Customer Experience Interview Preparation Guide

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First and foremost, the customer experience is a strategic issue. To succeed online, a company *must* make the customer experience the cornerstone of its Web strategy. Without a good customer experience, no amount of advertising, "brand-building," or high-tech gadgetry will save the company from failure. If it's not good for customers, they're going to leave forever. Period, end of story. It's not that complicated.

In our consulting engagements, Creative Good measures the revenue increase after a client improves the customer experience on its site. One of our clients saw an increase of $11 million within two months of making our recommended changes. The client directly attributes the $11 million to the improvements they made to the customer experience.

But don't rely on our numbers: think about it qualitatively. Customers return to the sites that give them what they want. Once they arrive on the site, customers don't want complex technology, egocentric graphic design, or any other slick nonsense. What customers *do* want is a good experience. What do you expect to have the best economic advantage -- the nonsense, or the experience?

The customer experience is a holistic quality of a site that encompasses many areas of business -- usability is just one of them. For example, Creative Good engagements focus on five areas: strategy, marketing, technology, usability, and the client organization. In each area, we identify how it affects the customer experience, and how to improve it.

So yes, usability is an important part of our work -- but just a part. Running usability tests only is NOT sufficient for customer experience management. How can tests be effective, for example, without a deep knowledge of the strategy of the site? How can the strategy of the site be understood without forming consensus within the organization? Usability processes, refined through the years for *software* products, aren't fully applicable on websites (though Jakob Nielsen's discount usability techniques are effective). To put it plainly, the Web is not software, and the customer experience is not usability.

By the way, I recently explained this perspective to a group of usability professionals here in New York City. I've never seen an audience so close to riot :)

We don't ask customers what they want; we watch what they *do*. There's a big difference

Creative Good has a four-phase method: strategy, qualitative assessment, usability tests, and after site launch, ongoing maintenance. Essentially we start at the most strategic level and work our way into the tactics. At each step we base our work on what we established the preceding phase. To anyone interested in the customer experience, I'd definitely suggest starting at the strategic level. Don't just jump straight into usability work.

Overall, probably our most effective "technique" (if you can call it that) is our absolute commitment to creating a good site for the customer. We do whatever it takes to show our clients their customers' perspective.

I'm the president of Creative Good. I founded CG in January 1997. For the first year I slogged it out alone in my suburban New York apartment, conducting a guerilla marketing campaign to raise awareness of Web ease-of-use. During the second year I conducted my first few consulting engagements and wrote my first Good Report, "In Search of E-Commerce," with Robert Seidman. My campaign, consulting, and report brought about significant improvements on several top e-commerce sites; this prompted InfoWorld magazine to award me Netrepreneur of the Year 1998 for "doing more than any other individual to make Web commerce sites easier to use."

In February 1999 I hired an awesome CEO, Phil Terry, who came from McKinsey and Harvard Business School. We've been growing Creative Good together ever since. Now I have the pleasure of working side by side with some of the most talented, passionate people in the industry. I can say this with confidence because our hiring is extremely, extremely selective. We're 15 people big, and growing fast. All bootstrapped.

Our advantages are our vision (no one else focuses on the customer experience), our team (no one else has such selective hiring), and our culture (one of openness, listening, and partnership). We're trying to build a solid company that actually creates good online.

I'll just plug the three things that might help WebWord readers the most: first, our free e-mail newsletter, the CG Update, explores the customer experience every two weeks

You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.

You can not necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online), they will simply go to a competitor or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:
★ Is our market share slipping?
★ Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
★ Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
★ Are we getting fewer recommendations and favorable reviews online and in social media?
★ How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)?
Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.