Focus on your customers’ objectives to deliver a winning customer experience

A business professor at Harvard once said, ‘People don’t want a ¼-inch drill, what they want is a ¼-inch hole in their wall.’

That’s the difference between an objective and a higher objective.

The objective is your product or service. The higher objective is the ultimate goal.

So, ask your team this question:

“Our customers buy this product or service from us – why do they do that?”

Empathy and understanding about what really matters to your customers (their objectives and goals) should shape the customer experience you and your team want to create.

It’s natural to focus on the product or service – ‘we sell drills, cars, cakes, office space’ – and lose sight of the fact that it’s always in service of your customer’s high objective.

To help you with this, Matt Watkinson recommends a 4-part framework of ‘mental reconnaissance’ to help you delve into the detail of your customers’ lives to inform and guide your customer experience.

1. SUPER OBJECTIVES – This underpins a whole range of lower objectives. Matt states: “Brian and Jenny are on their honeymoon. Steve has a client meeting. James is attending a friend’s funeral. They are all flying economy class to San Francisco. Yet for all their similarity, the three have radically different higher objectives, and thinking about them could open up a world of opportunities for the airline.”

2. SUBTEXT – This is the difference between what people say and what they mean – the underlying thoughts that are behind their behaviour. You build empathy with your customer when you understand their motives and relate these back to their higher objective.

3. OBJECTIVES – The reason why your customer performs an activity or task using your product or service. Your customer is travelling to San Francisco on a certain day and time, but there might be other objectives that feed into that:

• finding the cheapest fare
• knowing how to get to the airport
• packing for length of stay or weather

So why not email your customer the weather forecast for their destination, along with a list of the top ten most forgotten items when packing?

Many businesses don’t often consider the underlying objectives when it comes to the customer experience, so this is an area where you can make a big impression. Customer expectation that you will do this are very low.

4. STAKES – Every customer objective has a different level of importance, e.g., holiday flight vs funeral flight. The stakes and level of risk are different. Start by asking ‘what is it that we want our customers to feel as part of their experience?’

Define the emotional criteria of your product or service and think about what you don’t want people to feel and how that can be avoided.

‘Satisfying the high stakes objectives is the route to a great customer experience.’