4 The Core Behaviors of the Experience-Centric Organization

This chapter describes the natural behaviors of the experience-centric organization. You might already exhibit some of these behaviors, in which case the chapter can give you confidence you are on the right track. You might, however, see the need to develop new ones or turn up the volume on some of your weaker ones. If that is the case, read on, as the rest of the book describes more about these behaviors and how you can develop them in your organization.

Both a Roadmap and a Benchmark

The experience-centric organization has core behaviors that characterize it and nurture its development. At some point, the organization’s efforts toward experience centricity become energized like a flywheel and start to turn on their own. You can use this chapter to help develop your organization, or as a means of monitoring your progress and seeing how many of these behaviors your organization exhibits. There is no specific order to these points, although arguably the first one—knowing the experience you want to offer—is the most important.

You Know What Experience You Should Offer

The experience-centric organization knows exactly what experience it wants its customers to have. Further, it knows how to make that experience happen through the service personality, tone of voice, and individual touchpoints along the experiential journey. The organization is continually updating and adjusting the experience, and all members of the organization know their role in delivering it. Discussions regarding strategy and tactics regularly center on their relevance to, or consequences for, the desired customer experience.

You See, Hear, and Can Be the Customer

As an experience-centric organization, you listen to what customers want to tell you, rather than seeking answers to what you want to hear. You are also aware that to surprise and delight customers you have to be proactive about customer needs, and intuit needs that customers cannot express. The experience-centric organization knows the desires of its customers and has the agility to react to, and to stimulate, these desires (see Figure 4-1).

In this organization, you have built a picture of your customers that comes from an integrated understanding of them—and when you have this, you can have the confidence to sometimes go against what they say. This is because you know that there are other factors in play when it comes to customer desire, and that by going ahead of your customers, you can lead them: they will desire what you are offering. The more you know your customers, the more you can be ahead of them, confident that they will follow you. To paraphrase Atticus Finch, “to really know a man, you have to walk in his shoes.”1

You Listen to the Customer, and Understand the Meaning Behind What They Say

Even though you are skilled at listening to customers, you have also developed the ability to go beyond what they say and intuit what they mean. You are able to reflect on your customers in context and extract meaning from what they say and do.

Your Customers Believe You Have Their Best Interests at Heart

Because you know your customers so well and deliver on your experiential promise, they consider you benevolent. They believe that you act with their best interests at heart, within the frame of the offering that they have entered into. This builds mutual trust and creates a long-term relationship. It also promotes customer acceptance and tolerance when things don’t go as planned or break down.

You Understand the Cultural Zeitgeist and Design for It

The zeitgeist is the spirit of the times. You know what characterizes the zeitgeist, and you follow it as it evolves and changes. You understand how society embraces your offering as part of a cultural movement that utilizes the nature of groups to share, build, and experience together.

The organization continuously engages in trendslation—that is, translating cultural trends into experiences—and has taken a larger role within the culture. This role allows you to be influenced by culture and, to a certain extent, you can influence it in return.

Your Story Resonates with Employees and Customers

You have spent time building a story based on your DNA, supporting that story through the touchpoints of your service, continually rewriting it together with your customers during interactions, and listening to it be told and retold by your customers and employees. The story is not fiction; it is a transformation of your DNA, recounted and experienced in narrative form. And a good story can never be told too many times.

You Are Balanced with Multiple Intelligences

The experience-centric organization balances the analytical with the creative, the practical with the social, and all the while is focused on developing the emotional. You encourage a “multiple intelligences” approach to the organization and the experience it supports. The organization values empathy as a core intelligence—not only customer empathy, but empathy within the organization for the roles and challenges each and every employee takes on to make the experience a success.

You Are Reverse-Engineered from the Experience

The experience-centric organization always works from the experience backward through the wheel of experience centricity. Starting with the frontline employee, it asks, “What does this employee need to be able to give the experience the customer craves?” Then, taking another step back, it asks, “What does this work group need to be able to support the individual frontline employee in delivering the experience?” Finally, it asks, “What does this manager need to be able to support the team and the individual in providing the desired experience?” The same is asked of platforms and infrastructure within the organization: “What enterprise platform will enable the touchpoints to provide the desired experience?” With this view, the term management breaks down into a combination of tasking, trusting, and tending to the frontline touchpoints.

You Are Aligned Around the Experience

The organization is aligned around the experience that you wish to give customers. Everyone in the organization understands the wheel of experience centricity and their role in energizing it. There is internal rotation of staff, such that all employees have periods of customer contact and therefore understand the importance of the customer experience, even if they are far from the front line. Everyone in the organization works to support the delivery of a superior customer experience.

You Have Clear Responsibilities and Structures in Place for Experience

Everyone in the experience-centric organization feels a responsibility and a motivation to develop and deliver desirable experiences. Employees are empowered to do it, and they take this responsibility seriously. The CEO is responsible for the customer experience and has a supporting part of the organization, headed up by the chief experience officer (CXO). The CXO in turn is responsible for the orchestration of the experience and is the caretaker and custodian of the experiential DNA.

You Are Symbolic

You know the enhanced significance of certain objects, behaviors, or interactions for customers, and you use them as part of your design. Coupled with this, your awareness of cultural relevance adds to the significance of these symbolic objects, behaviors, and interactions. Customers enjoy a richer experience with you, compared to your competitors, and this gives added meaning in their lives.

Experiential Journeys Are Your Bread and Butter

Experiential journeys have added an emotional layer to your journey structure, and you have found your organization’s own way of creating them. You recognize that smileys as a description of the customer experience are a thing of the past. Instead you are specific, describing how the customer should feel at each stage of a journey, and how you can make that happen. You continually craft the emotional curve of your experiential journeys, always looking to improve and tweak it—the odd nudge here, honing the tone of voice there. This extreme attention to detail pays off by fostering employee ownership and a shared desire for perfection.

You Have Authenticity of Purpose

You have an authentic purpose in terms of a transparency between your DNA and the customer experience. This clarity is visible to employees and customers alike, and makes life easier for all. It also encourages forgiveness from customers during service breakdowns, when things don’t go as expected. There is a generosity from employees and customers alike that comes from the simplicity that lies in authenticity of purpose.

Brand Has Become Brand Experience

The term brand has morphed into brand experience as you have focused on translating your experiential DNA into better and better experiences. Branding is now focused on experience fulfillment and interactions with customers, and takes a greater role in innovation projects.

You Develop Continuously Through Concept Innovation and Experience Prototypes

The development of future concept services is one way that you get involved in the wider societal culture, but the majority of the concept services you develop are used internally to assist with alignment, infusion, and ultimately creating a relevant organizational culture that is infused with the customer experience. You have developed the skills to prototype new experiences based on the innovative offerings that you are always considering. You are confident that your innovation pipeline is an experiential roadmap with a strong fit to your organizational purpose.

You Make “Concept Cars” as Second Nature

The automotive industry has a tradition of developing concept cars (see Figure 4-2), and over time has found that they communicate not only outward to a potential customer base, but also inward, preparing the organization for change. The experience-centric organization knows that developing the equivalent of the concept car within the organization is a means of propelling the organization toward the future—a future that is highly experiential.

You Use Design to Explore and Understand the World and Fail Forward

Studies of designers show that they use design as a way of understanding the problem by trying to solve it. In a kind of trial-and-error process, designers attempt solutions to determine whether they offer promise, and to better understand what might and might not work. This approach, often called “failing fast and forward,” is a way of rapidly understanding and learning about a new problem area and a potential solution space. You design with a view to having multiple failures along the way, and you are not precious with your solutions. You expect them to fail during the early stages of a project, because that is how you find out what works.

Exploring Easy and Difficult in People’s Homes

When I was working with design company Livework to simplify insurance for customers, I worked to understand what “easy” meant to customers. As part of this work, we visited customers and gave them two cards: one said “easy” and the other said “difficult.” We asked them to go around their homes and point out things they were surrounded by that were easy or difficult. The cards helped them focus their minds and pick out individual items in their homes.

The results changed the project’s view of simple and difficult and led to a change of direction, toward a new design of insurance policy.

You Are Optimistic, and So Are Your Customers

When the design and delivery of memorable experiences is your core mission, you naturally work to provide better experiences, always with an intent to improve the existing situation. This engenders a culture of directed improvement in the organization that is reflected in the market. This optimism and faith is something that your customers share and take part in. They feel it through the interactions they have with your organization, and are therefore willing to accept that sometimes things won’t go as expected. Optimism and faith translate into fault tolerance and loyalty and a positive circle of improvement in the customer experience.

You Continually Monitor the Multiple Experiences Your Customers Have

As an organization you are aware of the difference between the lived experience, gained directly from interactions with touchpoints, the remembered experience afterward, and the shared experience as told to others. You know these well, and monitor each continuously. At the same time, you do not have a tyranny of metrics within the organization, since you balance measurement with your own insights at all levels of the organization.

You Know That the Devil and God Both Are in the Details

You are successful at matching the overall offering with the detail in the customer interactions, so that together they are an experiential fit for your experiential DNA. This creates an experience that is more than its individual parts or the sum of those parts.

The organization knows that customers understand the offering as a holistic promise providing experiential benefits, delivered through interactions with many touchpoints. You understand this, and also know that it can be hard work to be obsessed with the details. At the same time, you know the pleasure customers gain when you get it right.

You Have a Sensory Orientation

You actively and wisely use all five senses in the touchpoints of your service to support the experience you want to give customers. You know that the visual sense is very strong in most interactions, but you diligently use the four other senses too.

You Are Known as Much for What You Don’t Do as for What You Do

Choosing the right investments in infrastructure, the right organizational changes, and the right innovation projects to move forward is more about saying “no” to options than saying “yes.” There are countless possibilities to invest in projects, but the experience-centric organization invests only in projects that improve alignment around the customer experience. This means saying “no” more than “yes” and continually questioning how an investment will improve the customer experience.

Design Thinking Is a Core Competence in Your Organization

You constantly strive to improve existing situations, always looking for a creative leap. You understand that design thinking adds something to your existing skill set,2 and make it a core competency in your organization. Design thinking is found in the leadership of all experience-centric organizations, as an approach to continual innovation in changing situations.

Abductive Thinking

Recent design research has discovered that designers use a little-known but important kind of thinking called abductive logic. Traditionally we think of inductive and deductive logic, but abductive logic is an important third way of reasoning. Abductive thinking is thinking about how things might be, rather than how they are or have been. This is a logic that is used in all disciplines, but designers are trained in it. They look past what is and explore what can be. It is a fundamental way of thinking, of generating new hypotheses, and it is central to innovation. When combined with the ability to visualize what can be, and to make prototypes of it, abductive thinking is a core innovation capability.

You Do the Right Thing, and Do the Thing Right

The experience-centric organization knows the importance of getting the right fit between the service offering and its experiential DNA. At the same time, it has an attention to detail that ensures that the experiential vision also imbues the touchpoints and interactions. This is a combination of doing the right thing, and doing the thing right. The two are inseparable, and this ambidextrous way of working is key in the experience-centric organization. Doing the right thing focuses on zooming out and asking the big questions about what it is you offer as an organization. What does banking mean in a mobile and socially connected world? How should healthcare be provided when the patient has spent two days Googling their illness and knows more (in some cases) than the doctor? The continual questioning of what can be at this level is proactive, looking for radical innovations and continually exploring experiential futures. It’s always striving to improve the service offering. At the same time, the experience-centric organization also has its eye on doing the thing right. It zooms in, right down to last detail, recognizing that it has a promise to deliver on. This ability to move between a macro view and a micro view is a core competency in the experience-centric organization (see Figure 4-3).

Doing the Right Thing—It Pays to Get It Right

If you had an hour to save the world, what would you do? This question was supposedly asked of Albert Einstein many years ago, to which he replied, “I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, then 5 minutes solving.” Whether true or not, this statement summarizes the importance of fully understanding the broader context of a project as part of its resolution. At a project’s start, an organization knows little about what the problem actually is but makes big decisions regarding its solution, so it’s crucial to develop a rapid and broad understanding, particularly around user aspects. This is a cheap way to reduce risk further down the line.

Studies of the innovation process show that the first stages of an innovation project have the greatest potential to influence the final outcome and cost of the project. However, teams often hop over them to start developing something quickly. The front end of a project generally constitutes about 8% of the project life cycle, but it involves decisions that determine 80% of the project costs. This is because decisions made early are decisions of direction, rather than detail. Getting this right at the start is a way of improving how the remaining 92% of the project life cycle is used and reduces the risk of failure. Once you realize this, it makes sense to be thorough at the start of a project.

As Visual Groupies, You Co-Design

Co-design is your normal way of working, because you know that any innovation will impact the whole wheel of experience centricity in some way or another. By having representatives for each part of the wheel working together, you speed up development and implementation and reduce problems along the way.

The organization works visually, sketching during discussions to illustrate and clarify ideas and reduce the risk of misunderstandings. In other words, through this visualization, the organization shows it has listened, understood, and imagined how a solution might work if implemented, and communicated that idea so that all can understand it. You encourage visualization in all cross-functional discussions (including leadership meetings).

You Encourage “Coolhunting” for Experiences

You encourage people to bring home and share new and exciting experiences with others, be they innovative offerings, touchpoints, platforms, or structures. This promotes a culture of looking for and discussing new and valuable solutions. This is coolhunting in its best form, an organizational interest in exciting new innovations with a goal to share them and learn from them. Coolhunting is part of the formal and informal structure of your organization—formal in terms of providing a means to facilitate and reward sharing, and informal in terms of being infused in and a natural part of the organizational function.

Coolhunting ZOZO

One of my colleagues discovered ZOZO.com and immediately spread the news to others at work. ZOZO is innovative in both its offering and its touchpoints and detailed interactions. It is experientially a step change in clothes shopping for the large number of people who don’t fit standard off-the-rack sizes. This got us all interested not only in trying out the offering, but also in discussing the potential that lies in its clever use of a smartphone as a 3D scanner. Within the design community, there is often a lot of sharing of new experiences and experiential offerings, and this leads to new ideas and inspirations in projects and in the everyday. Maybe the same should be true of your organization!

You Emulate the World of Film in Your Own Way

You understand the flow experience of film and want to emulate it, but in your own way. Flow is a term that was first used in 1975 by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a situation of complete absorption in a task, resulting in loss of one’s sense of space and time. You know that films are characterized by exactly the same things that characterize services: a strong experiential message, a large team of disparate specialists that need to collaborate to deliver that experience, a high degree of complexity, technical constraints, budgetary constraints, and (not least) aspects such as the peculiarities of individual stars.

Changing the Mindset of Customer Contact

Picture this scene: the main offices of a global telco in Stockholm (one with a customer-centric goal). A customer walks in with a complaint, and everyone in the office suddenly is busy, or tries to look busy. Nobody wants the discomfort of having to deal with “the problem.”

This was the reality when we started a service design academy in Sweden as part of an initiative to develop competencies in the organization of listening to customers. During a carefully crafted course, we wanted to shift the focus from “What’s the matter (with you)?” to “What matters to you?” to teach listening skills and imbue a real love of customer contact.

The course and workshops were a success, and some months afterward we heard how things had changed. Now, when a customer comes to the office, there is competition to talk to them. The reason? Changing the mindset to one of listening, combined with the empowerment to act on the situation and make it better. A customer listening culture makes things happen.

In addition, you recognize that films have cultural relevance and have the ability to fit with the culture of the moment. Your services continually evolve to do the same.

Do Job Promotions Take You Away from Your Customers?

Generally I have found that the higher one’s position in an organization, the more distanced they become from their customers (they don’t necessarily dislike customers, it seems, just contact with them), and the more out of touch they become. Regular customer contact is replaced by cold numbers, surrogates for real customer insights, and lack of feelings. I’m not sure why this is; perhaps they get out of the practice of customer contact, they feel they are too busy, or they’re just glad that they don’t have to talk to those “pesky customers” anymore. In her book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation (OR Books), Liza Featherstone explains how everyone hates the focus group. Participants feel awkward, the facilitators feel awkward, and the people behind the two-way mirror really don’t want to hear what the participants say. In addition, feedback from a focus group needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt because you can’t always trust what people say in such a setting. Why is there such a fundamental disconnect between companies and customers? Well, I think it is because organizations are not good listeners. It is alien for them, and for an organization that is active and hectic, it is difficult to sit back and really listen.

You Avoid the Trap of Number Comforting

You understand that the customer experience cannot adequately be described through measures and quantities alone. You have a pragmatic approach to the use of quantitative data and use it critically. You do not go in for “number comforting” as a means of distancing yourself from customers, but instead use customer data in a way that brings them inside the organization.

You Are Not Afraid to Go Against Customer Wishes

You have the confidence and experience to look beyond what your customers are saying. You know that they most often can talk well about what they know, about something that exists, and you respect that they have limited abilities to look into the future like you can. You know that sometimes you need to talk to customers in a different way, and get to know more about what their lives are like and less about what they want.

You Know That Meaning Is the New Money

You reflect on broader cultural issues and are not afraid to ask yourself what these customer and cultural inputs really mean at a deeper level. You understand that people are looking for meaning in their lives, and strive to develop meaningful experiences for your customers. You do this because you know that meaning is the new currency; it translates into devoted and loyal customers and long-term relationships.

How Designer Christopher Bailey Transformed Burberry Through an Experiential Vision

Christopher Bailey transformed Burberry in both aesthetic and financial terms. In 2001, Burberry was a heritage rainwear brand that had become the butt of tabloid jokes. Bailey built a new identity, and the Burberry trench coat was transformed into a sought-after and highly lucrative trophy piece. It also served as a crucial plot device in the story Bailey was telling the world about Burberry, which framed the brand as a glossy, romantic, modern version of Britishness.

But Bailey was more than a clothing designer. He was the experience director of Burberry. In 2009, when Burberry moved into its new state-of-the-art center at Horseferry House, Bailey remastered every modern detail—right down to the mineral-water bottles he designed for the canteen. He hired people from gaming companies, and he walked the floors to sit with coders. He oversaw the photographic and video studios installed in the basement, where product could be shot and uploaded to Burberry.com in minutes. Bailey became the first-ever designer at a publicly traded fashion company to be named both CEO and chief creative officer.

In 2008, Burberry became the first brand to live-stream its catwalk show, something that is now commonplace for most designer labels. It was one of the first brands to utilize social media and certainly the first luxury fashion label to see the value in Snapchat. It was the first fashion brand to have a channel on Apple Music. In 2014, it was the first brand to use in-tweet purchases. Famously, in 2016, Bailey changed the face of the fashion calendar format forever by introducing a see-now, buy-now concept that enabled consumers to buy the collections straight off the catwalk rather than waiting for six months.

Bailey’s transformation of Burberry was experience-led, powered by desirable products. It shows how clarity of experiential vision can demand and initiate innovation in multiple areas, thereby creating great commercial value.

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The Core Behaviors of the Experience-Centric Organization