The Language of Experience

Simon Wood 

This week I came across the list of the most influential tweeters/twitterers in market research on research-live.com Alas @SimonWood_TNS didn’t make the list. The news didn’t get me down too much though, after all – I have only persuaded 118 of you to follow my 140 character thoughts.

So congratulations to Leonard Murphy (@lennyism) on being the ‘official’ top MRS tweeter. However, I think whoever put this list together may have got something slightly awry (sorry Leonard). Namely, they forgot about the most successful market researcher out there:  @simoncowell (3m+ followers).

Now you’ve had chance to get over my preposterous suggestion, and mop up your spilt latte and the crumbs from your Pret croissant, just think about it. Here’s a man who has turned market research into a prime time activity!  What is X Factor, or that weird imitator with Bond villain-esque spinning chairs on the BBC?  Yes it’s a TV show, but in reality (pardon the pun) it’s a product /concept test!  As we’re all going gooey-eyed over the idea of ‘gamification’ in surveys and discussing how we might implement it, Simon Cowell (or SC as I ‘m going to call him) has been doing this for years!

Now market research and TV have a long history. In the UK, avid quiz show watchers will be familiar with Family Fortunes, Blankety Blank, Pointless, 8 out of 10 cats and that Channel 4 one with the shouty woman from Big Brother – all of which use market research data as the base of their answers. However, SC has gone way beyond that. Consider the usual NPD process. Companies come up with ideas, then pay researchers  to pay the public to tell us what they think of them. We researchers then work out which, if any, will sell.  What SC has managed to do, is to persuade the British public that it wants to participate. He and his team throw a load of potential artists together and we avidly vote for the ones we want – giving him his winning concepts – then go out and buy the ‘product’ the minute its launched/released!

SC’s even managed to make us researchers look a bit inept. While we, ‘the experts’, congratulate ourselves on that 10% response rate and wonder what huge incentive we’ll need to use to get 15%, he’s got about 9m people watching every week and countless more arranging their social lives around the time of day he conducts his fieldwork, plus those who participate pay to do so. How impressive is that! He’s got the public – those people who sign up to Telephone Preference Schemes, put the phone down on interviewers, ignore email invites etc. – paying to be involved in market research!

I suspect you’re probably not yet convinced that SC is the market research messiah.  However, here’s my final piece of evidence – he appears to be defining the language we use. Listen to the ‘contestants’ who lose. Every week they dutifully trot out how ‘its been an experience’, or ‘they’ve been on a great journey’. Now compare the research briefs you’ve got this year with those from three years ago.

What you’ll see is that we’re now researching ‘the customer journey’, ‘customer satisfaction’ studies have suddenly become ‘customer experience’ surveys. We have been ‘Cowelled’!

Things bring me onto the topic I wanted to discuss this month – the language we use in customer ‘experience’, and more importantly what that means for the work we do.

‘Customer Experience’
I’m not quite sure when this happened, but customer ‘experience’ researchers refocussed. We no longer wanted to measure how satisfied customers are, or even how loyal, we now want to take a ‘holistic’ view encompassing everything – not just the rational ‘did I get what I want’ but the emotional ‘how do I feel’.  We’re also no longer just interested in what happened on the day – but the whole process of before and after and how that fitted with the desired ‘experience’.

Now plenty of people have written plenty of stuff about this and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but here’s my view.

There’s no question that a large number of research practitioners (and some buyers) have cynically adopted the ‘experience’ tag as a new buzz word and just carried on as before.  If that description fits you, then hang your head in shame!  There is a fundamental difference between measuring ‘experience’ and traditional ‘satisfaction’.  Nailing down that definition will always be difficult, but if we want to do good research we need to take a wider, bigger viewpoint. Traditional satisfaction studies have tended to focus on what happens on the day or on the relationship from a very procedural view – looking at the different touchpoints and how well each of those works.  The better studies tend to include an emotional aspect.

Being a customer is not just about what happens on the day when you interact with a brand.  It’s not just about whether the customer had their rational needs met and were left ‘satisfied’.  The true customer experience includes an emotional attachment.  It also goes on for longer than just the day of interaction itself.  The experience is both of the service they receive but also of using your product going forward (does it work as they hoped?), and what it means for them in their wider life i.e. can they be proud of being one of your customers or will they be embarrassed to admit it to their friends?  Ultimately it’s about their overall relationship with your brand – something we need to acknowledge and include in how we research them.

For those of you interested in thinking more about this I recommend an article published in the International Journal of Market Research (Customer experience: are we measuring the right things? Stan Maklan and Phil Klaus, Vol. 53, No. 6, 2011).  I’m not going to say I agree with it, but its a short, readable starting point for thinking about this area.

The Customer Journey
The desire for research mapping the ‘Customer Journey’ is probably the biggest trend I’ve seen this year.  Not only do most ‘experience’ measurement briefs want to include it, but there appear to be many briefs which are focussing on this alone.  The usual critics suggest this is a fad and make up silly examples about how they walk to the restaurant, walk to a table, then sit down etc.  These people fundamentally miss the point.  For me, you simply cannot do customer experience research unless you understand the customer ‘journey’.  And if you come across someone willing to sell you a customer experience survey without checking what the journey is at the outset I strongly advise removing their business card out of your rolodex .

Why do I think this is so important?  Well, how do you measure the customer experience, if you don’t know what it is?

Personally I send congratulations to all those brands who want to reassess their knowledge of this.  It’s old hat to say that the way markets have worked has changed – but it’s true.  The internet and globalisation has meant many traditional purchase funnel models or paths to purchase don’t hold true anymore.  Furthermore, too many ‘customer centric’ companies approach the purchase process from an internal viewpoint – assuming customers go through a process which matches their internal structures and systems.

If you want to deliver an exceptional customer service you need to look at how you interact with customers through their eyes.  What processes (if any) do they go through?  What loops are there?  Fundamentally, what mission are they on – and how does that affect their needs?

In reality, customers are all different and will all have different needs.  In fact the same customers will have different needs on different missions.  It will appear complex and possibly contradictory, and the implications for how your organisation works could be far reaching.

However, once you understand customer’s needs, and the journeys they go on, then you can orientate your procedures etc around the needs they have.  Of course you could go ahead regardless.  And you might even be lucky and get it right!  But do you want to take that gamble?  No organisation has an automatic right to win, and there’s one thing you can be sure of – customers will readily leave you if you get it wrong!  Just ask the ex-CEOs of Woolworths, Raleigh bikes, or those who have left the M&S hotseat.

But what does that mean for us researchers?
Well, we’re foolish if we think we can just design an appropriate survey approach or even a questionnaire without understanding the ‘customer journey’. We can design one – but whether it will be the right one is a whole different kettle of fish (I’ve never understood why you’d have kettles of fish but that’s a different debate).  We need to ensure that we include an initial phase which examines and reviews the customer journey into every customer experience project.  This needn’t be expensive, nor take a long time – in fact it needn’t even include primary research.  But before we start any survey design we simply have to rewind and understand what the customer will be going through and what the important things to measure are at what stage.

This is fundamental to the research being a success.  Otherwise, we risk bloated questionnaires, that ask the wrong thing and generate meaningless ‘insight’, and are likely to irritate the very customers who fill them in.

The will always be a tendency to dive straight in – time pressures are a constant in our industry and now before than ever we need to deliver research faster.  But resist the temptation – build your research on solid foundations, if you don’t it’ll come back to haunt you in the end.

Simon Wood is Head of Stakeholder Management Research at TNS UK.

The views expressed in this blog posting are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of TNS, nor of its associated companies.