight was that most new products and services fail in-market not because they don’t work, but because they don’t improve things on dimensions that drive choice. For companies to create successful new products that people will choose over the competition, they need to identify the causes that lead customers to choose product A over product B.
This is the foundation of our new CX approach – a blend of innovation and CX best practice that elevates CX into its proper role of customer value creation and a key driver of growth.
What this looks like in practice
The starting point is always a diagnosis. Before any experience is redesigned or any improvement is prioritised, we establish what is actually causing customers to choose – the functional, emotional and social dimensions of the progress they are trying to make, and where the current experience is working against that or simply irrelevant to it. From that foundation, CX investment stops being a question of which pain points to fix next and becomes a question of where to focus effort to actually shift customer behaviour. That is a different brief, and it produces a different quality of answer.
CX for business growth
If your CX programme is producing output without producing growth, the question worth asking is whether it started in the right place. Get in touch to talk through what a diagnostic approach looks like for your organisation.
