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continued Four Journeys

The Four Journeys

This is where the concepts we’ve been discussing start to come together into either a paradox or opportunity, depending on your point of view. Brand is by definition company-centric or offer-centric. Yes, there’s a customer in there somewhere, but fundamentally, it’s your promise to the market. Back in the old days, whenever they were, that was enough. Today, customers want that promise, but they also want to be able to assemble their own experiences within the context of that promise. To cite just one example, in the case of financial services, the customer might think of that as creating “the bank of me.”

It’s an appealing notion, but the truth is, most firms struggle to make these circles come together.

Instead, they usually wind up with something that looks more like this:

Operationalizing the brand, the branded customer experience, and all the other high-tone visions we’ve just laid out requires leadership, management, and followership. Turning visions and brand promises into operating principles, hedgehogs, go-to-market strategies, and operating strategies are a good next step.

Operating Principles: These are the culture building or culture derived rules that govern the four journeys: how the organization will be; how leaders will interact with employees, how colleagues will interact with each other, and how your people will interact with customers. There can be any number of these principles, but somewhere between ten and twenty-five is probably about right. For example, consider this list developed by one of my clients, Wells Fargo Bank (LA Metro Division):

• What, where, and when is driven by the customer.

• Don’t create rules that don’t allow you to service the customer.

• Make an unhappy customer happy.

• Build competence in yourself so that you can act with confidence and communicate with courtesy.

• If the customer chooses you, you own it.

• Do what you say.

• If you can’t help the customer, then you need to find the person who can.

• If you have to hand the customer off, then the handoff has to be flawless.

• If the customer needs to find a way back to you, he or she should be able to do it easily.

• If nobody can do it, the customer needs to hear it from you, understand the reasons why, and feel like they really got treated well in the process.

• If you can do it, do it extraordinarily.

Hedgehog. This comes from James Collins and his work on Good to Great companies. It is the intersection of three circles:

• Something you can be best at.

• Something you’re passionate about.

• Something that drives the economic success of the organization (thought of in terms of a key economic driver).

Go-to-market strategy. A single, integrated strategy for delivering the desired customer experience through people, processes, products, and premises. The factors that need to be aligned are as follows:

• Brand: Your functional, emotional, social, and spiritual promise of consistent value.

• Demand Side: Everything you do through Sales, Customer engagement, Marketing, Advertising, PR, Pre-sales, Education, Sales Partners, and Analyst Relations to influence targeted segments and customers to purchase and repurchase.

• Supply Side: What you do in Engineering, Manufacturing, Services, Service, and across your Supply Chain to deliver your go-to-market strategy(s)

• Infrastructure: The choices you make around human factors, information management, finance, procurement, legal, admin to support your go-to-market strategy(s).

• Customer Experience: The guiding principles that govern how you’ll deliver your brand promise through a lifetime of personalized, valuable, branded interactions when, where, and how the customer wants

• Value: How you want your customers to denominate the value of what you sell and the method by which you make money.

 Operating Strategies. These are the key plays the organization runs in order to deliver its vision. The organization needs many strategies, for example”

• YILO: Year in the life of. Strategies the link to the rhythm of the year. You don’t do the same things in the first quarter that you do in the fourth.

• MILO. Month in the life of. Strategies that link to the rhythm of the month.

• WILO. Especially relevant in a retail setting. Weeks break into days and days into Day parts. Each may require its own plays.

• Inbound vs. Outbound. These could be stand alone strategies or could be part of a YILO, MILO, etc.

Customer Experience Ladder. This is a customer assembled experience: the people, processes, products, and premises the customer chooses. The trick is to be able to price and deliver how the customer wants to interact in order to make an acceptable return.

The problem with thinking strategies, tactics, and processes is that attention is too quickly drawn inward to operational and efficiency considerations. Customers don’t necessarily want to follow our rules; they want to make up their own. The customer experience ladder is optimally a shared journey. It specifically references two concepts:

• Seamless deliver of the customer experience through all touch points.

• Regardless of what order the customer wants to interact.

All of this sounds like a lot of moving parts and a lot of work. It is. If you’re a start-up or intraprenuerial venture, most of this is irrelevant. You need a vision, a ton of creativity, and a lot of do, do, do. The rest will follow in turn.

As you begin to transition to an adolescent organization, or if you’re already an established enterprise, you’re going to need to think about all of these elements. You’re going to need to make choices which give rise to our final point. Quality, dynamic organizations make quality decisions.

Decision Quality. There is a difference between good outcomes and good decisions. You could drink like a fish and then drive home at 2:30 in the morning and get there alive. That would be a good outcome but a lousy decision.

Disciplined, dynamic organizations make good decisions. Usually the outcomes are good as well, but if they’re not, two things are true: 1) there is no second guessing the decision because it was well made; and 2) it’s possible to now make better decisions because the process promotes learning. The factors that support decision quality are as follows:

• An appropriately framed decision. What are you deciding and why? What shouldn’t you be deciding and why?

• Creative, doable alternatives. Are they real alternatives or just the same old, same old? This is where you want some constructive conflict.

• Meaningful and reliable information. What you want is insight that will be meaningful and relevant in judging alternatives.

• Clear values and tradeoffs. Values define our preferences among outcomes. Values can be expressed by “attributes.”   Attributes are characteristics of the outcomes that we find desirable or undesirable. They typically occur over time and may have some degree of uncertainty associated with them.

• Correct Reasoning. Reasoning is how you combine your alternatives, information, and values to arrive at a decision. Good reasoning requires an explanation, or rationale.

• Commitment to Action. A decision without action is futile. Commitment to action means that you are set to act and have the ability to direct your action in a purposeful manner. This is where you want no conflict.

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Last modified: 05/03/06