Improvisation is a good analogy for how many customer experiences unfold, and it’s especially important in digital media (though more difficult to accomplish). If there isn’t a person guiding the experience (like a salesperson or customer support agent), the system should improvise and provide a coherent experience, automatically, no matter what the customer does. This provides more value than a static experience that is the same for everyone, regardless of what they do, but it requires much more thought, planning, and engineering. However, if you value the best experiences, websites and online services must do this, regardless of the complexity. Games do this, inherently, as the experience unfolds for a user despite the variations in behavior that she may exhibit (not to mention her goals). This kind of system behavior creates an experience that goes far beyond mere tasks, and it enables both the reaction to and the expression of emotions, values, and core meanings by customers and audiences (and influence over the customer’s state of mind).
Which type of interaction you have or choose is up to you. The important thing is to have the right interaction, to evoke the right experience, for the right person, at the right time because you considered it, not because others have done it or it’s a default.
Customer Time Versus Corporate Time
The next step in understanding a relationship is to see what happens to customers as they connect with touchpoints over time. Remember: a single wonderful experience is not enough. You have to make sure your customers have many valued experiences over time to keep the relationship going and that these different touchpoints reinforce each other, collectively. To do this, experiences must happen on your customers’ preferred time frame.
Many businesses have this figured out. Hotel services are usually arranged around their customer’s schedule, rather than what would be best for them. If the hotel had its way, the most efficient path would be to have visitors up, fed, and out the door as early as possible. That way, its housekeepers could come in all at once, in one shift, and do their thing. But the customer may not want that, which is why housekeepers linger with little to do in the early morning. Similarly, it would be best for a fine dining restaurant to get through as many customers as possible in a short time. Instead, they move at their customers’ more leisurely pace. This highlights two ways to organize an experience through time.
• Corporate time. The schedule on which companies can efficiently produce and deliver products, services, events, and promotions.
• Customer time. The continuous engagement customers have with the world as they interact with a company. In other words, they live in the world and that drives the pace they want.
The biggest difference between the two is that customer time isn’t only focused on one organization’s products and services in a vacuum. For customers, time flows along in their lives as they interact with everyone’s products and services (not just one company’s). Designing experiences from the customer’s perspective needs to take into account a much wider set of events. Corporate time usually lurches forward on its internal schedule and only takes into account what happens in the organization. There are campaign launches, product drops, important trade shows, ad schedules, and so on, many of which have nothing to do with what customers want.
A great example of this is how many technology companies approach the release of new versions of their products. A vice president at an enterprise software company tells of the dynamic within his company that governs product releases. He explained how customers aren’t interested in frequent releases to the products they use; in fact, customers don’t want their products to change often. So, their tolerance for change is low, as are their expectations of the need for change. However, the leadership within the company is highly concerned about losing great salespeople who look for the opportunity to resell software in order to earn their commissions and keep their jobs lucrative and interesting. Two years is about all they’ll wait for a major update that allows them to resell to their past customers. In this case, corporate time calls for a release every two years, whereas customer time wants something much more gradual. The two are in marked conflict, and which path the company chooses says something about its relationship priorities.
It’s important to understand and be sensitive to customer time. You can’t merely look at moments when you reach out to your customers. You have to look at what happens at all times. Your customers don’t just live in your world. They have touchpoints with your competitors, partners, each other, and a myriad of other sources. They live in a world that is much bigger than yours, so you should take account of at least some of these other interactions if you hope to build a successful relationship with them. That doesn’t mean you must interact with them all of the time—in fact, you want to stay out of the way when you’re not wanted. But you do need to take their mindsets into account, interact when they want you to, and make them feel better if you can. Remember after 9/11 when movie studios pulled their release schedules for violent films or stalled comedy programs until people were in better moods (or bigger need) to laugh? Those actions were responding to customer time instead of corporate time.
Above all, you should not put customers on corporate time if you can avoid it because it has nothing to do with their lives. They may put up with it, but they won’t love it.
The Pace of Change
The pace of a relationship tells you how often a customer wants to experience your company or a change in their circumstances. To understand it, you should recognize a few principles:
• Understand that your relationship time frame may be much longer than you think. Too many companies view the relationship boundaries as starting and stopping with the touchpoint or even the transaction. Relationships, however, start earlier and last longer than any touchpoint or transaction, and any development must stretch over this longer period in order to be effective. You can’t neglect any part of the relationship, although you may want to focus on some interactions more than others.
• You should only interact when needed. Nobody wants to hear from you all of the time. Apple renews its operating system every year or so, adding new features and capabilities that make its customers happy. But it doesn’t do it every day, because it would annoy most of its users to learn a new interface more often. Theoretically, you could send your customers a great offer every day, but you’d be foolish to do so.
• And don’t forget, you’re interacting any time a customer uses your product. If you sell garden tools, the best thing you can do is make sure they are produced well and renew your relationship every time they are used. As a result, not much further interaction is necessary.
• Relationships go through phases. The intensity of your interaction with your customers will change over time. It’s important to keep it up, and to know when you should reach out and feed the relationship. If you think about a company that makes watches, it does not need to contact its customers often. But after a while, customers tire of the experience their watches provide, so the company should be ready to intervene and make the relationship evolve.
Setting the Tone
So there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s not difficult to understand how you’re doing over time. Everyone has personal relationships, and that makes it easy to understand how companies can build relationships as well. You can figure out how to improve relationships and devise steps for doing so. You simply have to take an active role in researching and understanding what’s wanted and do your best to fulfill that.
The following are a few core principles that you should observe:
• Not all relationships are meant to be. Frankly, you can’t please everyone all of the time. You merely want to structure experiences so that you build strong valuable relationships