Experience Matters

Alignment: Pulling together to deliver better experiences

Often during initial kickoff of projects, clients will ask us about the process and steps we take to deliver customer experiences. While there are dozens of methods we use to gather requirements, prioritize investments, explore new technologies, and synchronize experience components, the key centering point we’ve found for the best work is a simple one: alignment.

With alignment comes clarity. But getting to alignment often takes time, even though we look for alignment on three relatively straight-forward dimensions:

- What is the business trying to accomplish?

- What are the needs and insights of the customer?

- How do we deliver on the brand promise within the experience? 

They’re relatively simple questions. They’re essential to answer. And important that we all agree on them. But they open up a lot of discussions, a fair amount of discovery, and more debate than you would think. The answers define scope and schedule. And they also frequently determine the number of rounds of approvals that work will take. But our history has shown the more clearly these are communicated from senior executives, the more expeditiously experiences can be defined, executed, and evolved.

For the questions to be so simple, why do they take so long? Because a lot of clients don’t really deal with them front and center. Objectives are not clearly defined within the marketing function. Customer needs aren’t clearly understood and prioritized. And brand difference is a bit murky.

What are the tools to help create alignment?

For business objectives, clear goals and measures of success in achieving those goals is the first step. We look first for clear business goals. Those lead to specific marketing objectives. The more specific those goals, the more likely a program or experience can deliver against them. An excellent example of a marketing goal is “achieve market share of 20% in the online gaming market within one year.” Or “improve traffic to the commerce site by 10% and conversion by 500 basis points during the holiday season.” Other examples of marketing goals may be cross-channel. “Deliver 3,000 qualified leads to retailers as a result of ride and drive events.” Or “drive a 20% improvement to in-store pick-up of items purchased online.” Or “improve average order size by 10% and margins by 2%.” It’s surprising how infrequently we encounter clear business goals or specific marketing goals that are spelled out and communicated to marketing organizations. The best examples can be summarized on one page, with progress milestones quarterly.

What about customer needs and insights? Start with segmentation, but use ethnographic, online or other research, call center and site and program analysis tools to understand customer actions and decision points. This is often the one area of discovery where clients will say “we understand our customers” but they seldom boil them down into key need states, insights, and opportunities. The key is to translate the research into actionable insights and efforts to improve them. That’s often where our team will snythesize the data to develop the insights that identify experience gaps and new ideas to close them. Personas and scenarios are an excellent tool for aligning against customer needs and insights. Segmentation studies, or Pareto summaries from call centers, can help to feed these insights.

Finally, what about brand purpose and promise in the experience? Clients often define style guides for brands - the look, feel, tone, and style guidelines, and often the brand platform. Those are necessary elements. But brands need a centering point - the position and value they will deliver to customers. The value exchange - what brands deliver in return for customer time and attention forms the foundation for the experience. And while business objectives may change by quarter or year, and customer needs may evolve over time or vary by segment or need state, the brand value proposition is the most sustaining of the three.

So are you aligned in your customer experience plan? Can you summarize in a few key statements the answers to the essential questions? More importantly, are your teams clear on these same questions? We’d love to hear your ideas (and experiences) on how you drive alignment.