Introduction

 

“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”

– Simon Sinek, author

 

I originally wanted to start this book with a perfect, yet very personal, example of what encapsulates great Experience with a capital “E”. By that, I mean that summation of employee and customer experience that made me forever loyal to company x, or wanted to work until I retired for company y. Instead of finding that single perfect example, I could much more easily name countless examples of small cases where a small action, the design of a process or interface, or some other detail occurred and added up to either a positive or negative feeling about a company, product or brand.

 

This thinking reflects reality, much more than a single grand gesture. Sure, in the movies, it’s a grand gesture that turns the tide, or wins over the hardened heart. But here in the real world, brands live or die by a thousand little actions and gestures. If they wait for the opportunity to do a single grand one, it will likely be too late. Consumers have way too many choices, have ready access anywhere they are, and are too busy for such things. The battle for consumers’ (and employees’) hearts and minds is fought every day in countless ways. Thus, the value of a great experience needs to be woven through every plan, every action, every idea.

The Experience-Led Organization

The term “experience-led” is used in the subtitle of this book. I can explain what I mean by that, though I have to give credit to Cravety CEO Ed Bodensiek for using the term before I did. To me, it means that an organization understands the importance of both employee and customer experience enough to lead its thinking and initiatives with the idea that if the experience is valuable and rewarding, the company will tangibly benefit.

 

Being experience-led comes with many challenges, since companies have not traditionally had “experience” departments, and also because experience itself spans so many disciplines and facets of a consumer’s or employee’s interactions with an organization. Many are awakening to this to varying degrees, as evidenced by Gartner’s findings in late 2018 that “improving the employee experience” was one of HR’s top three goals for 20191, as well as similar statistics for customer experience. There is still much work to be done, and so I wrote this book because I see several gaps for organizations that want to tie both employee and customer experience together and become truly experience-led.

The Power of Experience

We find ourselves at an inflection point in the relationship between brands and their audiences, where customers and employees are demanding better and more valuable experiences. Companies must keep up with this demand in order to remain competitive. This includes competition for both customers as well as employees. More importantly, while many organizations have traditionally focused on external-facing initiatives first, it is the ones which start internally that have the greatest potential to provide long-term positive benefits.  I believe so strongly in this that I devoted my last two books to this topic, centering The Agile Brand and The Agile Consumer around the premise that experience and relationships will separate successful organizations from the unsuccessful.

 

Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) have the power to individually influence an organization for the better. Benefits from EX include improved productivity, engagement, and turn-over rates, among other changes. But combined, they have the power to truly transform. When these three elements are combined successfully, we refer to the phenomenon as brand experience. 

 

For many organizations, enabling great experiences for employees and customers supported by process, organizational culture, technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the ability to measure across the elements will be a game-changer. The speed at which these practices are applied could be the difference between exponential growth and losing out to the competition. However, as many early adopters have found, there are many hurdles to overcome for successful implementation of CX and EX within an organization. 

 

Unfortunately, because EX and CX have unique requirements and are often applied by disconnected teams, this cannot be pinned down to a single issue. For improved experience to deliver upon its promise, a complex interworking of different factors will need to line up. These range from organizational and operational to the people, processes, and technologies utilized. Companies that understand how to make that work will be the winners, able to outsmart their competition.

 

For instance, in the 2019 edition annual CMO Survey by Deloitte, Duke University, and the American Marketing Association, the top challenge in managing customer experience was developing the necessary capabilities inside the organization to design, deliver, and monitor the customer experience2.

 

In order to address this, I’m proud to share the Center of Experience (COx) framework to help organizations with all of the tools needed to enable great experiences for both employees and customers, and to achieve and measure the return on investment that is referred to as Return on Experience (ROx).

 

The flexibility of the Center of Experience framework is also an asset. While it contains all of the aspects needed to have a true brand experience, you do not have to adopt every piece of it if you have some of the pieces already established within your organization. Thus, you can think of this as either an entire platform to use, or as a resource that you can rely on to fill gaps in your current experience transformation.

 

This book provides the blueprint for you to create your own Center of Experience.

Who this book is for (and what this book is not)

This book is intended for experience practitioners who have the task of either setting up or improving the customer experience (CX) and/or employee experience (EX) within their organizations. As it can serve as a blueprint for your company, the Center of Experience framework, is made to be flexible to the needs of any organization, regardless of its experience maturity. You can take the pieces that are missing or relevant to you without having to adopt the entire model verbatim.

 

On the contrary, this book is not meant to convince the “uninitiated” that investing in customer experience and employee experience is a worthy endeavor. While I wholeheartedly believe that, there are many books dedicated to the value of EX and CX. Some valuable statistics and justification for approaches are given along the way, but this is first and foremost a working guide to creating a Center of Experience of your own.

What we’re going to discuss

I’ve separated this book into three parts, with the following structure:

A Note of Explanation

Many of the terms and ideas, as well as the processes and methodologies mentioned in this book have been developed as part of the Cravety team and work. Because of this, I refer specifically to the names that Cravety uses for them.

 

This does not mean that you can’t thoroughly understand and benefit from reading this book without working with Cravety’s tools and methods, but I want to be completely transparent and specifically mention that, since, as one of the principals at Cravety, I do firmly believe those tools and methods provide great ways to undertake any experience strategy, design, and implementation work.

 

However, you should be able to learn and take lessons you can apply to your own experience work without relying on any of the specific tools mentioned in the pages that follow.

Idea starters

Again, since the intent of this book is to be as prescriptive as possible of how to set up your own Center of Experience, there is only so much that a single book can share with a general audience. Because of this, I decided to include some “idea starters” at the end of most of the chapters that may help you find a way to personalize the ideas discussed, or to start a piece of the process. My hope is that this helps you create your own Center of Experience more easily.

Appendix 1: Glossary

Because I am mentioning several terms that are potentially new to at least some of the audiences of this book, and introducing a few to the vernacular, I’ve included a glossary in the back that you can refer to if you come across something that would be helpful to learn more about.

Appendix 2: Sample Experience Maturity Assessment

Since this is a practical guide to standing up your own Center of Experience, I wanted to provide a sample slimmed-down version of the experience maturity assessment that Cravety uses with our clients to determine where their starting point is, and how we can best help them.

 

All in all, this should provide you with...