By Nat Ives
Netflix Inc. lets binge watchers skip the opening credits of TV
shows. Domino's Pizza Inc. alerts customers with updates about
their pie as it's being prepared. Harry's Inc.'s razors now produce
a 'click' when users change blades.
The theory behind these actions is that customers don't just
want to be the emotionless end point on a transaction. They want a
good experience.
More companies are viewing that experience as an increasingly
powerful driver of business success as traditional advertising gets
harder, as data and technology offer new ways to cater to customers
and as social media amplifies bad experiences in unprecedented
ways.
Increasingly firms are creating new positions for people who are
in charge of maximizing these efforts. "The experience of the
product is bigger than the product itself," said Donald Chesnut,
who became Mastercard Inc.'s first chief experience officer in
2019. "It's everything around it. How well does it work? How does
the product feel?"
Some 89% of companies employed a chief experience officer or an
equivalent role in 2019, up from 61% in 2017, according to research
and advisory firm Gartner Inc., which surveyed nearly 400 large
companies in the U.S., Canada and U.K. about their customer
experience management.
In the U.S., 330 people listed chief experience officer as their
new job title on LinkedIn in 2019, up from 125 who did the same in
2015, LinkedIn said.
The heightened attention to a customer's experience can be
traced back to the technology boom of the 1990s, when the internet
created new points of contact between companies and consumers. Now
the chief experience officer position is prevalent enough in the
corporate world that it has its own custom abbreviation: CXO.
The companies that have a CXO include restaurant chain TGI
Fridays Inc., bank Citizens Financial Group Inc., travel site
TripAdvisor Inc. and Tile Inc., whose gadgets help people find lost
objects. Sportswear company Under Armour Inc. named its first chief
experience officer this month.
But just adding a hot title to the c-suite won't always get the
job done, experts said.
"That's not enough to make the whole thing really work," said
Caren Fleit, managing director at executive search and management
consulting firm Korn Ferry. Organizations need to go through a
deliberate process to identify the capabilities they're missing,
the internal silos that could get in the way, the right size and
structure of the team most responsible for experience and any
changes to compensation needed to give people incentives to
deliver, Ms. Fleit said.
It is not always clear what skills or background to seek in CXOs
-- who are typically drawn from disciplines such as marketing,
information technology and product development -- -nor is it clear
how many companies will measure the success of these executives.
CXOs can also find themselves too removed from the ground-level
decisions, sometimes seemingly small ones, that cumulatively shape
customer experiences, said Cliff Kuang, a user experience designer
and co-author of the book "User Friendly."
"You need someone who can get into the weeds but also see the
broader picture," Mr. Kuang said. "It's just rare." A big question,
he added, is "what does a leader look like and what does it take to
empower that position? People don't have answers."
For companies that don't have a CXO, the work is still important
enough to be assigned to multiple top executives. At Domino's,
which is facing mounting competition for delivery customers,
responsibility for experience is shared among executives like Chief
Digital Officer Dennis Maloney.
The Domino's approach to crafting an experience for its
customers is to rely on oceans of data pulled from sources
including point-of-sale systems and 26 supply chain centers as well
as text messages, Twitter and Amazon Echo. The world's largest
pizza chain works with data management and analytics companies like
Splunk Inc. and Talend Inc.
One goal is to determine what kinds of promotions to offer and
when, while avoid annoying people with poorly timed or unappealing
offers. Another is to spot bad customer experiences like a sluggish
website before they become too widespread -- or big on Twitter.
"The consumer's willingness and forgiveness in that space is
decreasing rapidly," Mr. Maloney said. "It used to be 5 or 10 years
ago, if your site was slow I'll give you a break." Now if a website
begins to lag, he said, there is no tolerance.
One specific output of Domino's data is its Live Pizza Tracker,
which gives customers real-time updates about their pizza as it is
being made. It alleviates some of the impatience customers feel as
they wait for their order to arrive, according to Mr. Maloney.
"That single device from a consumer experience standpoint has
been incredibly important for us," Mr. Maloney said.
Some companies say the key to creating a great experience for
customers starts with something simple: listening.
At Harry's, its razors didn't always make a clicking sound when
blades snapped into place. Co-founder Jeff Raider said the company
changed the design after a user said he wanted to hear something
when he locked in a new blade. "One of our customers went into his
garage, hollowed out a piece of his handle and said 'If you make
that change, you can get that click,'" Mr. Raider said. "We said,
'Can you send that handle to us?'"
But listening is often not enough. Sometimes what a company
hears can create new, unintended problems.
When Netflix heard from subscribers that they wanted the service
to highlight coming attractions, the company tested a large preview
unit at the top of the screen. "We think it's going to work," said
Todd Yellin, vice president of product at Netflix, who shares
responsibility for the customer experience with Steve Johnson, vice
president for product and studio design, and other executives. But
even though customers asked for it, they didn't use it, Mr. Yellin
said.
The company realized that the unit was making it harder for
users to reach programs they could watch right away. "When I want
instant gratification, I don't want a big part of the interface
taken up with 'coming soon,' " Mr. Yellin said. "I want what I can
play now."
The solution: It moved the coming attractions to a section that
people could navigate to if interested.
Another change designed to improve the Netflix customer
experience was a decision to let members skip the opening credits
of serialized TV shows.
Long opening-credits sequences make sense for traditional TV
viewing, when episodes arrive a week apart and people watch other
shows in between, Mr. Yellin said. But as binge viewing became more
popular, Netflix discovered the old format degraded the experience
for people watching several episodes of the same show in a row, he
said.
The company tested the skip button on a subset of members. "They
loved it, and even more importantly as a subscription service, it
encouraged people to keep subscribing," Mr. Yellin said.
At Mastercard, one recent change made to enhance the customer
experience is a "True Name" program that allows transgender
customers to use the name of their choice on credit cards even if
it isn't their legal name. This change was made "by understanding
the journey that people go through every time they pull the card
out of their wallet," said Mr. Chesnut, the company's new chief
experience officer.
Mastercard is also grappling with unintended consequences of any
changes that make the payment process easier.
Customers want their purchases to go smoothly and quickly, Mr.
Chesnut said. But if a cashierless grocery makes checking out so
effortless that nobody takes out their credit cards, do they forget
about Mastercard? "There's some debate we have internally -- is too
little friction a bad thing?" he said.
One fix to that potential problem is a signature sound that now
plays when customers use a contactless card to pay for a New York
City taxi ride, according to the company. It eliminates friction
but still lets people know that payment went through -- and that
Mastercard did it.
Write to Nat Ives at nat.ives@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 21, 2020 11:44 ET (16:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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