Following the Microsteps a Customer Takes

by Vince Kellen, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

The connection between IT investments and success with the customers who pay the firm money is often indirect, ambiguous, and difficult to establish. For example, IT initiatives designed to share customer information to aid sales and marketing decisions might not have any impact on firm sales due to a variety of factors, including unpredictable external market events, internal business process issues, poor teamwork, misaligned goals and incentives, and so on.

So much stands between technology and customers. It behooves IT executives to have the means to manage this ambiguity. I do not like the idea of loading the multimillion-dollar IT shotgun with million-dollar IT initiative shells, pointing blindly, and hoping to hit a target.

Over the past decade, I have had the chance to work with technologists, brand strategists, business strategists, marketers, salespeople, and creative types on various projects designed to directly or indirectly affect how the firm wins and keeps customers. Along the way, I've guided and helped in the development of methodologies that are supposed to help firms determine which interactions with their customers they should improve.

Normal usability studies are insufficient for answering these investment-type questions: What interfaces are critical for us to improve? How do our Web sites fit into the overall workflow or daily lives of our customers? Do customers want things from us that they aren't telling us? Do they need things they may not even know about? What customer interactions are fine or ones that we can safely ignore for now? How will we know if these IT investments are actually working? Answering these questions requires technologists to move beyond the technology to more complete understanding of the customer experience. What follows is an ontology depicting the architecture of customer experiences.

Customer Experience. I define a customer experience as a set of activities that a customer engages in to fulfill a need, all within a reasonable period of time. For example, if I need to purchase food for my fish in my fish tank, my experience includes all the activities I do to fulfill that need, including researching different fish foods, finding a store, driving to the store and parking, entering the store, searching the shelves, interacting with the employees, checking out, opening the packaging, and using the new fish food. This conceptualization of the customer experience is meant to be need-driven and behavior-based.

Interaction. If, in the middle of watching me at home researching fish food, you could freeze time and examine my behavior, you will see that I will be engaging in one or more interactions to fulfill my need. On the fish food manufacturer's Web site while on the phone with a friend who has a fish tank, I may instant-message another friend for some ideas, as I read a book about tropical fish. These are four interactions: one with the company's Web site, the second with my friend on the phone, the third with another friend via instant messaging, and the fourth with the book reading about tropical fish. An interaction is an information flow between the customer (me) and the various entities (a Web site, two friends, and a book).

Channel. This is a vehicle for the information flow. In the fish food example, the channels would be the Web, the phone, an instant message tool/protocol, and a book.

Offering. This is the name of the thing the customer is seeking to buy to fulfill the need. In this example, "Nutrafin Max Complete Flake Food" would be an offering I could choose. Offerings can be broken down into other component concepts, listed here:

• Offering name. This is simply the name of the offering, as understood by agents.

• Offering attributes. These are subcomponents of the offering the agent uses to communicate about the offering. In the fish food example, "flakes" and "tropical" could be considered attributes.

• Attribute levels. Some attributes may have different values. Take color, for example. A product may come in several colors; each color would be a level. Some offerings come in sizes; each size would be a level

• Associations. Offerings are often associated with each other. For example, in my fish store I noticed that the fish food offering was marketed as a package with fish-care items. This bundling of offerings is an example of offering associations.

Agent. An agent is either a producer or consumer of information. Agents share information about an offering with each other. The agent may be a single person or could be a group of people in the case of group-buying decisions. Agents might be systems, especially where computers act as human proxies. Agents come in different flavors, listed here:

• Customer. A customer is the agent who makes the decision to buy.

• Influencer. These are advisors who can influence a customer's decision. In the fish food example, certainly my friends are influencers. The book on tropical fish might be an influencer.

• Consumer. When a customer (or any agent) is receiving information about an offering, he is the consumer of the offering. When a customer is sharing information about an offering with others, he is acting as a producer.

• Producer. These are typically people (or systems) at a firm who communicate information about an offering to customers (or other agents). Customers can be producers when they share information about offerings with others.

In the next few months, in several Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisors, I will go deeper into the customer experience architecture, problems this model predicts, and how to apply this model in making IT investments. I welcome your comments about this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights on business-IT strategy in general to me at vkellen@cutter.com.

-- Vince Kellen, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium