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‘Customer grumbles are now sort of like anti-advertising. You try to manage brands but ultimately a brand is what exists in the mind of consumers’
doing for me?’” The need to focus on the entire customer experience is becoming more of an issue with new channels, he says, giving the example of magazine apps. While publishers are now able to deliver their products through these apps, they’re not necessarily geared up technically to provide the necessary support, he notes. “For example, a first-hand experience I had with The Economist a few weeks ago was that all of a sudden your experience of a great publication where the delivery is completely uncontroversial is affected by the fact that they don’t know how to run a helpline! “The bottom line is that the devil is in the detail in all customer experiences, so if you’re not planning your operations from the perspective of the customer journey then the odds are that you’re not empathising enough with your customer. That’s when things go wrong. And this is why organisations suffer.” He concedes that understanding the whole customer
experience can be difficult to achieve. “If you’ve got a product or a service you’ve got a bunch of people sitting in an office trying to plan the future and they tend to plan from the perspective of what they do,” he says.
Breaking down the customer experience Desbarats’s company uses detailed models to break down the overall experience at three levels of scale. “We’ll look at value chain level – if you’re looking at new materials and really advanced innovation it’s about who’s going to buy what from whom. And then we have a brand rein- forcement level. Then, at a very macro level, it’s step-by- step converting an intention into an outcome. So you model experience at those three levels. “The typical brand cycle we tend to divide into first
sight, point of sale, first use, routine use and extreme use and then end of life. Under those headings we brain- storm what goes on. So think of that as a draft for a play and then the characters in the play are typical personas and what we’ll do is we’ll build personas and the user research will be used to inform the personas. “This customer-centric approach is being taught in
business schoolsmore andmore. You just need to be care- ful that at some point it does need to be converted into specs for technical people to deliver. A lot of people at the moment are doing a lot of work around design thinking
and getting their creative hats on and empathising with the customer and so on. And that’s fine, but there’s also the key ingredient of informed creativity.” In Desbarats opinion, Apple is one of the best exam-
ples of experience-led innovation. “Just look at the power of the design function within that organisation,” he says. Another example he loves is BMW. “Their engineers are
in the customer service business and their dealerships are superbly selected, developed, run and choreographed. The whole customer experience, from the website to bringing your car into the dealer, is impeccably done.” Even the company’s single-word slogan – Joy – res-
onates, he says. “There are all kinds of really intelligent ramifications to that that go deep into the operation of the business, from taking the guilt out of motoring to injecting fun into motoring. Slogans can be trite or they can be really beautifully, deeply connected to the culture of the company.” A useful parallel is Audi, he says. “In the last five or
six years they have set BMW as their target in all kinds of areas and are busy beavering away trying to get up there, with their own distinctive flavour, but to get up there to the same level of executional excellence. And they’re really getting up there little by little, bit by bit.” Desbarats gives Microsoft as an example of a compa-
ny that is failing to provide the best-possible customer experience. “There are just too many aspects of the relationship that aren’t good enough,” he says. “There are many good things to many things that Microsoft does, but there’s a huge missed opportunity to be so much better. I understand fully how complicated their life is. But they’ve got classic innovators’ dilemma. Their whole approach to the customer journey – from the time it takes to boot up a Microsoft computer to the number of times you have to hunt around in a mil- lion places to change your personal settings – are not good enough. “Sometimes you do something and you’ll map the jour-
ney and it’s amazing how just doing that little cross-silo exercise can flush out things that are just so obviously irritating, that so obviously overshadow all of the good things that you just wonder why they’re not addressed. It’s about how you run your business and it’s about how you are organised systematically to plan things across
48 Irish Director Summer 2011
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