About

Your customers are less different than you think

I have worked in customer experience and service operations since 2004. The most useful thing that span has taught me is how little the industry itself explains.

A citizen renewing a licence, a business buying infrastructure, and a shopper chasing a refund are asking for the same two things underneath. They want less friction. And they want to succeed, and to feel like they succeeded. Those are two different things, and most organisations are considerably better at the first than the second.

"Our customers are different" is almost always true about the context, and almost never true about what the customer actually wants from you.

What's usually actually wrong

Most CX advice opens with a framework. I open with your numbers, because the framework is rarely the problem. The problem is usually that one symptom has four plausible explanations and nobody can say, with evidence, which one is real. So the fix gets aimed at the wrong one, the metric doesn't move, and the next quarter starts with a larger framework.

That isn't a competence problem. The evidence needed to choose between those four explanations is scattered across systems that disagree with each other, and pulling it together is nobody's actual job.

Working lean

Lean means going after the smallest thing that will tell us which explanation is the real one, rather than surveying everything first. Four habits do most of that work.

• Hard fails first

  I define what disqualifies an outcome before measuring anything else, because a good average should never be able to average away something that should never have happened.

• Traced or judged, never blurred

  I separate what I can trace to a source from what rests on judgment, and I tell you which one you are looking at.

• No blended numbers

  If two of your systems disagree on the same figure, you get the conflict rather than an average of the two. Blended numbers are how organisations end up confidently wrong.

• Report it, don't chase it

  Where a metric can be gamed, or doesn't mean the same thing in every context, I report and explain it instead of optimising it upward.

The sounding board I wanted

Earlier in my career the thing I needed wasn't a framework or a vendor. It was one person who had seen the pattern before, who I could hand the messy version of the problem to for an hour, and who would tell me which part of it was actually load bearing.

Most CX problems that present as complex are two or three ordinary problems wearing a trenchcoat. Someone who has watched them come apart before can usually tell you which is which fairly quickly. I didn't have that, and I spent longer than I needed to on problems that turned out to be simple once someone named them properly. That's the job I'm most interested in doing now.

The evidence

Every engagement starts with a consultation, so we can both find out whether the problem you have is one I'm useful on. If it isn't, I'd rather tell you that in the first hour than take the work.

Book a consultation or see services.