Shouldn’t the client experience be as important as the customer experience?

Customer Experience (CX) management is one of the most exciting areas of marketing today. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s exciting and profitable to be engaged in the science and art of satisfying customers.

One of the areas where CX is getting a lot of attention is in web and application development. This isn’t surprising, given the essential role the web (and other digital technology) plays in delivering value to customers.

Web development has evolved from tactical brochure-ware in the mid ‘90s to playing an essential role in customer experience in today’s global digital marketplace. No doubt this is because technology has finally caught up with the promises made by early internet visionaries – personalization, integration with point-of-sale, and thousands of online and offline touchpoints. Plus, because of advanced analytics,
we now have end-to-end visibility of the customer journey.

With these advancements come some challenges, however. The teams that plan and build complex digital systems require more and broader skills – and more information – to get them right. The executives that lead the client teams need continually growing visibility into the process too, because building and operating these systems is just a small component of their responsibilities. The first challenge, building the technologies, can be addressed with staffing, training and specialization. But the second challenge, providing more visibility and understanding, is another matter altogether – not because transparency isn’t important, but because the CMO’s bandwidth is being stretched to its limits.

While software and processes have been developed to ensure that the customer journey is well-served – everything from advanced CX research to journey mapping, personalization, analytics, addressable media, mobile technologies, etc. – far less has been done to ensure that the sponsors (clients) of these experiences are as well-served.

Growth, complexity of the digital ecosystem drive the need for greater client/developer alignment

The failure to serve the client is particularly troubling given the complexity of planning, building and managing the technology that supports today’s richer customer experience.

The marketing executives that lead the development of digital solutions are key to gathering insights into customers and their needs; the company and its solutions; and the various roles channel partners (among others) can play. And often, extracting all of these insights and market intelligence is restricted because the marketer “didn’t know what he didn’t know” about the technologies in play.

Deep understanding of content management systems, customer relationship marketing (CRM), marketing automation, data integrity, security, etc., are tough enough for professionals who focus on them day in and day out – let alone for busy marketing executives with myriad nontechnical things to think about. Consequently, these marketing executives need to rely on trusted advisers to guide them and ensure that their digital marketing vision actually comes to life. The problem is, many of these trusted advisers, while competent in their ability to plan and build complex digital solutions, fall short of delivering the world-class experience their clients deserve, expect and need to make their digital initiatives successful.

Addressing this challenge requires more than communications; it requires alignment of the client’s needs with the development team’s needs. This alignment enables deep understanding of business challenges and opportunities; deep understanding of options, and their costs and benefits; and a deep understanding of processes and their human and monetary costs. In short, digital solutions being built today must serve the customer journey and be designed, built and deployed with the client’s journey in mind too.

Like Customer experience, client experience is about exceeding expectations

Every day, around the world, brands are observing and optimizing the interactions between their customers (and employees and channel partners) and their companies. And the enlightened companies are pushing it beyond that: imagining ways the interactions and the experience could be better – being proactive before their customers complain about the current ways or suggest new ones.

The team at Marcus Thomas (and our predecessor digital teams at DigiKnow LLC) have been involved in planning, designing and building complex digital experiences since 1995, when we built websites and online communities for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Red Wings. Since then, the agency’s U.S. and Argentine teams have designed and built more than 700 websites, mobile apps and custom software projects for brands ranging from Visa to Nestlé to Sherwin- Williams, GE and others.

When building these sizable technology projects, the expected focus was always on satisfying the customer journey, within the project budget and timeline. But this is just table stakes. If you book passage on a cruise ship, you expect the ship will get you to its intended destination, but I doubt you’d view that journey a success if the experience failed to leave you awe-inspired.

Customer experience is all about creating experiences that exceed expectations – especially the emotional, unspoken ones – and the client is key to giving us a window into those expectations. If we know this, shouldn’t the client journey be just as awe-inspiring? The answer is a resounding yes.

This conclusion led the Web and Application Development Team at Marcus Thomas to differentiate its service offering by building a world-class client experience while continuing to deliver world-class digital customer experiences.

With the goal of building a world-class client experience, it’s important to create a structure that is repeatable and flexible enough to work across a variety of development engagements. The first step to achieving this structure was an examination of our current development process.

The below process map illustrates the stages of development and interactions that occur in a typical development scenario. Other elements (not shown)

Here, we measure and optimize our performance against our marketing and business objectives list specific deliverables, who would be involved and what their role(s) would be at each step. This process is fine if you’re merely focused on completing the project. But if your goal is to improve the experience, you’ve got to do more.

In a July 2018 Marcus Thomas-conducted survey of marketers’ satisfaction with the technology development experience, we discovered that 57% of marketing executives felt their most recent digital project “met their objectives, but communications along the way were lacking.”

In addition to the revelation that most marketers were as unhappy with the process, the survey gave us glimpses into client expectations and what they valued when it came to creating a more satisfying and successful development experience.

More than 70% of our respondents felt that written technical specifications were critical to success of their project, yet only 50% actually had received them. And 80% of our respondents felt written business requirements were critical to program success, yet fewer than 70% actually had them for their most recent project.

The agency’s takeaway from this simple survey and a deeper review of CX concepts is that there is much misalignment between client expectations and how those expectations are being met. Most significant, is the ignorance of (or apathy toward) those expectations. While there is certainly room for more in-depth study, the findings suggest that major opportunities exist to improve client experience with more visibility and clarity of those processes/procedures.

To meet the challenges of serving clients and their customers, the Web and Application Development Team at Marcus Thomas envisioned a new approach to how we plan, communicate and collaborate throughout the development process. This approach requires new thinking in five critical areas:

1. We first toss out the idea that the development process is linear. Certainly, the process from the developer’s perspective is mostly linear, but in reality each of the steps along the way is a small loop. For example, Discovery isn’t just about gathering and reporting on that listening process. There are steps for pre-discovery, inviting participants, advance briefing, moderating, reporting, analyzing, presenting, revising … and this is true of every step for the development process.
2. Then we use an Agile roadmapping process to detail each step in this “looping” process. Doing this gives us a better idea of what the client journey really looks like. It identifies where we can engage and serve our client, and it reveals more opportunities to “imagine” ways each step can be more effective for them.
3. Next, we recognize that the client isn’t a singular person; the client is multidimensional. That is, while the main project owner is our direct client, there are many others – sales, research, channel partners, compliance officers, content providers, IT, etc. – who are either served directly or indirectly through our main project lead. The epiphany here isn’t that there are many people represented on the client team (that is obvious). The epiphany is that the client should be viewed as multidimensional. And the thing to take away from this is that failing to satisfy the different expectations of the client players would not only result in an inferior product, it could result in the client lead (and us) getting fired.
4. Then we identify the various roles each client dimension plays at each step of the development process. Are they actively involved? Just providing input? In a review/approval role? Or some combination of these roles?
5. Finally, we map the baseline expectations (deliverable) that must be met for each client dimension at each step. We can really make a difference by imagining and addressing “what if?” scenarios to exceed those baseline emotional and physical expectations each client dimension could have along the way. We also look at what might threaten those expectations and what response/ emotion we should seek at each stage in our process.

Keep in mind that the purpose behind this approach is to reveal ways that baseline expectations are being overlooked and to also uncover ways to exceed expectations.

You can imagine that as you study each client type, the specific needs and expectations at each stage of the development process can become overwhelming and/or where addressing them doesn’t make economic sense. We solve this challenge by looking for places/ways a single tactic or approach can meet multiple needs or expectations.

Of course, the real goal is to maximize the ways you exceed expectations, because, as we’ve said earlier, everything else is just table stakes.

If you’ve hired a development firm to build your dot com, you expect them to build your dot com and meet all of your specifications. What really makes an impact is when the process of planning, building and launching that dot com fulfills expectations that you didn’t even know you had.