Author: akc

The Effortless Experience

The Effortless Experience

by akc

The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi

Portfolio/Penguin, September 2013
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

As I read The Customer of the Future, this book kept coming to mind so I decided to revisit it. At the time I first read The Effortless Experience, my team and I were just starting the process of choosing and configuring a new support system. It was interesting to re-read this on the other side of that experience, having overhauled the support program and gotten it to a much more sustainable place. I remember my first read of it was very positive, and it helped to develop my mindset as I went into the project.

While it’s focused on call centers and support by phone, the authors do go into some research around how consumer preferences were shifting from phone to web. For myself, I found that subbing “cases” for “calls” as I read worked just fine. A lot of the concepts apply to support in general, regardless of channel. The details would differ in implementation, but they would anyway.

One of the biggest takeaways from this is the research they did that debunks the idea that exceeding customer expectations is the best way to ensure customer loyalty. They found that customer behavior plateaus when you meet expectations, and doesn’t significantly rise if you’re exceeding them. Consistently exceeding expectations is costly, and to some extent just continues to raise the bar, constantly resetting the baseline expectations of your customers. Really, customers just want you to be easy to deal with, something I’m sure we can all agree with as customers ourselves.

They developed a measure for this called the Customer Effort Score, which you can obtain with a single survey question asking the customer how easy you made it for them to deal with their issue. You can collect that alongside your standard satisfaction measure and get a better picture of what’s going on.

The concepts presented in The Effortless Experience are well-researched and presented clearly. They’re backed up with data, and the authors include some very useful looking worksheets in an appendix.

This is a quick read, and I’d recommend it for anyone working in support, not just team leaders and managers. Re-reading it I found that I wished I’d treated it as a reference after that initial read, as there were some ideas that would have been helpful for us as we developed some training for team members and built new business processes.

For a great preview of the book, check out this article in Harvard Business Review, written by some of the book’s authors in 2010: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.

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The MVP Mindset

The MVP Mindset

by akc

The MVP Mindset

One of the downfalls of leading (or being a member of) a high performing team is that the bars get higher and higher. And I do mean bars, plural — there are two. The one set for you by your organization, and the one you set for yourselves. If you’re a busy team, or if you have lots of competing priorities, keeping your own standards high can sometimes slow you down.

Having high standards for yourself or your team isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. I’d argue that you can’t be truly high performing without high standards. But past a certain point, you should consider whether it’s slowing you down too much. Maybe you have plenty of time and capacity on the team to quickly create something amazing, but it’s more likely you don’t.

This is something my team and I struggled with. As our workload increased, I was trying to get better at noticing when we’d set the bar too high, particularly for training materials and documentation. My framing for this was “done is better than perfect.” That was helping around the edges, because it gave us a way to think about whether something was at the point where tweaks and changes weren’t doing much to improve the end product.

But something was missing. “Done is better than perfect” doesn’t help you think about quality; the focus is on completion. We still have high standards, but we need to adapt them for reality. It also didn’t resonate for me for a project larger than a single handout or blog post.

Then we encountered the Agile concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is the simplest product you can get away with — something that will meet the core requirements and be good enough to release. Once it’s in your users’ hands, you can start getting feedback from them and using that to inform your next steps. There are probably some features still on your list, but now you have space to incorporate new ones and do some informed prioritization. Plus, you can more easily make changes to what you’ve just built and validate your assumptions about what your users will and will not actually use earlier in the process.

Eventually we started thinking about our other work in this way. It can feel odd to take this approach with customer-facing stuff, especially when it’s something that you don’t typically see labeled as a beta, like training resources or documentation. One way to think about an MVP in that scenario is by asking a question — is this ready for users? “Ready” can mean a lot of things, but it isn’t as final as “done.” Something can be ready before it’s done. And if you don’t have anything at all, even an imperfect version 1.0 is an improvement to your users.

This approach also supports a mindset shift. Instead of putting your project out there when it’s finished, you go into it knowing you’re going to continue to work on it after you release or distribute. And that you’ll be incorporating user feedback. That could be data from usage patterns, feedback from a few ad hoc conversations, or an analysis developed from a more formal approach.

This can be a great tool for engaging customers. People love to share their opinions, and pulling back the curtain on something like training materials or documentation is a low-stakes way for the organization to give customers an inside look at how things are done. You get the feedback you need, and you’ve helped to build the organization’s relationship with that customer. The customer gets to help you with something that will help other users, and it’ll be a much faster turnaround to when they can see their ideas incorporated. (Because you will follow up and share the next version, right? Right.)

Working to “ready” instead of “done” can feel a little awkward when you’re struggling with some aspect of whatever you’re creating. Take this post. I’ve been working on these last couple of paragraphs for a couple of days now. Is it done? No, I think I need a better conclusion. But is it ready? Absolutely.

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Meet Me in Another Life

Meet Me in Another Life

by akc

Once a month I’ll be recommending a novel that I’ve recently read and enjoyed. This month’s blends a little bit of magic with a touch of science fiction.

Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey

William Morrow & Company, April 2021
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

Thora and Santi are stuck in a reincarnation loop. In each new life they’re another version of themselves, with a different relationship. But they always maintain certain core aspects of their personalities, and they always meet in Cologne.

It was fun to see all the different relationships between them, what they’re doing in their lives, and who else reappears. Sometimes it’s claustrophobic, other times it’s surprising and exhilarating. I never quite knew what to expect in the next chapter. 

He is unflappable, relentless, a lake that absorbs every stone.

At first they don’t remember one another, or anything about their past lives. But finally, Thora begins to remember. At this point the texture of the novel begins to change, and I really enjoyed that. You’ve been along for the ride, and now the ride is changing and gaining new purpose.

I don’t want to say too much more, because one of the joys of this novel is seeing this play out without knowing why they’re stuck in a loop. I liked the ending but I do wish Silvey had left it a little more ambiguous, I think that would have been more in keeping with the mood of the story. But I definitely didn’t see it coming until we were there.

I’m guessing this will be a novel that either works for you or doesn’t work for you. It sounds like a thought experiment or a writing prompt, and maybe that’s how it started, but there’s so much more to it.

Do Most of The Things

Do Most of The Things

by akc

Do Most of The Things

As a manager, I don’t think it’s unusual to find that you can’t get through all of your actions and to-dos every week. I certainly couldn’t, and this only got worse as the scope of my team’s responsibilities expanded. I also found that there was sometimes a disconnect between my strategic priorities and how I prioritized tasks on a micro level every day.

I tried to just be more mindful of this, but that approach only got me so far. When I transitioned to a new boss, he introduced me to something that turned out to be a great tool to address that disconnect: 30x5s.

Your 30x5s (aka “thirty by fives”) are your five top priorities for the next month. You probably have a few other projects to work on, so this should be the five most important. Your 30x5s should be more specific than “work on the self-service site” but higher level than “write a ticket to have the new fonts added to the self-service site.”

My boss circulated his 30x5s to his team, and had all of us share ours with one another. I also shared mine with my team, who seemed to appreciate having an idea of where I planned to spend my time over the next few weeks.

Once I got into the swing of it, it didn’t take me long to write up my list. First, I’d start with any time-consuming non-negotiables. Things like budget development, performance reviews, or prep for a big cross-functional meeting. The types of things I had to prioritize over other work, or couldn’t realistically assume I could do on top of my typical workload. Likewise, if I was taking a week off I put that on my 30x5s to represent a reduction in my capacity.

Once I’d identified any non-negotiables, I’d think about work that related to my team’s strategic priorities. This stuff was usually crystal clear for me, and I knew exactly what the focus for the month would be. (Our strategic priorities were effectively my performance goals, but if yours aren’t, you’ll want to look at those as well.)

Last, I’d prioritize the list. Sometimes I had more than five, and in those cases I could see which one didn’t make the cut. I might still work on that project, but I wasn’t planning for it to be a major focus. Prioritizing also played into how I’d use the list over the course of the month. Here are a couple of (lightly edited) examples of what my 30x5s would look like:

Month A 30x5s: 

  • Complete all appraisals
  • Prep for, run, & first follow up for fall retrospective
  • Consultant recruitment
  • Prep, run, follow up for Q3 support ops meeting
  • Stakeholder demos for self-service MVP

Month B 30x5s: 

  • Write annual performance goals
  • Consultant decision & contracting
  • Create & finalize next year’s Service Console roadmap
  • Stakeholder review & soft launch of Learning Commons
  • Vacation time! 

After I shared my 30x5s, I’d write a shorthand version on a sticky note that went on my monitor. I used it when I planned for the week ahead, but it was even more helpful throughout the week, as I prioritized on a micro level. If I had some unexpected free time I’d use my 30x5s to decide what to do next. Typically I’d try to work on something related to one of my top two or three. 

Writing up my 30x5s also helped me feel better about the things that didn’t make the list. There was always more work than I could actually do, and having a tangible reminder of the current priorities helped me let go of some of the anxiety around that.

While this worked really well for me at the time, I’m not sure if it’ll feel equally as useful in another role, where I’m (hopefully!) not pulled in as many competing directions. But at the very least it’s a good way to think through the month ahead.

What about you? How do you manage that gap between daily to-dos and strategic priorities?

The Customer of the Future

The Customer of the Future

by akc ♥ 1 Comment

The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business, by Blake Morgan

Harper Collins Leadership, October 2019
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

This book provides a framework to explore the ways your organization can improve the customer experience. Morgan’s prose is straightforward and engaging, and she clearly outlines the concepts she’s covering. There’s jargon of course, but it’s used appropriately – this isn’t one of those business books that’s full of acronyms and hollow phrases. The case studies provided enough detail that you could glean some useful info from them. 

For me, the biggest takeaways were some clear, short statements around what it takes to be focused on the customer. First, that most companies are product-focused, not customer-focused. In order to be customer-focused, every decision needs to be made based on what’s best for the customer, not what’s best for the revenue stream or even the company. She notes that it takes a willingness to focus on long-term value at the expense of short-term profits. That needs strong leadership, with goals and KPIs that account for the approach. In this model, they truly a tool for leadership to incentivize and operationalize customer-focused actions. 

The second is that customers move horizontally, but companies organize vertically. I knew this, but I didn’t have a clear way of encapsulating the conflict I’ve seen between organizational structure and the customer journey. If you’ve organized for internal operational efficiencies, your customers are going to have a disjointed experience. Thus, the best way to improve the customer experience is to organize to support the customer journey. The challenge here is that it means the employees are likely to feel the friction, and without good management and an internal commitment to addressing the friction, you have a new problem.

The last one I’ll mention is the observation that companies need to treat digital transformation as a state of mind, not an initiative. I’m not the only one who’s seen how you can catch up on significant technical debt or launch a suite of product improvements and still be behind the curve. The curve keeps moving while you’re catching up! To actually get ahead of the curve, or at least keep up with it, you have to constantly innovate. A model where you’re launching big improvements and going into maintenance mode for two years won’t position you to meet customer expectations in three years. 

As Morgan notes, becoming a customer-focused organization is “not easy, but it is simple.” Maybe you can’t rebuild your entire internal infrastructure to ensure employees have more customer data at their fingertips. But you can start prioritizing the customer over the company in making decisions about product roadmaps and allocating resources. You can lift your strategic gaze to look farther out as you set goals. This book will help you start.