I recently attended the first CXPA Conference. It was a great event attended by some of the leaders in delivering great experiences. One side benefit of attending was that they gave away a number of Customer Experience books. I had the chance to discover a few that I might not have found otherwise. One of these books was Clued In: How To Keep Customers Coming Back Again And Again by Lewis P. Carbone.
“In trying to maximize the value of customers to their businesses, they appear to have lost sight of the need for their organizations to create value for their customers.”
“Brand management and experience management are different: the former is more focused on how customers feel about the company and the latter on how customers and/or employees feel about themselves.”
This book is great for raising awareness. Similar to The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. There are many good stories and examples of how Experience Design can improve customer & user experience and how that can help a business be more successful.
“The fact is, customers cannot not have an experience! They’ll have one whether you want them to or not. The question is, how random or managed is the experience you are delivering?”
“When businesses accept the idea that the quality of the total experience has powerful effects on long-term loyalty and advocacy, the plan on which the organization can complete broadens remarkably.”
For example, there is a story about how Avis wanted to improve their customer satisfaction related to having clean cars. They tried everything they could think of, but the score would not budge. Doing more to clean the cars couldn’t raise customers perceptions that the cars were clean. However, after doing an Experience Audit, they discovered a number of “clues” that led customers to perceive things as dirty; oil stains on the floor and car seats in messy stacks behind the counter. By cleaning the service counter area and neatly stacking car seats led to customers rating the cars as cleaner than before.
“The performance of the system depends more on how its parts interact than on how they act independently.”
Overall, this is a good book for raising awareness that customer and user experience is important. However, if you want to improve experiences, you will need to go beyond this book. The book is short on substance of actually how to do Experience Design. There are examples given are a team of Emergency Room personnel that come in on a weekend to clean and paint a room or a bank that hires an architect to build a completely updated corporate office building. But, you will need to go beyond examples like this to implement experience improvement in your organization.
After getting inspired to improve experiences, you may want to check out the list of UX and CX Essential Reading for books that will actually give you the skills to design, implement, and measure experience improvements.
The book does a good job of articulating one of the big questions people often have about experience design. Many have suggested that you can’t design an experience. However, this book provides the idea of designing clues that a person will encounter and that will help guide them to having the experience you hope they will have.
“you can’t really control what the customer thinks and feels about any given experience. Only the customer has that power. What you can control and manage toward a predetermined goal or end frame are the individual clues that customers process on both a conscious and an unconscious level so they create an experience that better meets their needs and desires.”
While I enjoyed the book, I didn’t agree everything in it. I have yet to come across evidence that selling your product as a commodity, for example selling bags of coffee in the grocery store instead of brewed coffee delivered in a specially designed coffee house environment, doesn’t dilute the value of the experience.
“Even when customers find boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts in grocery stores, department stores, convenience stores, or church fundraisers, there’s little danger that the experience itself is being diluted. To the contrary, it’s being reinforced. Customers know that what they’re buying in these peripheral locations is a good product but nowhere near as emotionally satisfying as the experience they will have wherever they find one of those Pavlovian ‘Hot Donuts Now’ signs lit. One form of consuming simply reinforces the other.”
Experience design requires ongoing improvement. Just improving the mechanics of the existing experience may not be enough. Sometimes a business needs to step back, question their assumptions, and rethink the value that they offer. The author uses Blockbuster Video as an example of a company that was successfully improving customer experience. However, it has been a few years since this book was published. Since then, competitors like Netflix or Redbox were able to identify different ways to deliver the experience of renting a movie while Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.
Clued In is available on Amazon.