by Noah Fleming
The Evergreen Experience Audit
Earlier in the book, I mentioned a process I engage in with a number of my clients called the Evergreen Experience Audit. The minimum fee to engage in this process with my company is $17,500—that’s the minimum—and it always generates a demonstrable ROI, but I’m going to give it to you here in this book that likely cost you less than $20. If you decide you want us to come help with the audit, we’d be more than happy to do that. The Evergreen Experience Audit is a five-step process designed to look at the whole customer experience regardless of the type of business or industry you’re in. One of the common buzz phrases used in the customer experience world is “touch points.” Touch points are all the times you engage with clients throughout each stage of the loop. In some cases, you might have only one or two touch points through each stage. The bigger and more sophisticated a company gets, the more touch points they have. There are touch points in Stage One in marketing, touch points in the sales process in Stage Two, perhaps multiple touch points with your front-facing staff in Stage Three, and additional touch points as you continue to follow up with the customer. As we’ve discussed throughout the book, even one poor touch point can paint a negative picture of all the positive ones. The goal of the experience audit is maintaining congruency throughout all touch points. That’s not always easy—experience expectations about what happens during each stage and through the various touch points can be vastly different amongst the executive suite, management, front-facing staff, and even your customers.
Using the process that I’m going to share with you now, we close the gap between what your customers expect and what’s actually delivered; we also close the gap between the differing expectations amongst your people. I can’t stress enough how important it is to do this on a regular basis. It’s not difficult; in fact, you won’t believe how easy it is. The reason it’s powerful to have an outside party do this is because you and your team are biased. The confirmation bias creeps in to make us feel we’re doing things right. The real results and power come from having someone with the right expertise to not pull any punches. When I do this, I’ve already been paid. I’m not working with clients to make friends. I’m there to discomfit and create change. Sometimes this doesn’t always work out. I had a client that hired me to do a meeting with their salespeople. There were 80 of them from around the globe who gathered for a one-day sales meeting. Almost every time I speak, there’s extensive predatory work on my end. I talked to some of the salespeople. I talked to their customers. I talked to management and executives. And what I found were wildly different expectations about the whole customer experience. I warned my buyer that I wasn’t going to come down easy, but perhaps say things that might make people uncomfortable. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. While some of the attendees said the workshop was “enlightening” and “fascinating” and “some of the most valuable work we’ve ever engaged in,” others didn’t feel this way. As I explained to my buyer, “There are always people discomfited by change and/or who seek to critique, but that’s not my concern.” If you don’t hire someone like me to help you engage in a process like this, consider engaging your own customers to help, or having other outsiders do it for you.
Action Step: Evergreen Experience Audit
Step 1: Process Diagnosis
The first step involves looking at the customer journey as it pertains to your business and simply having a discussion about it. If you’re a large organization and have multiple divisions, this step just starts with a conversion. Talk about the customer experience as a whole using each stage as a guidebook. For example, what customer touch points are happening in the early marketing stages—how about when a lead raises her hand, or how about once they finally sign on the dotted line. What about after the sale? You get the idea. In Step 1, we’re simply surveying the landscape to get an understanding of what’s happening at each stage. You can use some of the other Action Steps to help you diagnose the experience.
Step 2: Employee Understandings
In the second step, you want to test your employees. There’s no pass or fail here. Well, that’s not true. You can fail, and perhaps fail miserably. I’ve done this part of the process with teams all within the same department only to find wildly different expectations and understandings about what was happening and what was expected of them. In this step, you want to have everyone write out all the customer touch points that they believe are happening and are expected of them. Ask them to map it.
Step 3: Customer Stories
In the third step, you want to talk to your customers. I don’t mean lousy and somewhat useless surveys like the one-question NPS survey. Talk to them. Ask them to tell you about their experiences. Read your recent reviews and stories from customers. If someone’s experience sounds awful, reach out and learn exactly why they were upset. Interview your customers and record their experience. Share these with the appropriate teams. When we do this to our clients, we talk to perhaps dozens of customers across the entire customer experience, from Stages One through Four, to see how the customers were truly feeling throughout each experience with your company.
Step 4: Undercover Boss
The hit television show Undercover Boss always makes me laugh because it shows just how complacent owners and executives have become. I always love the scene where the CEO returns to the boardroom and they’re all just shocked at what the boss experienced. Could they really have been that surprised with what they learned? I doubt it. Most of the time, I do a quick Google search and find dozens of the horror stories shared by their customers.
In my experience, CEOs and business owners often have very little idea with what’s actually happening in their companies on a day-to-day basis. In this part of the process, you want to experience the process from the eyes and ears of the customer at each stage in the process. For example, you want to answer the phones. You want to work on the front lines. You want to go visit the shop floor. You want to run the front desk or the service counter for a day. You get the idea. There’s no need to wear silly costumes.
Step 5: The Hierarchy of Horrors
Take your learnings from the previous four steps and create a Hierarchy of Horrors.
The Hierarchy of Horrors is a process I learned from Michael Basch, who was one of the founding executives at FedEx. In his book titled Customer Culture: How FedEx and Other Great Companies Put the Customer First Every Day, Basch offered the Hierarchy of Horrors. In my opinion, this is a fantastic process to take what you’ve learned in the first four steps of the Evergreen Experience Audit and create an action plan around them. When I’m engaged in the audit with a client, we use a slightly different process but the essence is the same.
There are four simple steps to the Hierarchy of Horrors:
1. List the eight worst places where you’re messing up with your customers.
2. Measure the mistakes over the next 30 days. FedEx measured things like missed deliveries, damaged packages, and so on.
3. Add up the results and categorize your horrors from bad to worst.
4. Work backwards by improving areas you’re the worst in measure.
Work on one area at a time. When you’ve made significant improvements in that area, move on to the next.
Step 6: Every 90 Days
Schedule at least one day every 90 days that you’ll spend getting in touch with your customers and employees. If your salespeople meet customers on site, spend a day traveling with them to meet prospective customers. If you have a customer service line, spend an entire day answering the phones and talking to customers. Sit in with other reps to see how calls are answered and handled.
I’m giving you a brief understanding of the process, and you can certainly engage in this type of experience audit yourself. But if you’re interesting in a more thorough, in-depth look at the experience at your company, or across multiple locations (perhaps hundreds or even thousands of locations) and different divisions with multiple service offerings an
d multiple customer experiences, feel free to get in touch.
6. Stage Four: Happily Ever After
If you create a great experience, people tell their friends, but you don’t own the gas pedal on that. No attempt we’ve made to bribe our customers into telling more people or even inspire them into telling more people by making charitable contributions and other things, has ever given us a gas pedal on word of mouth referrals. The best gas pedal on word-of-mouth referrals is just a great experience.
—Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact1
The customer who has recently finished a transaction with you is more likely to engage in a transaction with you again. This is the power of recency. And, the more frequently a customer engages in a transaction with you, the more likely they are to continue that behavior. This is the power of frequency. The entire loop and adopting a retention/loyalty-focused mind-set is about increasing a customer’s frequency and willingness to engage in business activities with you again and again. In the business world, this is often referred to as the recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) value model. As we think back to previous stages of the book, the model makes sense on many fronts, primarily with how the customer is feeling at each stage of the process.
Back in the 20th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus called a similar concept the serial position effect.2 Analogous to the RFM model, the serial position effect deals with primacy and recency—primacy as it relates to the first stage of the loop and the ability to be preeminent in the customer’s mind, and primacy as it relates to first impressions and so on. People are more likely to remember what happens at the beginning of an experience and the end of the experience, but they often forget the middles.
Ebbinghaus was his own research subject, committing himself to learning thousands of lists of apparently “nonsense” words that had been made up of two consonants and a vowel, like HEB. Despite the fact that these words were made up and had no meaning, subsequent research showed that people would try to associate the words to those they already knew and thus ascribe some sort of sense to them. Ebbinghaus was famous for identifying the forgetting curve, which plots the rate of loss of learned information. He found that the greatest decline occurred in the first 20 minutes and is significantly larger in the first hour. Ebbinghaus also described the learning curve in which most information is learned at the first attempt, and less information is learned after each repetition. Perhaps this explains the “first impression” effect— it’s difficult to unlearn initial information or learning.
Ebbinghaus also identified the serial position effect, in which recency and primacy seemed to enhance learning. Ebbinghaus believed that the recency effect worked because the information was still in short-term memory. The primacy effect works because there is more time to rehearse and commit to long-term memory compared with items that come later in the list.
Another relevant concept that Ebbinghaus came up with is that of “savings.” What he found was that even after he had forgotten a list, he could subsequently relearn it much faster than he did learning it the first time around. He assumed that even though he had consciously forgotten a list, it was still lurking in his subconscious and was quickly recruited when he was exposed to it again. His memory had been “jogged.” This has real implications for the Customer Loyalty Loop. How you treat a customer isn’t relevant just to their immediate experience, it is also likely to recruit similar past experiences that they have probably forgotten. Customers aren’t likely to be going around constantly remembering the great customer support they received until they get it again. Of course, the same works for negative experiences. Every time you interact with a customer, you are likely to remind them of their past experiences with you, especially if they were more than neutral interactions.
Dropping the Customer Follow-Up Ball
In the Customer Loyalty Loop, recency is the crucial underpinning of your customer follow-up processes and procedures. The more recently someone has engaged in business with you, the more likely they are to be interested in what you have to say (or to do it again). Now here’s a big distinction: the onus isn’t on the customer to come back and be more “recent.” It’s not up to the customer to conduct transactions with you more frequently. Instead, the onus is on you, the business owner, the brand, to work to bring the customer back to buy, buy more, and buy again after that.
Most companies drop the ball in Stage Four because they’ve moved back to the thrill and excitement of finding new customers. It’s backward thinking. If I do business with a company and then the first time I hear from them is six or eight months later, then they were likely better off not following up at all! It creates negative associations for many customers. But if I’m contacted 10 or 15 days after I do business with you with the right type of request or reach-out, then I’m more likely to do business with you again and react positively to whatever it is you send me. The memory of our experience is still fresh at this point. So ask yourself, how soon after the transaction ends are you making your next contact with a customer? The more recently they’ve done business with you, the more likely they are to respond and be interested. But it needs to be the right type of reach-out. Many go right for the jugular, hoping the positive word of mouth starts flowing after the first experience. To do that, they use something called Net Promoter Score. which I believe is a terrible tool for measuring customer loyalty.
Stop Measuring NPS
In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, introduced the Net Promoter Score.3 NPS was introduced as a management tool that could help companies gauge and understand customer loyalty as it applied to revenue growth. The model was incredibly simple and became—and has remained—one of the most important tools for measuring customer loyalty over the past 10 years. Customers of a company were asked a single question, using a 0–10 scale: How likely is it you would recommend (insert brand/company) to a friend or colleague? This is the official NPS question. Respondents were then grouped into categories like:
• Promoters (score 9–10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
• Passives (score 7–8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0–6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word of mouth.
Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters yields the Net Promoter Score, which can range from a low of –100 (if every customer is a Detractor) to a high of 100 (if every customer is a Promoter). NPS has long been hailed the ultimate customer loyalty measurement tool, but in my opinion it’s a relatively useless tool. I have a slight suspicion it makes bigger brands and organizations feel good about their efforts because it takes an average look across all customers. If most are considered promoters, then they must be doing something right. If more are passive, then they know where to focus some efforts.
There are several things wrong with the NPS approach from a simply statistical perspective. There’s the question of the reliability and validity of the standard questionnaire that asks customers to rate service on a linear scale. Reliability refers to whether someone will reliably give the same answer to the same question. If they don’t, the questionnaire is useless. Validity refers to how well a tool measures what it intends to measure, and it depends on the questionnaire being reliable to begin with. For example, does the answer truly reflect the customer’s views? Perhaps they just want to fill out the form and send it back as soon as possible and aren’t concerned about accuracy. Perhaps the answer given just reflects the mood that the customer happens to be in at the time they complete the rating scale. The scale is also very subjective, and people vary in their criteria of service so that one person’s 5 is another person’s 9. This problem is mitigated a little when there are descriptions of the numbers on the scale (e.g., “A 10 means that service was perfect,”), but then perfect is a subjective judgment. So, what correlation
is there between a customer’s rating scale and the probability of them buying from you again? A rating scale is not the basis of a relationship. Completing a typical rating scale is not a peak experience; in fact, it’s not much of an experience at all.
There may be ways of making a rating scale a bit more fun and more interactive, for example, by adding an animated character to guide you through the rating. Interactivity is the key, here. But while we might have fun and even some excitement interfacing with an animated character, for example, there is nothing like the right person-to-person interaction to create a bond, trust, and ultimately, loyalty. And that personal interaction has to be authentic.
How can you make your post-sales (that is after the customer’s most recent purchase but also before his or her next purchase) communications memorable? Sending a standard form used by everyone else hardly makes you memorable. Asking the same questions in the same way that doesn’t distinguish you from the competition hardly makes you memorable.
There are other reasons why NPS is relatively useless. Some of the big reasons should be obvious. For example, it doesn’t matter how many promoters you might have based on the single survey question. Because unless you have referral programs and tools in place to encourage word of mouth, then it means nothing. In essence, by looking at averages, it misses out on looking at one-to-one perspective and experiences with a company as an opportunity to improvement. Even if 100 customers told a company their service was horrific and Johnny was a rotten account executive, they might not be willing to do anything about it, because overall NPS scores are still averaging on the high end. Johnny still continues to damage your company behind the scenes.