02 Nov Deliver on your customers’ objectives to deliver a winning customer experience
Deliver on your customers’ objectives to deliver a winning customer experience.
The objective is your product or service. The higher objective is the ultimate goal.
A Business Professor at Harvard once said:
‘People don’t want a ¼ inch drill, what they want is a ¼ inch hole in their wall’.
That’s the difference between an objective and a higher objective.
So, ask your team this question:
“Our customers buy this product or service from us, why do they do that?”
Empathy and understanding about what really matters to your customers (deliver their objectives and goals) can reshape the customer experience you and your team want to create.
It’s natural to focus on the product or service ‘we sell drills, cars, cakes, office space’ and lose sight of the fact that it’s always in service of your customers high objective.
To help you with this Matt Watkinson recommends a 4-part framework of ‘mental reconnaissance’ to help you delve into the detail of what you need to deliver in order to make your customers’ lives easier and to inform and guide your customer experience.
1. SUPER OBJECTIVES – This underpins a whole range of lower objectives. Matt states “Brian and Jenny are on their honeymoon. Steve has a client meeting. James is attending a friend’s funeral. They are all flying economy class to San Francisco. Yet for all their similarity, the three have radically different higher objectives, and thinking about them could open up a world of opportunities for the airline.”
2. SUBTEXT – This is the difference between what people say and what they mean – the underlying thoughts that are compelling their behaviour. You build empathy with your customer when you understand and deliver their motives and relate these back to their higher objective.
3. OBJECTIVES – The reason why your customer performs an activity or task using your product or service. Your customer is travelling to San Francisco on a certain day and time, but there might be other objectives you need to deliver that feed into that:
- Find the cheapest fare
- How to get to the airport
- packing for length of stay or weather
So why not email your customer the weather forecast for their destination and maybe a list of the top ten most forgotten items when packing?
Many businesses don’t often consider the objectives when it comes to the customer experience, so this is an area where you can make a big impression because the customer expectations that you will do this are very low.
4. STAKES – Every customer objective has a different level of importance when you deliver – holiday flight v funeral flight. The stakes and level of risk are different. Start by asking ‘what is it that we want our customers to feel as part of their experience’.
Define the emotional criteria that your product or service has and also think about what you don’t want people to feel and how to avoid that.
‘Satisfying the high stakes objectives is the route to a great customer experience’