Customer Innovations

Most of the time and money organizations invest on customer experience is wasted...

... because they focus on how the organization "delivers the experience"...

... rather than on how customers actually "HAVE the experience"...

... and how those experiences influence behavior!

Most customer experience efforts are based on touch-point oriented approaches that define the experience in terms of a customers' interactions with the company. These approaches are inherently company-centric and, at best, lead to improvements that create "better sameness." The fact is:

Customers' experiences do not just happen at your organizations' touch-points.

Evocative Experiences... The Experiences that Matter

An experience is evocative when it positively and profitably influences:

• What people think (cognitive outcomes)
  • What they remember about their experience
  • The story they tell themselves and others about their experience
  • The distinctions they draw that differentiate what you did for them
• How people feel (affective outcomes)
  • How doing business with you makes them feel about themselves
  • How the way they feel about themselves drives how they feel about you
  • What specific emotional states and triggers motivate behavior
• What people do (behavioral outcomes)
  • Making additional purchases
  • Diversifying what they buy from you
  • Telling stories about their experience with you
  • Recommending you to others
  • Behaving more cost effectively
  • Adopting new product, service, or process offerings

Four Characteristics of an Evocative Experience

1. Are immediately simple to understand and easy to navigate. The vast majority of peoples’ experiences are accomplished using a combination of “gist processing” and “automatic behavioral scripts.” Well-designed experiences fit easily with the mindsets and natural behaviors people have for the problem they’re trying to solve. Note: As a result of being designed around automatic behavioral scripts, evocative experiences can have a surprising subconscious influence on behavior.
2. Offer innovative solutions to peoples’ latent problems. Well-designed experiences start with a deep understanding of what people are trying to accomplish and provide solutions to problems, accomplish goals, and address needs that people may not even realize they have or be able to easily describe. These innovative solutions almost never occur at the existing company touch-points.
3. Tell a compelling and memorable story. People perceive, interpret, and recall their experiences using stories. Well-designed experiences tell a story that has a clear and distinctive message that resolves conflict using a small number of high-contrast, signature experience elements. These signature experience elements get people’s attention and are perceived as a meaningful differences in kind… rather than incremental differences in degree.
4. Trigger specific emotional states that influence behavior. The most influential experiences are designed to influence how people feel... not about the company… but about themselves. The specific emotional state(s) associated with the experience are chosen as the precursors to the behavior the experience is intended to generate.

Creating Evocative Experiences

In order to create evocative experiences you must start with an "experiencer-centric" rather than "company-centric" definition of experience. We define an experience to be:

Experience: A person's cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions... across the end-to-end process they follow... in order to realize a desired state, satisfy needs, and accomplish goals that are important to them.

This is fundamentally different than the typical company-centric definition: Customer experience is the sum or all interactions a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.

Experience Miner^TM and the Design of Evocative Experiences

The objective of any product, service, or experience design is to profitably and powerfully influence how people think… how people feel… and, most importantly, how people act. Most organizations’ efforts fail to achieve this objective because they focus on how their organization “delivers” an experience rather than how people actually HAVE experiences. As a result, organizations routinely over-invest in incremental improvements that deliver “better sameness” at the existing touch-points. In the course of doing so, these organizations miss the fact that customers’ experiences don’t just happen at their touch-points. Although these investments may have a marginal impact on reported satisfaction, they often don’t lead to any measurable change in behavior in the face of changing customer needs, priorities, expectations, and alternatives. In order to positively influence customer behavior, experiences must be designed and delivered with a deep understanding of how people actually HAVE experiences. For more information on this, see: Getting Beneath the Voice of the Customer

Experience Miner^TM provides a rigorous way of capturing and analyzing the most critical aspects of the way people think, feel, and act on their experiences. Built on 25 years of research into the cognitive, affective, and behavioral basis of experience, it provides the specific insight required to focus design and delivery efforts on the areas of greatest influence and financial return. Experience Miner^TM is used to describe the key elements for each target customer personae. This insight is used to

...design evocative experiences from the mental model of the experiencer.

The Experience Miner^TM toolset consists of the following seven elements, each designed to fill in a critical piece of insight required to design experiences that influence behavior.

Goal Space Mapping^TM - Describes the desired states and situation-specific goals that motivate and direct the experience for each key persona

Experiential Temperament^TM - Profiles how temperamental differences influence the way people are drawn to and engage with novelty seeking, harm avoidance, social orientation, and persistence

Framing Metaphors – Surfaces the underlying physical metaphors people use to interpret, evaluate and act on their experiences in the relevant domain(s).

Experiential Constructs^TM – Identifies the most common, learned distinctions that enable people to recognize, categorize, differentiate, and form expectations.

Emotional States and Triggers^TM - Surfaces the emotional states and specific triggers across the lifecycle of the experience highlighting areas of uncertainty, stress, frustration, etc…

Experiential Pathways^TM – Maps the end-to-end set of activities and choice points that people follow in pursuit of their goals… including the unwritten rules and automatic behavioral scripts people apply along this pathway.

Experiential Choice Dynamics^TM – Describes the situation-specific choice processes that people follow, as well as, how they construct preferences and make decisions that influence their behavior.