Accounting for Customer Experience

October 9, 2020 Janus Boye

What’s really the value of content? And how do we measure the impact and value of our work on improving the customer experience?

As I’ve previously shared, one of the major issues is that management often does not have an understanding of the value of content. The root cause of this is due to a lack of business schools teaching accounting systems that actually account for customer experience.

What follows is a little bit of history, a little bit of accounting nerdery, and maybe a tangent or two - but I do promise I will get around to explaining how organizations can start to properly account for customer experience and produce incentives around that topic.

Expert of the month: Emily Corace

June 30, 2020 Janus Boye

A few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.

I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:

“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”

This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!

Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.

ROI of CX programs

December 4, 2019 Janus Boye

It's been said many times that delivering outstanding customer experience (CX) is the key to success.

Yet, with increasing expectations, and even after extensive investments in CX training and initiatives many organisations are struggling leaving disappointing customers behind and eroding loyalty.

In our recent member conference call, Stefan Kolle from the FutureLab in Belgium, shared his insights on the return-of-investment (ROI) of customer experience programs.

Trust is a prerequisite for great customer experiences

December 3, 2019 Janus Boye

“A brand is simply trust”

With this famous Steve Jobs quote, Tim Walters used his Boye 19 conference keynote to drive home the point that it’s all about trust and trustworthiness if you want to deliver great customer experiences.

Deconstructing the Experience Economy

November 18, 2019 Janus Boye

Can you create needs?
What is an experience?

Michael Bednar-Brandt from Oracle asked these and other relevant questions as he took Boye 19 Aarhus conference participants on a journey to untangle the experience economy.

In his highly engaging and entertaining keynote, he offered an answer which in brief was a recipe…

Using augmented reality to drive engagement and improve the museum experience

October 31, 2019 Janus Boye

Driving engagement and improving the experience has been key drivers for many big projects in the last years. Delivering a bad experience kills any hard-earned loyalty.

Technology is a part of the equation, but beyond creating a better and more compelling website, what might we do to go above and beyond expectations? In our recent member conference call, we heard about an innovative project using augmented reality at the Brooklyn Museum.

Delivering value to your customers through imperfect projects.

January 30, 2019 Janus Boye

There is always a lot at stake, when you are starting a new project, and several questions often arise quite naturally. Is the team structure right? On the client side as well as on the vendor side? Have we clearly defined the project, what about the budget and scope?

In my experience, it’s often completely different questions that need answering, when embarking on a new project

Your website needs radically more pages

September 30, 2018 Janus Boye

During the past years, many digital projects have focused on trimming websites by making them leaner, cleaner and more effective in solving the key tasks of their customers.

Many websites suffer from so-called redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) pages and it makes much sense to continuously address this problem from spiraling out of control.

Still if you want to take a customer-first approach, you need to add radically more pages to your site.

To understand why, let’s first take a step back.

Towards better experiences

August 5, 2017 Janus Boye

“We are all entitled to our opinion, but we share the same facts”

This was one of my key take aways from an inspiring session led by industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe at a recent Boye peer group meeting in Boston.

Out of office messages – a missed opportunity?

January 4, 2017 Janus Boye

You have probably just switched off your “out of office” message. Most out of office auto replies contain no more than a sentence a two saying when the individual is back in the office. But why miss the opportunity to add some brief relevant communication, such as a link to a marketing campaign or information that might actually help the sender.

Digital is where brand and identity disconnects

December 4, 2016 Janus Boye

Your brand is hopefully well incorporated into your physical buildings, printed materials and hopefully even how your colleagues act and the tone of voice, giving your customers the experience of a consistent message.

Insights from a day focusing on customer experience

November 8, 2016 Janus Boye

Some might say that it’s all about the customer experience. After spending a day moderating our very first customer experience conference track as a part of the 12th J. Boye Aarhus conference, I would say that customer experience is indeed many different things.

I thoroughly enjoyed 3 case studies from the US, Finland and Denmark coupled with an experienced consultant from the UK. The presentations and discussions that followed showed how wide of a field customer experience — or CX as a tech-savvy agencies like to shorten it — really is.

Speak human – a few years later

Back in 2010, Canadian designer and digital maker extraordinaire Eric Karjaluoto flew in from Vancouver to share his thinking on how most small businesses repeat the mistakes of the large businesses. He had just published a book titled Speak Human. For our audience of mostly participants from large and complex organisations this was a subtle way to zero in on their bad habits which directly impacts customer experience.

Fast forward 6 years to our conference last week and Sara Walsh from US-based Capital One opened the track with an impressive case study on bringing clarity and humanity to banking. To me, this was the best Speak Human case study from a large organisation that I’ve seen so far.

As one participant noted as main take away:

The importance of simplicity of language and focus on outcomes

Sara shared several examples of how even minor text changes can make a big difference and her presentation was full of examples of before & after screens that demonstrated how a focus on content has visibly improved the customer experience.

Following Sara’s presentation was a talk by Janet Morgan on how to create a cohesive narrative for an organisation. Again, in the footsteps of Eric Karjaluoto, but also based on Janet’s experience from a large, global and complex organisation, she stressed the importance of storytelling.

Looking beyond the screen to improve customer experience

In the afternoon, Jukka Helin from Finnish energy company Vapo provided a case study that involved Internet of Things. He brought a physical red button for easy ordering by customers who shouldn’t need to go online, log in and help themselves, but simply press the button to create a new order.

His presentation also encouraged easy ways to get started with Internet of Things and led to one of the most popular tweets of the conference:

Taking the #UI out of the equation is superior to making it more attractive says @yuccis #CX #IoT #jboye16
— TheBernd (@BerndBurkert) November 2, 2016

Finally, as a closing session, Morten Dam-Andersen from Copenhagen Airports shared their data-led transactional approach to improving the digital experience.

His session title also carried a question: How to make digital relevant in transit? During his talk we discussed the dilemma between many flyers who just want to look at departure times, while the airport want to lure them into duty free shops.

Learn more about customer experience

In advance of the conference, I published a few posts on the topic, including:

The rise and upcoming fall of customer experience

October 26, 2016 Janus Boye

Recent years have seen a lot of hype surrounding customer experience, but without anchoring the concept within a deeper digital transformation, it’s just another overhyped buzzword.

I am always interested in looking beyond the hype and trying to understand what is really happening, which is why I seeked out Michael Bednar-Brandt who is Director Digital EMEA at Oracle.

Creating good customer experiences calls for openness and collaboration

October 20, 2016 Janus Boye

Whether that’s a stretch, I’ll leave to you to decide, but these days everyone is really talking customer experience and how to use data to improve it.

Digital is part of the customer experience — also at museums

April 28, 2016 Janus Boye

I have been to see the Mona Lisa, but it was before the advent of smartphones. Today, I imagine there are crowds trying to take a selfie with her. Some might think that this is sacrilegious, and that you should let the several hundred year old painting speak for itself. At the same time others are beginning to appreciate the blessings of digital in regard to traditionally sacred areas like museums.

Suse Cairns is director of audience experience at Baltimore Museum of Art and she has a thorough understanding of how to apply digital to the world of art in order to achieve a meaningful and enriched user experience.

Digital has changed how we experience the world

Our lives are digital. There are many examples to this, and the museum experience is one of them. The way museums collect data and present it has changed. In almost every aspect of our lives we rely on the Web to provide us with the most precise and relevant information. So why should this be any different when experiencing a 200 year old painting? Respect of its age?

Should we do the same in regard to elderly people, and not expose them to a smartphone?

Suse Cairns points right to the matter at hand with this quote:

“The world continues to move past the simple physical/digital dialectic towards a more nuanced matrix of architectures uniting digital and material culture.”

The fact that digital have become mobile means not just that constant distractions are in our pockets — it also means that knowledge is only a push away. Having knowledge about something allows you to experience it in depth, and this understanding is already flowing through a lot of museums, where digital becomes a vibrant part of giving an audience the best experience.

The evil data collection — that is simply making our lives easier

That is one side of it; how users themselves are already using digital to gain the best experience. Another is the fact that museums are increasingly using digital data collection to improve upon the user experience. In a recent posting on transforming audiences, transforming museums, Suse focuses on innovative museum projects in recent years:

“It makes sense, then, that some of the most innovative museum projects we’ve seen in recent years combine audience experiences with data-collection and analysis.”

A critique that is often raised, is that data collection is somehow solely about evil marketers performing inception like maneuvers with our minds. But the ever increasing focus on user experience, which Suse describes above, is rapidly changing this; resulting in a world where our offline actions might very well be transmitted into a digital sphere, but where they are also given back to us in the form of real world experiences suited to how people really behave; resulting in easier lives.