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What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.
This CEO guide taps the expertise of McKinsey and other experts to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes.
Observe: Understand the interaction through the customer’s eyes.
Increasingly, customers expect from all players the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.
Identify and understand the customer’s journey.
A customer journey spans a progression of touchpoints and has a clearly defined beginning and end.
The advantage of focusing on journeys is twofold.
First, even if employees execute well on individual touchpoint interactions, the overall experience can still disappoint. More important, McKinsey research finds that customer journeys are significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes than are touchpoints.
Quantify what matters to your customers.
In most companies, there are a handful of critical customer journeys. Understanding them, customer segment by customer segment, helps a business to maintain focus, have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and begin the process of redesigning functions around customer needs.
Define a clear customer-experience aspiration and common purpose.
Customer journeys are the framework that allows a company to organize itself and mobilize employees to deliver value to customers consistently, in line with its purpose. The journey construct can help align employees around customer needs, despite functional boundaries.
Shape: Redesign the business from the customer back.
Customer-experience leaders start with a differentiating purpose and focus on improving the most important customer journey first. Then they improve the steps that make up that journey.
Apply behavioral psychology to interactions.
One tool leading customer-experience players deploy is behavioral psychology, used as a layer of the design process. Leading researchers have identified the major factors in customer-journey experiences that drive customer perceptions and satisfaction levels.
Reinvent customer journeys using digital technologies.
Customers accustomed to the personalization and ease of dealing with digital natives such as Google and Amazon now expect the same kind of service from established players. Research shows that 25 percent of customers will defect after just one bad experience.
Perform: Align the organization to deliver against tangible outcomes.
Applying sophisticated measurement to what your customers are saying, empowering frontline employees to deliver against your customer vision, and a customer-centric governance structure form the foundation.
Use customer journeys to empower the front line.
Executives at customer-centered companies engage employees at every level of the organization, working directly with them in retail settings, taking calls, and getting out into the field.
Establish metrics that capture customer feedback.
Leading practitioners start at the top, with a metric to measure the customer experience, and then cascade downward into key customer journeys and performance indicators, taking advantage of employee feedback to identify improvement opportunities.
Put cross-functional governance in place.
To foster understanding and conviction, leaders at all levels must role-model the behavior they expect from these teams, constantly communicating the changes needed.
Log early wins to demonstrate value creation.
The better way is to build an explicit link to value creation by defining the outcomes that really matter, analyzing historical performance of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, and focusing on customer satisfaction issues with the highest payouts.
Delighting customers by mastering the concept and execution of an exceptionally good customer experience is a challenge. But it is an essential requirement for leading in an environment where customers wield growing power
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1) The Connected, Healthy, Interactive Home
Pharma, device and consumer health companies are racing to build apps on Amazon Echo and soon-to-arrive platforms like Google Home. Soon, Echo-like devices will become major healthcare interfaces — talking to your medical Internet of Things devices (i.e., wearables, scale, blood pressure cuff and glucometer) and perhaps, based on your genomics, diet, activity and blood sugar, suggesting the appropriate meal to have delivered or prepared. “Alexa, call 911” may become a routine way of calling for help.
2) From Medical Tricorders to Connected Home Medical Kits
The blending of home-based diagnostic platforms with medical care at home is arriving.
3) The Healthcare Chatbot
Interactive and engaging, from coaching on diet and nutrition to reminding you to take your medications or offering psychological support and follow up — the chatbots are on their way.
4) VR in the OR to AR on the Streets
VR and AR are going mainstream.
On the AR front, Google Glass (despite reports) is not dead. Pediatric neuropsychiatry platforms like Brain Power are using Glass to help autistic children learn and gamify emotional cues.
Microsoft Hololens co-developed VR for anatomy and interactive physiology with Case Western medical school for educating medical students. Next-generation AR headsets like those from Meta will have a slew of applications for clinician and patient.
5) From Quantified Self to Quantified Health
Google Fit is now adding health-data exchanges, and already, Apple HealthKit is connected to over 30 healthcare systems. Data can flow from my iPhone to my electronic medical record at Stanford. Increasingly, software will parse the data from a variety of data sources.
6) Uber for Health Is Here
Blended with telemedicine, combined services can respond as needed for a true house call that leverages a combination of home diagnostics with hands-on care. Startups like Pager and Heal have raised millions and are providing on-demand physician house calls, some of which are covered by major payers. ZipDrug is doing the same for pharmacy delivery.
7) Cancer Moonshots
The White House Cancer Moonshot initiative led by Vice President Biden, which I attended in late June is helping implement new policies speeding up FDA approvals, patent protection and data sharing. There is even a new Cancer XPRIZE under development which will helpfully align incentives and speed up novel collaborations and approaches to decrease preventable cancer deaths.
8) The ‘Omes Come Home and Are Being Crowdsourced
From genome to microbiome and metabolome, it is becoming exponentially more common to send in a sample from home and obtain personal ‘omic information. We are also rapidly uncovering the importance of the microbiome in health and disease, and Ubiome and Second Genome now offer home kits which enable personal microbiome sequencing and the ability to anonymously be a ‘data donor’ share the data to improve its utility.
The eight areas mentioned above are just a taste of technologies and platforms rapidly entering healthcare. Some are still waiting for proof of value, aligning of incentives and the further connecting of the dots between various gadgets, data, apps, and integration into medical systems to be fully realized. Given the many challenges in healthcare around the planet, new thinking, creative technology applications, and talented people (often from outside the traditional healthcare sphere) are needed to bring these solutions to full realization.
Warren Buffett, the CEO of the fourth-largest company in the country, isn't as busy as you are. By his own estimate, he has spent 80 percent of his career reading and thinking.
Buffett's schedule may seem like an anomaly. In reality, he's a trailblazer. Thanks in part to his example, over the past few years, several high-profile CEOs have come out against the norm of constant busyness. They argue that critical thinking time is essential in a complex, rapidly changing digital economy.
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." --Abraham Lincoln
Mondays I devote to thinking to allow me to operate with surgical precision during the rest of the week. Here's what I do during that day.
Step No. 1: Schedule the whole day in your calendar
Are other people constantly taking your time and dictating your priorities? If so, the first step to finding time to devote to thinking is to take control of your calendar.
Step No. 2: Do not go to your office
My best ideas come when I'm not in the office, so I often spend the day wandering around Vancouver. I pick where to go depending on what type of thinking I need to do.
Step No. 3: Bring your journal
Writing is a powerful way to capture your ideas and get them into an organized, actionable form.
Step No. 4: Reschedule or shorten meetings you have later in the week
If a meeting isn't a high priority, I will ask my assistant to either reschedule it or shorten it.
Step No. 5: Prune your to-do list for the week
Most of those meetings lead to action steps. I use my thinking day to review the list and evaluate which ones are truly a priority. I ask myself: "Should we really action this?" Often, I find that what seemed important at first isn't anymore.
Step No. 6: Identify your top three outcomes for the day
Besides planning your week to come and reviewing your to-do list, set three goals for your thinking day and jot them down.
Step No. 7: Use powerful questions to encourage deep thinking.
Here are some of my favorites:
- Am I doing the right things with the right people?
- What's most important?
- What am I good at?
- What am I bad at?
- How can I spend more time doing what I'm good at?
- How can I spend less time doing what I'm bad at?
- Alternatively, I'll write out a goal and think about how I can strategically move toward it.
Step No. 8: Set aside time to solve your biggest problems
A portion of your day can also be spent investigating challenging issues and brainstorming ways to push through them.
Step No. 9: Set aside time to think of new ideas
Set aside some time to brainstorm new ways of doing things, or new opportunities to explore.
Don't be surprised if taking a whole day for thinking feels like an indulgence at first--it certainly did for me. I felt guilty for taking walks in the park or sipping wine while others were in the office. But now I can't imagine not doing it.
As CEO, I have realized I don't need to be the first one in and the last one to leave, but I do need to be the most impactful person in the office. And my 'Thinking Mondays' help me accomplish that.
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