Copyright © 2019 by Greg Kihlström.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written must be obtained by contacting the author. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Published by:
Agile World, LLC
3100 Clarendon Boulevard #200
Arlington, VA 22201
https://theagile.world
First Edition: December 2019
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Edited by Janelle Kihlström
Cover Design by Alicia Recco
Illustrations by Greg Kihlström
Copyright: 2019
eBook ISBN - 978-1-54399-905-1
Contents
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: Definition
Chapter 1.1 Brand Experience
Chapter 1.2 The Rationale for the Center of Experience (COX)
Chapter 1.3 COX Component 1: Brand Experience Framework
Chapter 1.4 COX Component 2: Intrinsic Motivation
Chapter 1.5 Component 3: Internal & External Teams
Chapter 1.6 COX Component 4: Data Science and AI
Chapter 1.7 COX Component 5: The 6 Properties of the Center of Experience
Part 2: Properties of the Center of Experience
Chapter 2.1 COX Property 1: Brand
Chapter 2.2 COX Property 2: Governance
Chapter 2.3 COX Property 3: Culture
Chapter 2.4 COX Property 4: Environment
Chapter 2.5 COX Property 5: Measurement
Chapter 2.6 COX Property 6: Platform
Part 3: Application
Chapter 3.0 Let’s Talk About Silos
Chapter 3.1 How To Get Started
Chapter 3.2 The Experience Maturity Model
Chapter 3.2 Next Best Action and the Customer Experience
Chapter 3.3 Next Best Action and the Employee Experience
Chapter 3.4 Next Best Action and the Customer Experience
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Glossary
Appendix 2: Experience Maturity Assessment Sample
References
For Lindsey:
The experience of knowing you
continues to make my life better.
Greg is an entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is currently President and Chief Experience Officer at Cravety, and was formerly SVP of Experience at Yes&, after Carousel30, a digital agency he started in 2003 was acquired by the agency to become the largest independent marketing agency in the Washington, DC region. He is an award-winning creative director and digital strategist who has worked with top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, GEICO, Marriott Hotels, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota, United Nations and VMware. He was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Industry Mentorship Board. Greg currently serves on the Advisory Board for the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Program.
Greg’s last book, The Agile Consumer (2019), explores the most recent shifts in the brand-consumer relationship and how companies must become more agile across their entire operation to remain successful. His previous book, The Agile Brand (2018), follows the evolution of branding from its beginnings to the authentic relationship with brands that modern consumers want, and gives practical examples of what you can do to create a more modern, agile brand while staying true to your core values. His first book, The Agile Web (2016), discusses the changing landscape of digital marketing and customer experience. His weekly podcast, The Agile World, launched in early 2019 and discusses brand strategy, marketing, and customer experience.
Greg was named 50 on Fire winner from DC Inno twice (2015 and 2018) as one of DC’s trendsetters in Marketing and Communications. He is a regular contributing writer to Forbes, and has been featured in publications such as Advertising Age, SmartCEO, Website Magazine, and The Washington Post. He’s participated as a keynote speaker, panelist and moderator at industry events around the world, including Internet Week New York, Internet Summit, EventTech, SMX Social Media, Social Media Week, Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, ABA Bank Marketing Summit, and VMworld. He has guest lectured at several schools, including VCU Brandcenter, Georgetown University, Duke University, American University, University of Maryland, Howard University, and Virginia Tech.
As with any work of its type, this book was produced with a lot of help from great people I continually rely on for good (and sometimes contrary) ideas, strength, and support.
The team at Cravety has been hugely supportive of this effort and it simply wouldn’t have existed without their support. Specifically, I want to thank: Ed Bodensiek for the brand experience and brand chemistry concept; JG Staal for his significant contributions to the Next Best Action concept; Matt Johnson, Katina Sawyer, Christian Thoroughgood and Carrie Cassullo for the intrinsic motivation concept and research that came from their work as MotiveX, which was acquired by Cravety earlier this year; as well as the rest of the Cravety team, including Rachael Satterfield, Mike Gardner, Amy Christopher, Ryan Brown, and others.
Thanks to my sister Janelle for her editing support, and to Alicia Recco for her continued (and stellar) design work on the cover and for being such a good steward of my personal brand. Thanks also to the wonderful Diane Magers for contributing the Foreword to this book; it’s great to have the support of such an expert in the field.
Others who have provided helpful ideas, insights, and support include Romie Stefanelli, Gail Legaspi-Gaull, Lisa Nirell, Josh Olson, Lou Pugliese, and Claudia Silon.
As always, my wife Lindsey could not be more supportive or understanding of all my endeavors. This has been both an exciting and challenging year, and I could not have done any of it without her support.
To anyone not mentioned specifically, I apologize for doing so, but I will say that I am truly blessed to have even half the friends, colleagues, and family who support me like you have. I only hope I can return the support you’ve given me at some point.
“Life is not a problem to be solved,
but a reality to be experienced.”
Søren Kierkegaard
After spending years forging the exploding discipline of experience-led transformation and talking with experience professionals across the globe, I’ve discovered those in our burgeoning field often feel overwhelmed, alone on an island, fighting organizational obstacles and lacking a great blueprint for how we can really help our brands succeed.
It’s not for a lack of effort; it is often a lack of thinking and acting as futurists. Futurists who see a vision and a different way of working, thinking and acting as a brand.
I’ve known the leaders at Cravety for several years. They are ahead of their time – pushing the boundaries of how we should think and act within organizations to really help brands gain traction in this crazy, changing world.
By creating The Center of Experience, Greg has given us a practical, value-driven blueprint for building experience skills, capabilities and competencies for a brand or organization. Experience management is often misunderstood, fuzzy, focused on tactics and scores and a “nice to have” program in organizations. In fact, it is a business discipline that establishes rigor and structure which provides a holistic foundation for the way an organization works to engage everyone – employees, customers, partners and suppliers.
The author has created a step-by-step recipe for exploring the most critical assets of your organization - your customers and employees. He shares real situations and stories about how you can discover the interactions everyone in the ecosystem has with your brand.
You will find it is really about creating knowledge and momentum from a different vantage point and, most importantly, about defining the steps to change how you approach our discipline in a different way.
As you read this impactful book, you will find yourself realizing your work is actually about personal and professional change for everyone in the organization. It reflects experience discipline as more human/personal and encourages the psychology of “why” – discussing motivation, impact, structure, personalization. You’ll discover this powerful, holistic way to approach our discipline and profession by breaking from the typical data – action – metric cycle. It’s all here. With honest expression and stimulating, provocative thinking, Greg comes from a place of passion and understanding of what it takes to achieve value. You’ll be reading words from someone who has been there and done that. Who has a vision and a plan for the “how to” rather than just the theory.
Regardless of where you are in your journey, you will benefit from the insights, advice and tactical approach in The Center of Experience. Roll up your sleeves, gather together change agents in your organization, use the steps in this book and achieve your vision!
There is no doubt this book is a labor of love and with a lens of the future. Greg and the Cravety team have spent years partnering with organizations to build capabilities for them to discover and impact experiences and engagement with their customers.
How to tactically build a work/life experience really comes to life in The Center of Experience. Enjoy this succinct, impactful work and keep your planner handy – you’ll need it for all the ideas you will generate to move your experience discipline forward!
Diane Magers, CCXP, MS, MBA
Former Interim CEO for the Customer Experience Professionals Association; Founder and CEO, Experience Catalysts
“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
– Simon Sinek, author
I originally wanted to start this book with a perfect, yet very personal, example of what encapsulates great Experience with a capital “E”. By that, I mean that summation of employee and customer experience that made me forever loyal to company x, or wanted to work until I retired for company y. Instead of finding that single perfect example, I could much more easily name countless examples of small cases where a small action, the design of a process or interface, or some other detail occurred and added up to either a positive or negative feeling about a company, product or brand.
This thinking reflects reality, much more than a single grand gesture. Sure, in the movies, it’s a grand gesture that turns the tide, or wins over the hardened heart. But here in the real world, brands live or die by a thousand little actions and gestures. If they wait for the opportunity to do a single grand one, it will likely be too late. Consumers have way too many choices, have ready access anywhere they are, and are too busy for such things. The battle for consumers’ (and employees’) hearts and minds is fought every day in countless ways. Thus, the value of a great experience needs to be woven through every plan, every action, every idea.
The term “experience-led” is used in the subtitle of this book. I can explain what I mean by that, though I have to give credit to Cravety CEO Ed Bodensiek for using the term before I did. To me, it means that an organization understands the importance of both employee and customer experience enough to lead its thinking and initiatives with the idea that if the experience is valuable and rewarding, the company will tangibly benefit.
Being experience-led comes with many challenges, since companies have not traditionally had “experience” departments, and also because experience itself spans so many disciplines and facets of a consumer’s or employee’s interactions with an organization. Many are awakening to this to varying degrees, as evidenced by Gartner’s findings in late 2018 that “improving the employee experience” was one of HR’s top three goals for 20191, as well as similar statistics for customer experience. There is still much work to be done, and so I wrote this book because I see several gaps for organizations that want to tie both employee and customer experience together and become truly experience-led.
We find ourselves at an inflection point in the relationship between brands and their audiences, where customers and employees are demanding better and more valuable experiences. Companies must keep up with this demand in order to remain competitive. This includes competition for both customers as well as employees. More importantly, while many organizations have traditionally focused on external-facing initiatives first, it is the ones which start internally that have the greatest potential to provide long-term positive benefits. I believe so strongly in this that I devoted my last two books to this topic, centering The Agile Brand and The Agile Consumer around the premise that experience and relationships will separate successful organizations from the unsuccessful.
Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) have the power to individually influence an organization for the better. Benefits from EX include improved productivity, engagement, and turn-over rates, among other changes. But combined, they have the power to truly transform. When these three elements are combined successfully, we refer to the phenomenon as brand experience.
For many organizations, enabling great experiences for employees and customers supported by process, organizational culture, technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the ability to measure across the elements will be a game-changer. The speed at which these practices are applied could be the difference between exponential growth and losing out to the competition. However, as many early adopters have found, there are many hurdles to overcome for successful implementation of CX and EX within an organization.
Unfortunately, because EX and CX have unique requirements and are often applied by disconnected teams, this cannot be pinned down to a single issue. For improved experience to deliver upon its promise, a complex interworking of different factors will need to line up. These range from organizational and operational to the people, processes, and technologies utilized. Companies that understand how to make that work will be the winners, able to outsmart their competition.
For instance, in the 2019 edition annual CMO Survey by Deloitte, Duke University, and the American Marketing Association, the top challenge in managing customer experience was developing the necessary capabilities inside the organization to design, deliver, and monitor the customer experience2.
In order to address this, I’m proud to share the Center of Experience (COx) framework to help organizations with all of the tools needed to enable great experiences for both employees and customers, and to achieve and measure the return on investment that is referred to as Return on Experience (ROx).
The flexibility of the Center of Experience framework is also an asset. While it contains all of the aspects needed to have a true brand experience, you do not have to adopt every piece of it if you have some of the pieces already established within your organization. Thus, you can think of this as either an entire platform to use, or as a resource that you can rely on to fill gaps in your current experience transformation.
This book provides the blueprint for you to create your own Center of Experience.
This book is intended for experience practitioners who have the task of either setting up or improving the customer experience (CX) and/or employee experience (EX) within their organizations. As it can serve as a blueprint for your company, the Center of Experience framework, is made to be flexible to the needs of any organization, regardless of its experience maturity. You can take the pieces that are missing or relevant to you without having to adopt the entire model verbatim.
On the contrary, this book is not meant to convince the “uninitiated” that investing in customer experience and employee experience is a worthy endeavor. While I wholeheartedly believe that, there are many books dedicated to the value of EX and CX. Some valuable statistics and justification for approaches are given along the way, but this is first and foremost a working guide to creating a Center of Experience of your own.
I’ve separated this book into three parts, with the following structure:
Many of the terms and ideas, as well as the processes and methodologies mentioned in this book have been developed as part of the Cravety team and work. Because of this, I refer specifically to the names that Cravety uses for them.
This does not mean that you can’t thoroughly understand and benefit from reading this book without working with Cravety’s tools and methods, but I want to be completely transparent and specifically mention that, since, as one of the principals at Cravety, I do firmly believe those tools and methods provide great ways to undertake any experience strategy, design, and implementation work.
However, you should be able to learn and take lessons you can apply to your own experience work without relying on any of the specific tools mentioned in the pages that follow.
Again, since the intent of this book is to be as prescriptive as possible of how to set up your own Center of Experience, there is only so much that a single book can share with a general audience. Because of this, I decided to include some “idea starters” at the end of most of the chapters that may help you find a way to personalize the ideas discussed, or to start a piece of the process. My hope is that this helps you create your own Center of Experience more easily.
Because I am mentioning several terms that are potentially new to at least some of the audiences of this book, and introducing a few to the vernacular, I’ve included a glossary in the back that you can refer to if you come across something that would be helpful to learn more about.
Since this is a practical guide to standing up your own Center of Experience, I wanted to provide a sample slimmed-down version of the experience maturity assessment that Cravety uses with our clients to determine where their starting point is, and how we can best help them.
All in all, this should provide you with the blueprint to set up your own Center of Experience. All right, let’s get started!
“Being a great place to work is the difference between being a good company and a great company.”
– Brian Kristofek, President and CEO, Upshot
In this first section, we’re going to discuss what we mean by brand experience as a combination of customer and employee experience, and the purpose of the Center of Experience. We’ll also discuss what the Center of Experience is intended to accomplish, and provide a high-level definition of the elements involved.
Let’s get started with a definition of what is meant by brand experience.
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
Richard Branson - founder of The Virgin Group
Change is inevitable and often necessary for companies to survive. We live in a time when, if your industry has not already been “disrupted” by some new approach, it will be soon. This is so prevalent, in fact, that many companies aren’t waiting for external disruptions and are enacting massive changes to themselves.
So, change is coming in many forms, and under many names. There is “digital transformation,” sometimes shorthanded to just “transformation,” along with other things like a move to substantial investments in data science and exponential technologies (often using artificial intelligence and machine learning). For many of us, “experience” is another one of these major game changers. Except that experience has always existed; it is just getting a new focus because of factors too numerous to do justice in this book. But needless to say, just as the big data craze (and its subsequent investments) of several years ago enabled a lot of the technology and digital transformation of today, there have been many factors that have contributed to the current era of experience such as the following (and many more):
Even if your brand is achieving success in many areas, there are always areas in which it can be improved. The premise of the Center of Experience is that motivated employees and leaders contribute to a healthy culture, which makes the desired change possible in order to yield tangible results like cost savings through reduced turnover, or increased revenue from customers who buy more, buy more often, and refer others who buy (1.0).
Figure 1.0: Motivated employees drive healthy cultures, which drive great employee and customer experience.
It all starts with motivation. When employees are motivated to do great work, there is higher productivity and engagement, as well as higher retention rates. These all translate into tangible benefits for the organization.
Keeping employees motivated allows an organization to pivot in the best strategic direction while staying unified. This translates into greater efficiency in accomplishing key strategic objectives.
An aligned culture creates a cohesive brand and value proposition for employees and customers. This translates to loyal customers who buy more, buy more often, and recommend others. This same brand works with employees and translates into further loyalty, referrals and retention.
As we dive deep into the approaches and inner workings of the Center of Experience, or COx, it is important to start at the very beginning. The COx is based upon the foundation that a holistic brand experience provides tangible value to an organization.