The Customer Experience Book: How to Design, Measure and Improve Customer Experience in Your Business

This book has the power to change the way you approach work on a daily basis. It has something important to say to all employees, from all departments, in companies large and small. But above all, it should be essential reading for CEOs and other leaders. We believe it will ignite a desire to measure, review and centralize the customer experience in your company's culture. And not as a one-off project, but as an on-going concern.

Pennington is a thought leader in customer experience who understands this strategic discipline first-hand. Following a successful corporate career, in 2002 he co-founded a consulting business that provides practical advice to companies developing the customer experience. The advice and support he offers in this book is based on more than 12 years of working with blue chip companies around the world.

So keep listening to learn the importance of thinking like your customer, why large expenditure on Big Data may not be necessary, and the true value of earning your customers' trust.

This book is split into two parts. The first addresses why the customer experience is so important and how it should be central to every role in your company. Pennington's favorite analogy is to describe customer experience as a film production. Think of the long list of people and departments on the credit roll who've contributed to the creation experienced by the audience. So, customer experience in business relies on numerous layers of support and action across all departments, up, down and across a company.

The book's second section explains how to use tools such as customer journey mapping to understand, improve and maximize the opportunity for customer experience in your business. Pennington argues that a "customer intelligent" company will be more efficient, and more effective at turning market and product development into profit. So, designing your company around your customers makes business sense.

In Pennington's view, customer service should be embedded in a company's culture. There's no point investing money and resources in producing and marketing a product or service, only to ignore how it's delivered to the customer.

In fact, this book opens with a vivid example of customer experience being overlooked in a massive global industry. While the design, engineering and marketing of cars improves in leaps and bounds decade by decade, the actual experience of buying a car has hardly evolved. Pennington points out how poorly most car showrooms and forecourts fit with the aspirational world projected by the brands' marketing teams.

Creating a better customer experience transforms your company. It leads to improved efficiency, reduced waste, and high-potential cost savings - plus, greater customer satisfaction and, therefore, retention. It's literally a win-win.

Pennington suggests it's never been more important for businesses to focus on their customer journey. The global financial crisis of 2008 has forced the subject of customer retention into the boardroom like never before. Then there's the immediacy, power and reach of comments and reviews on social media, which can make or break a company's reputation. Customer power has never been so strong.

Pennington's approach requires you to review your company from the outside in. This involves really engaging with your existing customers, not just presuming you know what they want. We learn how to do this in Part Two.

As an initial step, try being one of your own customers. Go online and place an order. Phone your call desk and make a complaint. Another exercise is to write a description of the entire purchasing experience from your customer's point of view. Is it as easy as it could be? Does it deliver on expectations?

Chapter six explains how to create a customer journey map, or CJM. This key tool enables you to visualize the purchase life cycle and understand how customers currently experience your company. It pinpoints the key interactions and emotions that influence their behaviors and decisions, and reveals the process as a whole, rather than as steps owned by separate departments across the company, as well as identifying opportunities for improvement.

For most businesses, a CJM is the first time they've considered a true end-to-end customer journey. Pennington argues that everyone has an impact on customer service, but some departments, such as finance and production, aren't used to recognizing their roles in it. A CJM allows them to see the connection between what they do and the customer.

The typical customer route moves from marketing to sales to customer service. Each department tends to be run separately, with its own targets to meet, and this creates a disjointed customer experience. For example, the sales team may promise that a product is easy to use when, in fact, it turns out to be anything but.

Another important thing to consider when building your CJM is where any budget cuts may be taking place. What effect does this have on the customer? Pennington points out that cuts tend to be to the customer's detriment. Even if this isn't in an obvious way, such as an increase in the price of a product, the manufacturing materials may be cheaper and poorer quality, the guarantees shorter, or the level of service compromised.

One of Pennington's case studies concerns a call center company's decision to reduce costs by cutting its standard script by 10 seconds. He shows how this short-term gain becomes a long-term loss. By contrast, investing an extra 10 seconds would allow the script to conclude with a question, to engage the customer's interest in learning more about your products or services.

Pennington stresses the CJM should not be mistaken for process mapping. A process map is an inside-out business journey that begins with the first recorded contact with the customer and ends with his or her purchase of the product or service. A CJM is the outside-in perspective, showing what your customers actually do. It begins at the moment of a customer's research into the products or services on offer, and concludes when your product or service is proven to be in actual use.

So, taking the example of a credit card company, the "true customer" isn't someone who has just been sent a card, but someone who is actually using his card. And not just once, but several times over several months. In Pennington's opinion, that's the data the company should be using to measure its true customer sales.

Pennington's outside-in approach also recognizes the impact of emotions on a customer's behavior – for instance, when calling an insurer about a car accident. Pennington recommends the insurance company uses a greeting that reflects the client's vulnerable state, for instance, "Hello, firstly can I check you are ok? Now if you can give me your full name, I will find your policy number." Changing the language you use to communicate with customers costs nothing, while adding enormous value.

As Pennington says, a CJM allows you to note and evaluate the key interactions you currently have with your customers. It provides a backdrop for reviewing your planned actions. From this, you can design and slowly implement a new customer-driven process – and Pennington explains every step. From this point in the book, we see the full extent of the commitment required to put the theory of designing customer experience into practice. It really does need everyone on board, and endorsement from those at the top.

There seems little doubt that CEOs and other leaders will reap the rewards of following this step-by-step guide to creating a highly efficient and rewarding customer journey. The casual reader may not be able to jump on board with this level of investment, but they'll still gain a lot from reading on, and may want to leave the book on their own CEO's desk marked "urgent attention!"

What will surprise and delight readers everywhere is that Pennington doesn't talk about huge, costly changes to achieve a great customer experience. His mantra is a hundred tiny changes, then a hundred more, and then a thousand. His approach is to invoke a change of culture, through engaging as many people as possible within the company to make small, but well-chosen, changes. These may well end up cutting costs, while increasing revenue.

Look for a plan that will reach as wide an audience as possible and, bit by bit, these changes will cause a shift in culture. This can be as simple as altering the phrasing on a standard document to customers. Pennington warns that your chosen objective needs to be deliverable within two to three months, though, because a quick gain will rally support and kick-start momentum for further change.

So an excellent customer experience is about small rather than big changes and spend. It's also about little rather than Big Data, Pennington says. The smallest piece of information about a customer can be used to transform her experience from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

An example in the book concerns a real estate agent who casually enquires what kind of flowers a couple likes, as he shows them around a house and its garden. If the couple then go on to make a purchase, he will arrange for a bouquet of those flowers to be placed in the property as a welcome gift. By securing one piece of information, the agent has created a very personal, high-impact "wow moment" costing very little in money, time or effort.

In chapter nine, Pennington addresses the modern desire for more and more data – a trend that's bred increasingly complicated and expensive systems of analysis. He urges CEOs to rethink their budgets and spending, especially what they're investing in collating data they wouldn't normally have. How is this new data being used? Does it justify such expenditure? Is it translating into an improved customer experience?

In Pennington's view, the answer is usually no. Data is often information for information's sake, and it's nearly always a waste of money to collect it. He also points out that, by the time you've done all of the research, the results can be out of date.

Instead, he advises you to use the data you already have. You should only invest in gaining more once you've created your CJM and have identified a specific piece of information that you know will enhance the customer experience. He also challenges the value of blowing big budgets on market research. This section is well worth a read.

Chapter 10 examines how to build trust, and why it's so crucial to business success. Here, Pennington calls on the work, ideas and findings of leading customer-experience consultants Dr. Martha Rogers and Don Peppers. In her contribution, Rogers says far too many companies still take advantage of their customers for profit, for example by allowing them to sign up for a more costly option than they need or to incur hidden charges.

In contrast, companies should look to earn their customers' trust, by ensuring they choose the right product, get the best price possible, and make the most of everything the business offers. A trustworthy company recognizes that what customers say about it is far more important than anything it says about itself. Rogers' studies show that customers will stay loyal to companies they trust – and are prepared to pay more to remain with them.

This book's concluding chapter offers invaluable advice for people implementing this cultural change. As well as explaining how best to manage and maintain this role, Pennington helpfully includes the common reasons for failure, so you can avoid a similar fate. For example, he warns that the customer experience must never be referred to as a "project" or "program," because this makes it sound short term and like someone else's problem.

Pennington is clear about the need for top-down and bottom-up support and action. You're looking to get as many people as possible on board and create an attitude where people in your company want to focus on customer experience. A prevailing sense that they are required to will only breed negativity and resentment, which prevents true and positive change.

For too long and in too many companies, customer experience has been an afterthought, pushed to the bottom of budgets and boardroom agendas. Pennington leaves the reader in no doubt that this needs to change. In our opinion, this book will change how you view your company's relationships with its customers and how you approach many decisions, including allocating budgets.

Provided you're prepared to make the investment of time and commit long-term, everything you need to design a successful customer journey is contained within these pages. Get reading and go for it!

"The Customer Experience Book: How to Design, Measure and Improve Customer Experience in Your Business," by Alan Pennington, is published by Pearson.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.