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Are you a painkiller or a vitamin?

You’re doing the right things. You’ve chosen your target customers wisely and found a set of needs you can solve for them better than anyone else can. People and teams across your organization are doing their best to make daily decisions that meet or exceed the requirements your customers value most. And you’re constantly re-evaluating and stopping processes that aren’t matching your target experience.

But, are you doing everything you can to stay one step ahead of your customers?

This time of year especially, the answer I hear often is “no.”

Why? Because many leaders are, despite the best of intentions, usually so busy working on the existing problem they’re solving for customers (good) that they have little time left to look at what’s next (not so good).

Looking at what’s next is key. Meeting the next, or evolving needs of your customers can be the difference between a company that stagnates and one that flourishes with profit over the years. So how do you stay one step ahead of your customers? Here are five ways to consider:

1.  Set up or tune up effective feedback mechanisms

Do you have effective channels in place for your customers to provide real-time feedback on your products and services and their experience? I know it’s basic, but do you have an email address at the bottom of your e-newsletters where customers can send you feedback? Are you listening where your customers vent their frustrations or share joys?  

Sometimes this valuable customer point-of-view gets “stuck” in marketing and never makes its way back to the people on the operations side who could really use it. Your voice of the customer (VOC) or other feedback mechanisms are only effective if you leverage them.

2.  Identify customers’ next problems, needs or desires—not products or services

Today and tomorrow, what you solve is more important than what you sell. When leaders take a breath and think about the big, long picture, they often agree on this point. Yet too often leaders listen or look for the next product or service a customer mentions, or lean too hard on “customers who buy X will buy Y next” analytics.

To stay a step ahead of your customers, observe or listen for the unmet needs, unsolved problems or unquenched desires of your existing and target customers. This is a headwater of untapped demand for you. Customers may buy if you push the next logical product, but they will be more loyal (and likely more profitable) if you solve the next problem.

BONUS: in your customer surveys or other follow-up interactions with customers, do you ask “Did we solve the need that triggered your journey to us?”  My words are likely not your words, but my tip here is to remember to ask this basic question.

3.  Find the alternative to you

Think about all the products and services a customer could reach for instead of yours. Let’s imagine I woke up with a stiff neck today. I could reach for 2 ibuprofen pills, declare my too-soft pillow has got to go, make an appointment for a massage, or admonish myself for missing my workout for the last several days. That’s four very different alternatives to solve my problem – and we haven’t even started thinking about the competition among drug companies or pillow manufacturers. In a similar way, your customers are contemplating their own set of options. 

Tip 3 is to push yourself to think of all the alternatives to you that your customers would reach for if they could. Some exist – some don’t…yet. Imagine all the alternatives to Instagram that found new customer support in the last few weeks. Don’t wait for a problem to open your eyes to alternatives. Be the instigator and find them, or create them yourself.

4.  Pay attention to existing customers

Many organizations get so caught up with the new customer that they fail to pay attention to their biggest advocates: their current customers. The shiny, new customer is compelling – they’re full of new opportunity. But existing customers have demonstrated a belief in your business. They are most likely to give you real feedback on what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. Getting that information from new customers isn’t quite as easy. Take advantage of your existing relationships before you start trying to mine new ones.

When I speak, one of my favorite questions to ask marketing leaders is what portion of the previous day they focused on new versus existing customers. When they say most of their time is spent on new prospects, they look at their feet. They know this truth: the most underleveraged asset in most businesses is the customer.

5.  Find out who your detractors are—and what they’re saying about you

Look back to #2 above. That listening exercise will help you identify your biggest fans—and your most strident detractors. Detractors might be bloggers. They might be industry influencers on Twitter or Forbes. Some are existing customers. Your job is to translate what’s being said into actionable lessons about what’s next. A favorite tactic is to create a word cloud of all the detractor statements or conversations about your brand, company, product or service. That will stimulate a conversation!

Bill Gates said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” 

As customers’ needs evolve, your job is to anticipate the next need. How have these ideas worked for you? Do you have other ways to stay one step ahead of your customers?

Annette’s blog is probably best known for her “lessons learned” posts, which I always enjoy. In fact, I wrote a guest post in that vein on her blog in Oct. about customer experience lessons we can learn from Lance Armstrong. You can also find Annette on Twitter at @cxjourney and @annettefranz.

 

360 Connext

What I love about Jeannie is that she’s always on top of recent trends in the customer experience arena. For example, her recent post about Instagram menus and what they mean for customer experience was a conversation no one else was having. (who would have thought—Instagram menus, right?). You can find Jeannie on Twitter at @jeanniew.

 

Customer Experience Matters

If you follow customer experience thought leaders online, you know Bruce is one of the more prominent in our space. I value Bruce’s research-driven approach. You can find Bruce on Twitter at @btemkin.

 

Return Customer

Joe Rawlinson is one of those bloggers who just goes about his business. Plugging away. Blog post after blog post. I enjoy Joe’s blog most for his book reviews. Right now, he’s reading Kill the Company by Lisa Bodell. He also wrote a nice review of my book, Domino, a while back. You can find Joe on Twitter at @joerawlinson.

 

Deliver Bliss

I’ll be honest, I’m a big Tim Sanchez fan. My only complaint with Tim: He doesn’t blog enough! But, his blog remains in my feed because I love the way his mind works. Even his more simple posts get me thinking—like this one titled “12 reasons bad customer service isn’t your fault.” You can find Tim on Twitter at @DeliverBliss.

 

Conversation Agent

Not necessarily a “customer experience” blog, but Valeria’s blog is a must-read for me most weeks. She tackles topics ranging from social currency to content marketing to customer service. Valeria takes a more analytical and thoughtful look at these topics than some—and I always appreciate her different perspective. You can find Valeria on Twitter at @conversationage.

 

The Engaging Brand

A couple years ago, I joined Anna on her popular podcast to discuss my new (at the time) book Domino. Since then, I’ve followed Anna’s blog (really her podcasts) when I have time (mostly when traveling). Again, she doesn’t focus exclusively on customer experience, but I find her guests—and the topics they discuss—always get me thinking. You can find Anna on Twitter at @EngagingBrand.

 

Disruptive Women

One industry area of interest—and specialty—for me and my firm, Aveus, is health care. So it’s no surprise a blog like this is on my list. But, the collection of women this blog features is more than impressive. From doctors to executives to academics, this blog features some of the brightest female minds in health care. It’s a no brainer for me to follow. Learn more about the contributors to Disruptive Women in Health Care here.

 

Customer Service Stories

I’ve been following Barry’s blog for a while now—after all, he’s been blogging since 2009. What I’ve come to enjoy about Barry’s blog is his ability to challenge the status quo—like he did in this post when he challenged the notion that if you pay more, you get more from a customer perspective. You can find Barry on Twitter at @bsdalton.

 

Harvard Business Review

There are a few bloggers at HBR that speak – if even indirectly – of customer experience-driven performance. One is Bill Lee. His sparky “Marketing is Dead” post calls leaders to task for thinking too much from an inside-out (vs customer) point of view. Bill pushes my thinking about how to build and measure the value of customer relationships.

 

Peterme.com

I started following Peter with he was at Adaptive Path, and as he posted occasionally on the HBR Blog network. While his mindset is more online user experience than every-interaction customer experiences, I’ve treasured his sometimes blunt, always incisive ideas. Now that he’s the VP of Global Design for Groupon, it will be interesting to see his perspective evolve.

That’s my short list.

I certainly follow a number of other blogs, but that’s a good core of the CE blogs I follow. What about you? What would you add to the list?

A few weeks ago, I attended the Customer Experience Exchange North America in Miami. I am a bit tardy in posting these takeaways, which I’ll blame on the crazy number of planes I’ve been on since I left there. Yet I left the event thinking about six key lessons and what they might mean for our clients—and all of you. 

1.     Chief Experience Officer? No common definition yet.

The Exchange was an intimate gathering of about 80 leaders responsible for defining and executing customer experience strategies in their organizations. The range of organizations represented was tremendous – I met leaders from firms including JP Morgan, HP, Nationwide Insurance, Hilton, Match.com, Canadian airline West Jet and Sunpower Corporation. Job titles were as varied as their industries and customers: Chief experience Officer. Global Marketing Officer. VP Customer Care. Chief Customer Officer.  Approaches to their work varied as well. No common definition of the experience leader, or at least not yet.

2.     Experience leaders are T-people. 

People responsible for customer experience carry a broad, “all-daily-operating-decisions-have-an-impact” view of their organizations. They are also deeply focused on building the specific capabilities needed to win the performance payoff possible by solving important needs for customers. Get the “T?” And they are frustrated by peers who think more functionally, or in silos of accountability.

In this way, they’re peerless - surrounded by “I” people. In many organizations, the only other person to see the organization so broadly is the CEO.

 3.   Pain points first.

I regularly see a 2-3 year journey from the moment an organization declares it will strengthen business performance by becoming customer-centric to the successful implementation of meaningful change. Leaders at the Exchange confirmed something that has been on my mind for some time – that before the declaration for enterprise change is made, the journey to customer experience-driven performance actually starts with lonely champions working on obvious pain points. Think lava below the surface of a volcano yet to blow.

That’s ok. It’s a way to score some quick wins and build the case for a shift in operating strategy by top leadership. Where are you on this journey? In your organization, are there champions simply battling the low-hanging fruit? Or are you part of a global commitment to customer-experience-driven performance? This brings me to my fourth point.

4.   Too few have defined an enterprise target customer experience.

Certainly among the leaders in Miami, few shared with me that their divisions, brands or companies had clearly defined a target customer experience. That means they’ve just scratched the surface of the performance payoff possible for their customers--and their organizations. A clear target experience can be used as a litmus test for decisions made across your company. It means the difference between everybody working on their version of “better” and the massive force of an organization in alignment on how to solve a need for customers better than anyone else.  

5.   Amazing things are happening.

Nationwide’s Chief Customer Advocate, Yasmine Green, shared the lessons of a large organization saying “I’m sorry” and the degree that social media has changed the customer experience. Organizations can choose to see the social reality as a problem and pressure, or they can see it as an opportunity. Nationwide did the latter.

When integrated healthcare system HealthPartners (transparency alert: Aveus client) wanted to show their customers what the other side of a healthcare decision was like, they created “Simple to the Rescue”, a fun, interactive journey. This was just one of many efforts to purge complexity and create a connected, personal experience for consumers – be they patients in a clinic or hospital, pharmacy customers, health plan members. Scott Aebischer senior vice president of Customer Service and Product Innovation, set the table for a raucous conversation on the “positive conspiracy” necessary for meaningful change in a complex healthcare business.

Metlife took life insurance accessibility to a whole new level when they sold it “in a box” to customers in the baby and pharmacy sections of Walmart stores.  What a terrific example of earning consideration by meeting customers where they are.

David Perrota brought the lessons of working in more than 20 countries and cultures around the globe, many for Vodaphone Group. His work confirms that in top-performing organizations, customer and employee experiences are based on mutually shared values.

6.   A strong customer experience is a path to stronger financial performance 

I still regularly meet leaders who feel investments in customer experience are a tradeoff to profits. But none of them were in Miami. These leaders have a strong grasp on the link between a stronger experience and stronger financial performance, and dispelling this myth is a daily charge. 

All in all, it was a terrific couple of days.  

What about you? If you attended the Exchange, what lessons did you take away?

 

 

Have you seen the scene on Showtime’s “The Big C” where the main character Cathy – who has stage-IV cancer – shows up two hours early for her clinical trial in order to “process in”? As she fills out paperwork and answers the nurse’s questions, she pulls piece after piece of information from a massive three-ring binder. That binder is the most tangible “integrated experience” she has, and she did all the work to assemble it. Cathy’s patient experience was fragmented, and driven more by payments and procedures rather than her own goals and milestones.

I’m a patient who works with healthcare professionals, so I watched with empathy for both Cathy and all the professionals in her treatment journey. Despite significant progress over the last few years, the patient experience continues to be challenge.

A patient faces a complex tangle of physicians, insurers, pharmacists and health coaches and their stories live in multiple EMR’s. While everyone in the system plays a part, physicians must play a central role. Why? Because while consumers are critical of health care organizations and insurance companies, they still trust doctors. Physicians have a particularly important responsibility to make the patient experience better in this environment of fragmented change.

So what can you do to embrace this new reality and improve the patient experience?

1. Discover the need to be solved from the patient’s point of view. At the start of every interaction with a patient, physicians should ask "What do you hope happens as a result of coming to see me today?"  I know for me, there have been times where the doctor thought it was primarily about relieving pain, and for me it was getting back on the hiking trail!  Think with them about the things they do to manage their health outside of your relationship with them. As the physician they trust, be the second person to see the whole patient. 

2. Knowledge is power – use it with your patients. Even when you meet with a patient for the first time, chances are you are not the first step in their health experience. Don’t make them repeat information they’ve already given someone and believe you should have. When your nurse takes a call from a patient following up from a recent visit, enable, empower – and expect – the care team to not “start from scratch.”

3. Collaborate — for the benefit of the patient. Multiple and overlapping health care relationships create a barrier to consistently healthier behaviors, better outcomes and lower investments in time and money.  Doctors need to be good listeners and excellent translators, communicating with patients as part of a single, broad care team – regardless of the contractual boundaries of the physician’s practice. Connect the most critical dots in the patient’s health experience, not just the functional dots owned by your practice.

Now, here’s the really good news: The effectiveness of any experience can be measured in value to the patient and value to your practice. According to a study of 640 leaders, organizations that have a well-understood definition of customer experience are twice as likely to beat their profit targets as those who do not. Customer experience needs to be inextricably embedded in what you do at every stage. If the experience delivers real value, both your patient and your organization win.

In her book “ROAR: Strengthening Business Performance through Speed, Predictability, Flexibility, and Leverage,” Chris LaVictoire Mahai sums it up perfectly: “Customer experience needs to be inextricably embedded in what you do at every stage of performance. If the performance chain works and the experience delivers real value, the customer and you win.”

Your patients trust you more than anyone else in the healthcare system. What will you do to improve the patient experience to maintain that trust?