It Was a Strokes of Genius

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

In my 20 years as a consultant for Customer Experience, I have been involved in several successful implementations. The Maersk Line project that I worked on with Michél Patterson, a continuous improvement expert in Lean Six Sigma was one of the most, with an improvement of 40 points for their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) over 30 months. What’s more is they also experienced a 10 percent increase in shipping volumes.

Implementation was a big part of that success. To that end, in this episode we share the five rules of a successful customer experience implementation. Michel Patterson takes the lead on this one, as a career-long believer in continuous improvement providing the following five rules she used in her first, and very successful, project with customer experience improvement:

1. Define: What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Measure: How will you know if what you do is working?
3. Analyze: What changes are possible that might improve experiences?
4. Improve: How can you roll these changes out on a larger basis?
5. Control: How can you keep things moving in the right direction?

In this episode, we cover these five rules and how they played out in our highly successful Customer Experience implementation for the world’s largest shipping container company. 

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

If you know anything about Lean Six Sigma, you probably recognize the five rules. These phases of the implementation serve as excellent guideposts in a customer experience project like this one. Michel Patterson says that for her first project in the implementation area, these five areas were the natural inclination for organizing their efforts with Maersk. 

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

• 06:44  Michel Patterson explains how she didn’t have a lot of experience with handling customer experience improvement projects, so she relied on her Lean Six Sigma background and project management structure, starting with Define.
• 14:43  Michel Patterson explains the concept about putting Measure second in the list and why it is essential it is there.
• 22:04  We discuss the third in the list, Analyze and how the changes you make are going to improve the experience and move the metric identified in the second step, Measure.   
• 25:00  Colin brings up the Ambassadors, how they were chosen, and the role they played in the implementation. 
• 26:52 After you improve your experience in a bigger way based on the first three steps, you land at Control, which is where you keep things going and improving continuously.  
• 30:58  Colin adds in some details he remembers from the implementation and how they played into the success of the overall project.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

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