The Customer Experience Report

January 26, 2013 – An Occasional Newsletter (Vol. 2, No. 1)

Brad Feld shared a story about meetings and making them better this week, including the memorable rule #0: Do We Need To Meet? This story made me think about the process of customer engagement and of a few suggestions that can make the process of delivering and receiving the experience better all around (and not just in meetings).

Hack Your Brain to Change the Situation
These suggestions have to do with brain hacks: specifically, the idea of reframing the situation and of suggesting a “Best Practice.” Reframing means to present the scenario so that you can change the way that people see things and suggest an alternate solution.

In my experience, one of the most powerful reframing tools is “The Happy Path” – it’s basically a way of saying “when nothing goes wrong, this is the best expected outcome for the process” – and suggesting this path to the customer. When the customer is closest to the ideal persona (a user model popularized by Alan Cooper), then the combination of the Happy Path and the ideal persona can produce a documentation of the ideal customer experience.

Matching the Happy Path with the Real World
Except when it’s not the ideal customer experience, because as we know, the Happy Path and the Ideal Persona rarely meet. It’s also really important to be able to say no instead of maybe to a customer who’s trying to do something that doesn’t really fit the experience.

It’s tempting to let them wander on and come up with an “almost” solution, and this often causes problems later on from a support or experience perspective when the “almost” solution encounters a hitch or a bug or a change of mind. So how can you introduce a bit of the Happy Path to the customer without diverting them dramatically or by trying to create a kind of customer model that they can’t ever meet?

The Just-in-Time Happy Path
One way to do this – especially in a feature rich product – is to uncover the right solution to a problem that they didn’t know that they have yet. An example from the CRM and Customer Service world is the ability to combine merge text (variables that substitute values from a case, customer, or company) with pre-written or “canned” content. By adding this very simple change, you can turn formulaic content into something a bit more personal, and streamline what could be a tedious manual process.

How can I learn more about Personas?
To get started, you can read the Cooper Group’s Guide to Personas. You should also read this article about making personas your team can actually believe in and embrace. Finally, consider this article about making sure that the details of your personas are grounded in fact and not just in vague description.

Great stories from this week

Why our brains like short-term goals (from Entrepreneur Magazine)

Setting an experience and a reward is better than just money (from Digital Telepathy)

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to Teach Critical Thinking (via @getlittlebird)

You can also find up-to-date customer experience tidbits here