Clued In : How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again

by Carbone, Lewis

• ISBN13: 9780131015500
• ISBN10: 0131015508
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: FT Press

Summary

Good, bad, or indifferent, every customer has an experience with your company and the products or services you provide. But few businesses really manage that customer experience... so they lose the chance to transform customers into lifetime customers

Author Biography

Lou Carbone has been exploring the dynamics of experience creation and management for 20 years. He founded and currently serves as CEO of Experience Engineering

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xix
The Case for Experience Management	p. 1
Orange Roofs and the Mouse: A Tale of Two Icons	p. 3
The Roots of Experience	p. 3
Seeing Orange	p. 5
Making Clues Systematic	p. 7
A World Apart	p. 15
Experience by Design	p. 17
Experiential Vision	p. 18
Enduring Lessons	p. 19
A Constant Learning Process	p. 21
Experience Evolution	p. 22
References	p. 23
Experience As a Value Proposition	p. 25
Smelling the Coffee	p. 27
A Valuable Cup of "Joe"	p. 29
Customers, Coffee, and Doughnuts	p. 34
An Alan Wrench for Your Thinking	p. 36
Taking the Next Step	p. 39
References	p. 40
The Brand Canyon	p. 43
Brand and Experience	p. 44
Exploring Experience Motifs	p. 49
Brand Junction	p. 54
A Tipping Point?	p. 55
Below the Radar	p. 56
References	p. 59
Experience Value Management	p. 61
The Preference Model	p. 62
Tying a Ribbon Around Experience	p. 63
Clue Math	p. 67
Principles of Experience Value Management	p. 69
Value-Added Education	p. 76
Focusing on Clues	p. 78
References	p. 78
Getting Clued in	p. 79
More About Clues	p. 80
Works Right, Feels Right	p. 83
Clued In	p. 85
Clue Clusters	p. 85
Clues in Action	p. 86
The Mechanic Side	p. 88
Too Much of a Good Thing?	p. 89
The Humanic Side	p. 92
Connecting with Customers	p. 94
Making Clues Count	p. 97
References	p. 98
Approach to Experience Value Management	p. 99
Managing Experience Value	p. 101
Process and Experience	p. 102
Establishing a Context	p. 103
Deliberate Systems	p. 104
Systems Perspective	p. 106
Start at the End First	p. 106
Systematic Stagecraft	p. 107
It's Really About Performance	p. 109
Casting Calls	p. 110
Realistic Expectations	p. 111
Managing the Value Proposition	p. 112
A Disciplined Approach	p. 114
The Disciplines of Experience Value Management	p. 115
Developing Competencies and Tools	p. 116
Thinking Systematically	p. 117
References	p. 118
The Practice of Experience Management	p. 119
The Discipline of Assessing Experience	p. 121
Why Assess?	p. 122
Exploring Experience Topography	p. 124
Assessing with Purpose	p. 125
Organizational Inclination	p. 127
Audiences and Experiences	p. 128
Experience Insight Wellsprings	p. 129
Employee Experiences	p. 130
Leveraging the Moment	p. 131
Eye-Opening Discoveries	p. 133
Internal Experiences	p. 134
Creating a Sound Foundation	p. 135
References	p. 135
The Discipline of Auditing Experiences	p. 137
Multiple Perspectives	p. 138
Auditing Components	p. 141
Transforming Experiences by Observing	p. 148
Emergency Sensitivities	p. 150
Widening the Vision	p. 152
Stretching Physical Boundaries	p. 153
Everything Counts	p. 154
Gaining Emotional Insights	p. 156
Staying on Target	p. 158
Insights Through Communication	p. 159
Obvious and Subtle	p. 160
Audit the Full Spectrum	p. 161
Expect More	p. 163
References	p. 163
The Discipline of Designing Experiences	p. 165
Illusions and Realities	p. 165
Experience Design Practices	p. 167
References	p. 191
The Discipline of Implementing Experiences	p. 193
Experiential Leadership	p. 193
Familiar Approaches: A Clued-in Team	p. 195
References	p. 214
The Discipline of Stewarding Experiences	p. 215
Understanding Experience Harmonics	p. 215
Experiential Learning Quest	p. 218
Getting Clued In	p. 223
Words and Meaning	p. 224
Start Where You Want to Finish	p. 228
On a Role	p. 230
Stewards of True Value	p. 233
References	p. 234
Afterword	p. 235
Appendix	p. 245
Acknowledgments	p. 255
Index	p. 259
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface Every sound business is built around a simple proposition: It makes or does something so well that customers will pay for the value being created. Peter Drucker, perhaps the most significant management scholar of our time, reduces this proposition to two basic axioms: A business has to make money, and a business has to make customers. It's not an either/or--the two are opposite faces of the same coin. If a business doesn't make customers, it won't survive to make money. If it doesn't make money, it won't survive to make customers. One form of value must connect with the other. Although many people in business will find this proposition familiar, fewer have extended its reasoning to the logical conclusion--that the customer is the ultimate arbiter of the value an organization creates and delivers, not CEOs, CFOs, shareholders, or stakeholders. Though each can make important contributions to the health and success of the business, none of them will be around for the long run unless the business creates value for its customers. In recent years, many businesses--many entire industries, in fact--seem to have lost their sense of balance in this regard. In trying to maximize the value of customers to their businesses, they appear to have lost sight of the need for their organizations to create value for their customers. The evidence is depressingly familiar: Airlines have systematically reduced the experience of flying to the feeling of being herded onto and off of an airborne cattle car (a form of experience that was ongoing long before September 11). Banks persistently charge account holders premium penalties for the most routine services. Periodically, some even try to nick customers for the experience of talking to a real live teller. Or the customer endures a circuitous maze created by the call center instant voice response banter to get to a destination.Credit card companies have tried to continually create new ways to bump interest rates into double digits and add painful penalty charges, to boot--this in an economy where the interest rate charged to banks has been at or near record levels. Reorienting Priorities From your own experiences, you can no doubt expand and extend this list with examples from across the full spectrum of business to find companies of every size and industry engaged in dysfunctional value creation. As wide-ranging as your examples may be, however, they'll probably have one thing in common: In virtually every case, someone will have made a decision that emphasizes how the customer can create value for the company (the financial value of the customer's business) more than how the company can create value for the customer. In few of these cases will the desires of customers have been factored in, let alone viewed as a priority. Far from trying to find a balance between customer expectations and business realities, it's a truism today that many decisions are based on only one perspective of value--the company's. The question of how to balance the value of the experience to the customer and the value of the customer to the company leads to an opportunity to "value engineer" the relationship between organizations and their customers, thereby making any market segment profitable. I believe today's organizations have become extraordinarily vulnerable. By neglecting to factor in customer expectations and preferences consistently --by essentially disenfranchising the customer from the focal point of value creation--these businesses have abdicated their obligation to customers and themselves. The result? With modern management fixated almost solely on the bottom line, the value proposition of far too many businesses has become increasingly one-sided: lots of emphasis on the company but little on enhancing the customer value. The overriding concern for maximizing short-term financial results now permeates business thinking from "mahog