I finished this book in June 2021. I recommend this book 7/10.
This book does a good job highlighting the importance of not only being aware of your customer (this could be inside or outside your organization) but how to bring them into the creation process. There is an excellent example of how Hilton hotels engaged with young college students and brought them on the customer journey.
One complaint is that the book keeps on referring to a pdf you can download. I spent an hour looking for it; I even emailed the author without any response. A friend of mine found it on one of the author's old web pages.
If you are looking for a book about customer experience and how to work closer together, get your copy here.
My notes and thoughts:
P8-He recognizes that it is far easier to lead people into relationship with Jesus Christ by executing events designed to meet them where they are than it is to attempt to convince them that their worldview is incorrect. He's designed an experience that pulls what we would term "customers" through stages of progressively more meaningful relations with his organization.
P9-Strategic Relationships.
Mapping: Identifying relevant individuals who can add specific value to your life and how you can connect with them.
Relating: Actively expressing interest in others to create connections on which relationships can be built. Relating emerges most easily from a shared mission, vision, or enemy.
Nurturing: Prioritizing opportunities to offer help and acting on those with the highest value. Nurturing includes making relation currency deposits and confirming you have delivered value.
Sustaining: Keeping the relationship strong by proactively staying in touch, creating touch-points with others in order to broaden relationships, and making strategic plans for the relationship's future growth.
Requesting: Evaluating when to request help to achieve objectives, framing requests appropriately, and providing pertinent and appropriate information to make the request actionable.
Capitalizing: Accessing and gaining quantifiable business outcomes from the value in the relationships that encourage both you and the others to grow in a mutually beneficial way.
P15-A transformational journey:
Visionary leadership: CEOs focus on managing the present while they lead the future by investing in opportunities to evolve. CEOs have to produce results, but they also have to invent their organizations' future.
Seal Team Six: In my view, the transformation of an organization does not require a battalion, particularly for mature companies in mature industries. You can not—and don't want to —turn an oil tanker on a dime. You need a Seal team six to get in, get the job done, and get out. A Seal team six-start small, proves the model, creates the success and then finds ways to scale that success, making it wide and deep across and throughout the organization. Then you can start to build momentum that leads to the next stage of this transformation.
Think transformation, not incrementalism. Doing things better is incrementalism. Real transformation is about doing things differently. It's about aligning culture, innovation strategy, and exceptional global talent—within and external to the organization. When groups work across functional boundaries to share insight and gain a new perspective, they generate more innovative solutions faster and with greater agility, and thus increase the chance of successfully implementing the new path forward. Here is a simple litmus test: How will your organization look, feel, or behave differently in eighteen or thirty-six months?
Your relationship ecosystem. Transformation leverages a strategic relationship ecosystem. We are always so focused on what we should do and how we should do it. Co-Creation is where you really leverage, asking instead, Who do we need? Who do we know? How do we leverage a broader ecosystem in our portfolio of relationships to accelerate this journey? Inside and outside of our organization? Inside and outside our industry? Inside and outside of particular geography?
Metrics and compensation. Only a dramatic, wholesale change in behavior will drive the impact that you are after, the results that investors and boards of directors are after. It is generally accepted that metrics and compensation are the levers that deliver desired behaviors. Yet how often do we see an organization incentivizing or compensating one set of behaviors but demanding a completely different set? Metrics and compensation are too often relics of past priorities, disconnected from the results required for success today, much less tomorrow. These levers can drive a company toward Co-Creation by rewarding outcomes instead of input, thereby encourage people to focus on the value their work creates for others. Measuring and compensating Co-Creation behaviors inside an organization may be the most disruptive transformation of all.
P61-Listening louder across the organization helps you ensure that different sections of the organization see their various contribution as part of one company narrative. As a consultant, if I walk into a company and hear "us and them" while talking to one division about another, I know that the company is not functioning optimally.
P75-
Segment your customers base by their needs and ask, "How do I cater to those differentiated needs?" This is where needs-based segmentation comes in. It will drive the next four steps.
Modularize your capabilities. When individuals can choose the offerings most relevant to them, their satisfaction grows. Can you offer ways to integrate modular technologies that are already in the love of your customers, like "Let me pay with PayPal"?
Anticipate customers' future needs. Use leading drivers like sentiment analysis to help you get and keep your fingers on the pulse of what they are thinking, what's of interest, and value to them moving forward.
Reward win-win behavior. Because it is extremely resource-intensive to cater to all buyers, find opportunities to get employees as well as current customers who are passionate about the brand to step up and engage them to get more involved in won-win behaviors. Create opportunities for your enterprise evangelists to make a difference.
Transform the touch-points where your customers' experience takes place into data-gathering engines. Intelligent touch-points that capture data, analyze it, and benchmark it against others will produce actionable insights that allow you to learn from every interaction.
P96- We visualized the Hilton Campus Conversation engagement journey from the port of view of the students. Think about having a conversation with the customer when you are mapping out the road map. What would you talk to them about? What are their concerns, perspectives, etc.? Like, the deadline for the next project, order tooling, and material?
P101- "The purpose of the canvas is to simulate ideas and create a better discussion with our client," "We must avoid developing a canvas which could be interpreted as we already know where your risks exist and how to address them. That answer can only be developed through an iterative process of discussion, research, and analysis with the client. The canvas is designed to facilitate the process.
P107- Co-Creation value depends on 3 things:
Focusing on needs-based segmentation of stakeholders.
Prioritize effective communications through alignment of signals being sent with signals being received
Replacing "Pitching" with genuine dialog facilitated with conversation starters.
P114- Customer retention supersedes customer acquisition as the primary objective of an organization.
P118- 6 stages of the Customer Experience Journey:
Evaluation: We engage in an ongoing process of evaluating the experiences in our lives. The journey begins when, motivated by a perceived want or desire, a potential customer starts to seek relevant options that might satisfy it.
Discovery: Increasingly aware of that perceived pain, gain, or series of tasks to be performed, the individual begins a discovery process. What options exist that might fill the need?
Consideration: Using criteria to evaluate what will meet or exceed the requirements of the solution, the individual deems some of these options better than others and they become part of the consideration set. The complexity of this stare varies depending on the degree of involvement the buyer feels in the process. Some buying decisions require deep involvement because of their impact on the purchaser's future experiences or what the purchase will say about the purchaser. Others are relatively insignificant. This is the difference between choosing a college and choosing a cafe.
Evaluation: The customer journey leads back to evaluation, this central position where the loops of the figure-eight meet, but now with a set of acceptable alternatives to consider and criteria to evaluate them against.
Purchase: an individual makes a decision to act. This can mean a literal sale, but it can also mean much more: "purchase" is the act of opting-in, in any context.
Use: The individual is now in a "draft" relationship with the brand and the product or service, experiencing either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Whether or not expectations are met determines if this cycle will be repeated.
P158- Leaders regularly undervalue passion as an asset. Passion motivates us to learn, to recover after a mistake, to find inspiration, and to apply it in ways that cross-pollinate and spark innovation.
P177- You can track harbingers of anticipated growth by paying attention to the following metrics:
Sentiment: How customers feel about their experience with our brand in all stages of their buying decision?
Reputation: How are we perceived in customers' hearts and minds?
Engagement: When, where, and how do customers prefer to be engaged by us and our brand?
Buying-cycle alignment: How can we increase our efficiency and effectiveness at meeting buyers at every stage of their customer experience journey?
High-performing and high potentials: Who in our organization consistently behaves above and beyond expectations when it comes to engaging and influencing the thinking and motivation of our customers? Similarly, which individuals show a stronger level of commitment, work ethic, and eagerness to learn and grow our brand?
P196- But created needs are where legends are born. When you create a need, the recipients of that value have never thought about it.
P200- Transforming our use of dashboards:
Who's the audience for this specific dashboard? What data do these individuals need to make their decision?
What does this role care about? What decisions are individuals in the role responsible for, and what data and insight might they need?
What information do we have? Taking into account my earlier recommendations regarding external and internal leading drivers, what metrics can you produce?
What information is missing? You may not have a method to collect leading drivers yet. How will you close the gap?