Human-centricity from CX to HX

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Transcript of recording with Ray Poynter – generated automatically by HappyScribe which means it will be about 80% accurate – if you spot confusing errors, please email ray@new-mr.com. The timestamps are included to help you jump directly to a point of interest.

[00:00:05.060] – Ray Poynter

Hi, Ray Poynter here, and I’m going to be talking about the shift from SCIEX customer experience to Ajax human experience, really starting to think about human centricity. So let’s have a look at how we got here and what the market situation is today that faces brands. We have had for some time now product parity. It’s very hard to produce a product that is fundamentally better than the products that other people can produce. We are increasingly seeing service parity. Two providers can provide the same level of service if they focus on it, we know what is required, we know what the tools are, we know what the methods are.

[00:00:57.250] – Ray Poynter

So increasingly the lead brands. Provide that high level of service, the discount brands provide a set level of service, so within a category, within the genre, there’s service parity, there is supply chain parity. So we no longer see that it’s possible for one company to have much better logistics, much better operations, because we’re sourcing from a global market. We’re pulling all these things together and there is parity there, too. And there is advertising dollar parity.

[00:01:38.020] – Ray Poynter

By and large, the only way for your advertising to be much better than somebody else’s is for you to spend more on placing that advertising. It’s not about spending more and making better ads. That’s obviously important, but it’s not the key driver because everybody places their money in the way they think is going to optimise the quality of the ads. No, it’s to do with how much your advertising spend is. And the way it’s allocated these days is increasingly algorithmic, which means we’re seeing parity.

[00:02:16.620] – Ray Poynter

If we think about the world and about products we’ve been shifting away from products to the experience we have when we use that product, we’ve been moving away from product centricity to customer centricity, not thinking about if I build a better mousetrap, people will come, but really focussing on what people want and how we experience it. So we’re moving from the customer now to the human. The customer is somebody you only think about when they’re buying from you. A viewer is somebody you only think about when they’re watching your programme.

[00:02:59.370] – Ray Poynter

A voter is somebody you only think about when they’re voting the human centric view. Really focuses on what the person is like all of the time. This real shift to the experience economy goes back now just over 20 years, and this is the prime work, the seminal work from Pine and Gilmore, the experience economy started as an article, then a book. And the book has been recently updated. So it’s worth having another look at it. And they talk about the fourth evolution of markets.

[00:03:36.760] – Ray Poynter

We used to have the agrarian economy, then we had the industrial economy. And for a couple of hundred years it was all about manufacturing and products. And of course, we’ve seen the real shift to service economy. Most Western economies don’t focus on manufacturing, they focus on services. But that has been shifting to the experience economy because of all those parities, the supply parity, the product parity, the advertising dollar parity. If you want to make a difference, the experience has to be the difference.

[00:04:19.780] – Ray Poynter

And we can see from lots and lots of studies that experience brands are succeeding. So this was a study that looked at Best Western where they really created personalities within their brands and they gave the hotel managers the ability to personalise the experience much more. And they saw a real increase in revenue and they saw an increase in the net promoter score. Virgin Atlantic turned that around, they had a look at what features people were actually using on aeroplanes, what was delivering a positive experience.

[00:04:59.720] – Ray Poynter

So instead of designing a better flight based on what engineers and designers and people like that think, they look to what people wanted and what people were using and saved millions of pounds by taking away the stuff that wasn’t wanted. If we look at Forrester, they’ve done the studies, they found that SCIEX leaders, the people who were really focussing on customer experience, are growing faster, 17 percent a year, the laggards only growing by three percent of year.

[00:05:35.530] – Ray Poynter

Of course, this is pre covid, but we expect it to make a comeback very shortly. McKinsey looked to the way that company valuations the SCIEX leaders more than four times the growth in company value than the six laggards over 10 years. This stuff makes a real difference. Consequently, and not surprisingly, SCIEX within our research world is really big business. So let’s have a look at the X values. When people talk about a tech company is 10x all sorts of things.

[00:06:14.110] – Ray Poynter

Does that mean when we look at SCIEX, so let’s start by looking at Ipsos. Ipsos has a turnover of about two and a half million sorry, two and a half billion dollars. It has a market capitalisation. About one and a half billion dollars, so the market says if you were to buy the whole of Ipsus, it’d be worth about one point five billion. Contrast that with Maddalena Ipsus, an enormous research company doing the whole range of research, Madali really focussed on SCIEX.

[00:06:53.380] – Ray Poynter

Of course it does lots of things, but really focussed on SCIEX is turnover is only about half a billion dollars, only half billion. I’d love to have half a billion. So it’s a much smaller kettle of fish than Ipsus, but its market capitalisation. Four and a half billion dollars, because people can see that it is delivering in a hot spot this area of experience. But there are several fundamental mistakes about the way we think about brands and we think about experience when we start from the company, I frequently see people saying we want to understand the path to purchase as if there was some absolute process.

[00:07:43.760] – Ray Poynter

We go through interest and research and purchase, and it looks so inevitable that we end up with this product. And the mistake about that is that it’s thinking that people rotate around brands we’re looking for. How can we buy that brand? What is our relationship with that brand? But actually that’s back to front brands rotate around people. We need to be really focussed on the human and then to see where the brands fit in. So if I look at the world from my perspective.

[00:08:17.730] – Ray Poynter

Closest to me, a family and friends, nothing to do with brands and products and experiences, then my colleagues and my neighbours. And only after that is the area where Bremnes can come into play, where I start to map my preferences, how I want to experience the world, if I replace that and hat tip here to my colleague Simon Harrington of Work with Now and a couple of companies for this type, his perspective where you think about all of the brands you interact with some of the time I don’t interact with.

[00:09:00.690] – Ray Poynter

Any of these brands all of the time. I go to them when they are relevant, when they float into my space, the rest of the time they’re not there in that space. So this is summed up so well by the American Thinker leader, business consultant Seth Godin, don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. We also see this in another of the hot topics of the moment, design thinking. And who is the strongest voice in design thinking idea, so let’s have a look at what they are talking about and they are really focussed on being human centred approach to innovation, understanding people’s needs.

[00:09:51.250] – Ray Poynter

And they have this interlocking three circles, desirability. People want this thing feasibility. We can make this thing or this service viability. We can make a living out of making this service. And where we get all three of those interests into setting, that is where we should focus. I think an even better way of thinking about this is to pick up on the concept of Ichigo, but actually make it a brand ichigo. So here are all the things that people need.

[00:10:35.620] – Ray Poynter

And then we add to that the things that we’re passionate about and the things we’re good at. So we like doing these things and we’re good at doing these things. And then, of course, we add in which things can we make money doing? That is the brand Ikoyi. That is where we should be. We should be delivering needs. We should be working in areas where we’re good and we have a passion. And of course, we have to be able to make money out of them if we are a business or a corporation.

[00:11:11.730] – Ray Poynter

We’ve seen over the last over a year now, isn’t it some wonderful examples of brands focussing on what people need? So we Louis Vuitton, lots and lots of fragrance houses, the right sort of factories, they made hand sanitiser for free in France to tackle the coronavirus spread. And there were hundreds of brands which kept brands, beer brands, all sorts of brands making these sorts of innovations. That is really human centric. It’s not saying what are we good at making?

[00:11:49.410] – Ray Poynter

What is our core business is adding in. What do people need that we can do? I love this bit of passion here from Patagonia. Don’t buy this jacket. Their passion is the planet. Fantastic clothes, but they want you to reduce the amount of stuff you use. They want you to repair things. They want you to reuse them and recycle. So if you are going to get a new jacket, make sure you keep your old jacket to somebody who hasn’t got one, who needs one.

[00:12:21.870] – Ray Poynter

Let’s not get a cupboard full of new jackets. And that is really thinking about things better. This is a lovely example from guarding a financial company, running an empathy lab, because the people who we are doing business with are usually not like us. And in this empathy land, they had a variety of stations. So one of them, they put some elastic band around people’s fingers and got them to try to fill in the forms, to get them to understand what it’s like when you’ve got physical inhibitions that make it harder to do that.

[00:12:58.110] – Ray Poynter

They had somebody there who wasn’t sighted and he was telling people what it’s like to try and open a bank account. When you’re using a screen reader and things aren’t set up properly or when you go into a branch. So we need to understand people better. And that’s all about empathy. So. 86, I mentioned being human centric, so here are six tips for becoming much more human centric. Obviously, first of all, you have to be interested in people, you can’t fake it, you can’t decide our business strategy is going to be to pretend to be interested in people.

[00:13:39.130] – Ray Poynter

You’ve got to be interested. You got to have measurements so you know what you’re doing, but it’s really important that we don’t fall into the slippery root of only being event driven. So when somebody eats a meal with us, we do in-depth. When somebody purchase something, we do a follow up survey. That’s part of the picture. But actually, it doesn’t tell you the whole the whole person. You’re not showing all of these pieces together and you’re not understanding things that didn’t happen and the things that didn’t happen could be really important to people.

[00:14:21.490] – Ray Poynter

What are people doing when they’re not buying your product, when they’re not using your product or your services? Find out what the rest of their life entails because you may be able to help. Give people space to say what’s important to them. Now, this is particularly relevant when we have a very fixed discussion, even more so with a survey, we tend to ask the question that we want the answers to. And of course, that’s going to be part of the picture.

[00:14:52.810] – Ray Poynter

But they should always be space where people can say, but I’d much rather talk to you about this. This is something that I need to tell you. Something that I’ve been investigating is to do with our research, something we do with people all at the time, start off with how are you? You know what? If somebody has had a really bad day. Then it’s likely that they’re going to give us a set of feedback on the product, feedback on the service, that’s going to be heavily influenced by that.

[00:15:28.340] – Ray Poynter

I remember filling in a survey once when I had a terrible toothache. I bet I gave really negative responses to that survey. So understanding how people are today is really going to be useful. I feel. And people change, there are some wonderful papers out there about what happens if you measure things like NRPs from the same people for several years, what you will find, it goes up and it goes down. People’s lives change. Their expectations change.

[00:16:02.450] – Ray Poynter

So really focus on long editorial approaches. And I’m going to give you a very personal example on what I mean by the human experience, so I’m very keen on running. I run cross-country as I run ultra races. I’ve got a lot of product, including these wonderful shoes here. And it’s important to know that the product is right and those sorts of things. And then we have the customer experience. So I go for a run. There is my distance just over 28 miles.

[00:16:37.440] – Ray Poynter

It took that long to run it, but actually. The product and the customer experience are there for a reason, and that’s the human experience there. I am running with one of my club mates in the national cross-country finals. That is the human element. Everything else is building towards that. Don’t focus on how you can make it better. Watch. Don’t focus on how you can make it better. You focus on how you can help me enjoy my life better in the way that I’m doing the.

[00:17:11.950] – Ray Poynter

Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions.