A Little Exercise to Improve the Customer Experience
Sometimes great experiences happen naturally—maybe you have a perceptive staff member, or perhaps you're rolling out an exciting new product line that takes on a life of its own—but for most of us, being "customer-centric" requires continual renewal of vision and diligent mining for insights.
You can do this in lots of ways (and obviously we provide a wealth of tools and services toward that end), but here's a fun exercise that can yield some great insights for your team: Become your customer, and map out your experience at every touchpoint—literally map it out.
That's exactly what Eric Berkman of Little Spring Design did. He created an Experience Map tracking his "emotional states, physical tasks, sensations and perceptions, social interactions, etc." at every step of his experience with Starbucks. He used a framework of five modes to capture his observations: Anticipation, Enter, Engagement, Exit, and Reflection. (I could go on, but you might as well just read his blog post about it.) Here's the end result:
Good stuff!
Exercises like these allow your staff to walk in the shoes of your customers, and they're key to building empathy. More than that, within them lies the potential to tap rich insights into areas of improvement that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Posted by 