The point about a musical score is that it tells you where you are, what comes next and where you’re trying to get to.
So when your bow breaks in the middle of your passionately executed violin solo, you can simply borrow one from the lead violinist and carry on. And so can the rest of the orchestra.
Ok, the pause breaks the illusion for a second or two, but the experience as a whole doesn’t break down. In fact, it becomes more memorable.
Not because it ‘failed’ but because of the ease with which it was got going again.
The only change you might want to make afterwards is to add a spare bow to each performance.
The point about a customer experience score is that it enables you to keep your promise, creatively, no matter what.
Why write down your Customer Experience Score? I can think of at least 6 reasons:
Memory.
Without a Customer Experience Score, some of the knowledge of “what we do here” and as importantly, “how we do things round here” and “why we do what we do” gets lost every time one of your ‘good people’ leaves. This knowledge also gets changed as new people join and bring their previous experience with them.
This can be overcome by a founder that spends time and energy ‘policing’ the culture (think Steve Jobs), but one day even the founder will disappear.
A Customer Experience Score gives your business a memory of its own, outside the heads of the people in it – including you.
That memory needn’t be prescriptive. The most detailed score still leaves room for interpretation, and you can make it more improv if that’s your style, but the main thing is that if the business always remembers the “what”, “how” and “why”, your people don’t need to make it up as they go along.
Detachment.
As Japanese businesses know well, what I call a Customer Experience Score embodies the ‘thing’ a group of people are working on – whether that’s a play, a car, a building or a service.
This allows a certain level of separation between ‘what I am trying to achieve‘ and ‘who I am‘, which makes it much easier for everyone involved to discuss and agree improvements, because it’s ‘the thing’ that’s being judged, not ‘me’. Free from the fear of personal criticism, your good people can eagerly look for ways to make things better.
Confidence.
Having a Customer Experience Score to follow while they learn, gives people confidence that they are doing the right thing.
Once people are confident that they know what they are doing, they don’t wait to be made accountable – they take responsibility. With the confidence of a process behind them, your good people can pretty much manage themselves.
Emotion.
Most modern businesses, large and small, involve interactions of some kind – with other employees, customers, and suppliers.
These interactions require emotional labour – listening; empathising, being present to the other person as well as intellectual labour – pattern-matching, imagining potential scenarios, reviewing possible solutions etc..
Without a Customer Experience Score these interactions become harder than they need to be, because every interaction is treated as unique, where in fact they fall into common patterns, with unique features.
Your Customer Experience Score captures what has to happen in the common patterns, giving your people a framework to work from that doesn’t need much thinking about.
A Score frees up intellectual and emotional energy to be spent on the unique and personal aspects of regular interactions, and on the exceptions that either prove the rule, or highlight the start of a new pattern. With their heads cleared of the routine, your good people can use their hearts to do more than keep your promises – they can confidently exceed them.
Automation.
The hardest part of automating any process or function is specifying exactly what it is you’re trying to do. This is so hard that most people skip this step, trusting the software to do this job for them. The trouble is, off the shelf software is by necessity, targeted at a mass market, while you have your own unique way of making and keeping promises. This means either conforming to the way everyone else does things, or worse, automating the details, without understanding the process as a whole. With a Customer Experience Score, you can use automation (even off the shelf) to strengthen your uniqueness, not dilute it.
Longevity.
Not even I would say that a Customer Experience Score can be designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality, and without good people a Score-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.
Good people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur. They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the Score.
Good people spark off constraints (such as a process), they ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities. With a solid framework to play in, good people bring a business to life – they make it human. A Customer Experience Score enables people to keep your business alive and human for generations to come.
In a nutshell, instread of recruiting new team members against an extensive checklist of skills, comptencies and attributes, these elite teams (incumbents) select a likely-looking candidate (aspirant) and find out whether and how they can best work together by actually doing it for a provisional period.
During this time, the aspirant is expected to understand the role and the role-components that make it up, and to demonstrate strengths in enough of these roles to make them worth employing. They may even bring new strengths to the role, requiring a new role-component.
On the other side, the incumbents are expected to understand and test the strengths of the aspirant and recognise when one or more of their own role-components is superseded, or a completely new role-component has been created.
Only when the negotiation is satisfactory to both sides does membership become formal. In this way both sides negotiate coming together to form a new, reconfigured team.
I think this is a very interesting process that could be applied to more than elite teams, such as a growing small business that already has a Customer Experience Score in place. Role-components correspond to Activities in the Score, while Roles have responsibility for one or more parts of the Score. Having the Customer Experience Score in place makes this less risky than it might otherwise be, since everyone knows ‘the least that must happen’.
I’d use it to allow individuals to negotiate how they can best contribute to the delivery of the company’s Promise of Value, not just when they join, but throughout their career with the company, as they grow and develop.
I’d also use it to ensure that everyone knows more or less everything about the Customer Experience Score, giving flexibility and resilience to the organisation while leaving plenty of room for evolution.
Because, after all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.
One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.
It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.
Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice. There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.
Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on. There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it. And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.
In The Disappearing Boss, I use a similar idea. A Role is a part played in a performance by a person. It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.
Here’s an example from one of my clients. Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:
It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.
What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed. They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships. What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.
As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing. One person can play many Roles. A given Role can be played by many people. Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.
At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable. Worth coming back for again and again.
I finished “The Uncertainty Mindset” this morning. Unike many management books, it’s taken me a while to finish because the book is dense with ideas and insights, so I have had to rest between reads.
I thoroughly recommend it, especially for those who wish to disrupt with their business.
In the high-end, ultra-innovative world of fine dining of the book, teams of innovators repeatedly dance with chaos, pushing themselves into some new, unknown situation (moving the restaurant to new country; organising a conference; organising food relief in hurrican-struck islands) inducing a feeling of desperation as they scramble to deliver on a promise that will be at once utterly new and utterly familiar to their clientele. Each time they dance they learn anew that they will succeed, even if they don’t yet know how. And they do succeed. Spectacularly. Then they rest, allowing themselves time to recover before they go again, on an even bigger challenge.
They can do this because they are specifically R&D teams. The day-to-day of a restaurant can’t run like this. The teams running the restaurants have a different challenge with it’s own rhythm.
What if you’re not a restaurant chain? What if you aren’t R&D? What if you simply want to evolve continuously, not necessarily radically, in response to the world around your business, through the lens of your customers? What can be learned from this approach?
It’s this aspect that I want to pursue – that dance between order and chaos, between predictbility and uncertainty that makes life so interesting.
So I’ll be reading it again, taking notes, and translating it into my own terms, so I can share it with you.
Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.
You may find that you need to refine an existing part of your Score.
This could mean simplifying an Activity by removing unnecessary steps. Or spelling out what has to happen in more detail. You might remove an Activity, or add a new one, or several.
Whatever the change, there are bound to be knock-on effects. Perhaps you need to review Props for this part of your Score. You might need to create a new Role. You’ll certainly need to let your people learn and practice the new Score before you perform it for real.
This may seem like a lot of unecessary work, especially for minor adjustments. It will be tempting to just change practices without bothering to change the Score first.
Resist that tempation.
Following through the impact of even minor changes on your Score, before implementing them in real life allows you to try different ideas and scenarios ‘on paper’, when getting it wrong and reversing back to your starting point is easiest and cheapest.
It means you get to see the full impact before you start changing anything.
It means you can share this task with everyone on the team, to get multiple perspectives and arrive at better solutions more quickly.
It also means that your Score always reflects the reality of how your business works, which keeps it useful, and even more importantly, preserves the value of your business until you’re ready to exit.
Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.
Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.
This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.
You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online. Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts. Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.
Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.
For example, emails.
If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails. Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.
This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process. It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.
It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well. You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients. Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.
Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:
For a human being, is this drudgery? Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
Is this something that people do better than machines or software? Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want? How many will we lose as a result? How many could we attract? Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
Will it be worth it? How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services? Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?
Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.
One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.
It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.
Props aren’t just physical either. You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.
And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.
Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.
Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too. You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.
Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.
Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).
Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.
This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.
Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play, you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.
Of course, if you embed your unique promise of value into the way your business works well before you decide to exit, you get all the benefits of exit, without actually having to do it.
You can even continue to grow your business at the same time.
Applied at the right time, Discipline really does make Daring possible.
