The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 2: Purpose

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Bob Adams

What is the purpose of Guest Experiences?

While researching Customer Experience best practices a few months ago, I came across Beyond Philosophy, a company that helps organizations create deliberate, emotionally engaging customer experiences that drive value, reduce costs, and build competitive advantage. Based in London with an office in Atlanta, Beyond Philosophy specializes in strategic consultancy services, custom research, training and education.

Steven Walden, Senior Head of Research and Consulting, was kind enough to engage me in a conversation via email and phone when I contacted the firm about my work in translating corporate Customer Experiences to ChurchWorld Guest Services.

According to Beyond Philosophy, there are 3 guiding principles of Customer Experience. I looked at the first one yesterday; today it’s time to look at the purpose of Customer Experience:

Create an interaction between an organization and an individual.
Conduct a transaction between an organization and an individual.
Create a desire for future interactions and transactions.
Create value.
Create advocates.

Translation for ChurchWorld

As referenced in yesterday’s post and the Guest Experience definition, the first purpose of Guest Experience is to create an interaction. This means there is communication between the organization and the individual. Ideally, this interaction moves on to conducting a transaction. In the case of ChurchWorld, this is not a transaction involving money, but one of time and potential life change. At the same time, the organization should be looking to create a desire within Guests for future interactions and transactions. Guests will only come back if they perceive value in the interaction. Also, the organization has to see value in this interaction for it to continue to offer it. Finally, the Guest Experience should be such that the individual wants to tell others how great it was. This can happen over a few hours, days, or possibly weeks.

Putting this all together, ideally, this is what you want Guests to say when they are talking with their friends:

It was awesome! The church was easy to find following the directions on their website. Everyone made me feel welcome without being in my face, my children loved their time in their group, and the worship experience was amazing. There’s something special happening there, and I’ve got to go back again! Would you want to come with me?

In a nutshell, this is the purpose of a Guest Experience as translated from the ideas and concepts of Beyond Philosophy’s work in the arena of Customer Experience.

The first Guiding Principle deconstructed Guest Experiences by looking at a definition in detail. The second principle examined the purposes of Guest Experiences. Tomorrow, it’s time to reconstruct your Guest Experience.

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was inspired by and adapted from Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw.

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 1: Definition

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Bob Adams

What is a Guest Experience?

A Guest Experience is an interaction between an organization and a Guest. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated, and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against Guest expectations across all memorable moments of contact. – Beyond Philosophy (modified)

Let’s break this definition down:

Interaction – when an interaction takes place, you are communicating. The interaction can be a split second, as when a Guest is looking at your website or print materials. It can also span a period of weeks, as the Guest continues to explore your organization at increasingly deeper levels. In an interaction, you are trying to attract attention and convey a message, hoping to receive a message in return and process it. The longer you hold your Guest’s attention, the more likely your message will get across.

Guest – an individual who is experiencing your organization for the first time, or at least is still very uncertain about moving any deeper with you. Taken to the next level, a Guest can also be an existing individual who is in your circle of influence, but not committed to become a part of the organization.

Blend – a Guest Experience is not just the physical, or just the emotional, or just the senses; it is all of these blended together.

Physical Performance – factors such as location, facilities, phone calls, digital experiences, quality of services provided, etc. While a business might consider this the end of their experience, for the church this is just the beginning; emotions and senses play a huge part in delivering Guest Experiences

Senses – human beings take in information by or senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In our day-to-day existence we use our senses to gather data about the world around us. Therefore, a Guest Experience is about the senses that are being stimulated. Organizations, to a large extent, can control what senses to stimulate, and this is the goal: to define how and when to deploy senses in your Guest Experience.

Emotions – the combination of physical aspects, the data received by your senses, and your expectations all contribute to evoke emotions. Forward-thinking organizations understand more than half the Guest Experience is about evoking emotions, and then plan how to evoke specific emotions.

Expectations – when you wrap all the preceding together, your Guest develops expectations. Their perception is reality, framed by the past and hoped for the future. Everything feeds our expectations, which are constantly being updated or confirmed.

Intuitively – these expectations are measured intuitively; they are within your Guest. One person’s shyness is another person’s exuberance. My definition of “loud” is probably different from yours. We all have personal measurement yardsticks within us.

Across all moments of contact – your guest can (and will ) touch your organization in many ways before they physically present themselves at your place. Through the web, direct mail or other print information, talking to a neighbor, etc. All of these are moments of contact that are Guest Experiences in their own right while together making up a complete Guest Experience.

As you see, there is a great deal behind the simple question, “What is a Guest Experience?”

Understanding more about what a Guest Experience is begs the next question:

Why bother?

I thought you’d never ask…

Tomorrow: Purpose

What is the Foundation of Design Thinking?

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Bob Adams

It’s the willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints.

The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas:

Feasibility – what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future
Viability – what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model
Desirability – what makes sense to people and for people

A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance.

This pursuit of peaceful coexistence does not imply that all constraints are created equal; a given project may be disproportionately by technology, budget, or a mix of human factors. Different types of organizations may push one or another of them to the forefront. Nor is it a simple linear process. Design teams will cycle back through all three considerations throughout the life of a project, but the emphasis is on fundamental human needs – as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires.

That’s what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo.

Questions for ChurchWorld leaders:

What are the constraints facing you today?
Can you classify them into the 3 categories listed above?
How will you balance them?

inspired by and adapted from Change by Design, by Tim Brown

Design Like Apple

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Bob Adams

John Edson is president of Lunar, a leading global design firm that has worked with Apple on many products. Edson’s book Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple’s singular approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience.

From his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs set the standard that all products should be “insanely great.” Continuing that standard today, Apple sees design as a tool for creating beautiful experiences that surprise and delight, but also convey a point of view down to the smallest detail – from the tactile feedback of a keyboard to the out-of-the-box experience of an iPhone package. The entire Apple organization is designed to give top priority to design considerations.

Design Like Apple is subtitled “Seven Principles for Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences.” Here are the seven principles with a short description:

Design makes all the difference – beauty, ingenuity, and charisma create a unique competitive advantage
Design the organization – nurture taste, talent, and a design culture
The product is the marketing – great products sell themselves
Design is systems thinking – product and context are one
Design out loud – prototype to perfection
Design is for people – connect with your customer
Design with conviction – commit to a unique voice

The content of Design Like Apple is a fascinating read, but the design of the book itself is amazing – this is a book that you won’t want to get on Kindle or other e-reader, but instead hold in your hands as you see how the author practices the book’s message in its own design.

You may wonder why I’m recommending this book for further study by leaders in ChurchWorld. That’s simple:

Leaders are designers.

The sooner you accept and apply that statement, the better off you will be as a leader.

inspired by and adapted from Design Like Apple by John Edson

I plan to dive into the individual principles at a later date, but if you are curious about design and leadership, take a look at these posts:

Will the DEO Become Your Organization’s New Hero?

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Bob Adams

More than rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision – successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity. – IBM Global CEO Study, 2010

There is no shortage of advice and counsel on how to become “creative” – as a matter of fact, the books and online resources available to today’s eager-to-learn leader are staggering to a fault. So much so that many leaders are tempted to throw in the towel and hope that their inherent traits or some measure of luck will suffice.

Authors Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland want leaders to take another approach – one that organizations have used many times in the past. In their recent book Rise of the DEO, Giudice and Ireland advocate that leaders identify the strategy and function best suited to these tumultuous times and use it to guide your actions.

In a time where organizations need agility and imagination in addition to analytics, they believe it’s time to turn to Design as a model of leadership.

When we think design, our first association is change: change that responds to need, embodies desire, pursues a stated direction and reflects a shared vision. Those who are designers – either through training or by nature – actively encourage and support collective change.

Enter a new model for future leaders – the Design Executive Officer, or DEO.

Design leaders usually possess characteristics, behaviors, and mindsets that enable them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving, and value-charged conditions.

Which pretty much describes the world leaders in organizations of all sizes find themselves today.

Giudice and Ireland have developed six defining characteristics of a DEO; do any of these look familiar to you?

Change Agent

DEOs aren’t troubled by change; in fact, they openly promote and encourage it. They understand traditional approaches, but are not dominated by them. As a result, they are comfortable disrupting the status quo if it stands in the way of their dream. They try to think and act differently than others. They recognize this ability as a competitive advantage.

Risk Taker

DEOs embrace risk as an inherent part of life and a key ingredient of creativity. Rather than avoiding or mitigating it, they seek greater ease and command of it as one of the levers they can control. They recast it as experimentation and invite collaborators. A failed risk still produces learning.

Systems Thinkers

Despite their desire to disrupt and take risks, DEOs are systems thinkers who understand the interconnectedness of their world. They know that each part of their organization overlaps and influences another. They know unseen connections surround what’s visible. This helps to give their disruptions intended, rather than chaotic, impact and makes their risk taking more conscious.

Intuitive

DEOs are highly intuitive, either by nature or through experience. They have the ability to feel what’s right, by using their intense perceptual and observational skills or through deep expertise. This doesn’t mean they have a fear of numbers. They know they that intuitively enhanced decision-making doesn’t preclude rational or logical analysis. They use both – and consider each valid and powerful.

Socially Intelligent

DEOs have high social intelligence. They instinctively connect with others and integrate them into well-defined and heavily accessed networks. They prefer spending time with employees, customers, and strangers rather than equipment, plants, or spreadsheets. “Everyday people” are a source of strength, renewal, and new ideas.

GSD

DEOs can be defined by a new set of initials: GSD – euphamistically short for “gets stuff done.” They feel an urgency to get personally involved, to understand details through their own interaction, and to lead by example. DEOs make things happen.

Is it time for someone in your organization to move toward becoming a DEO, looking at every organizational challenge as a design problem solvable with the right mixture of imagination and metrics?

inspired by and adapted from Rise of the DEO, by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland

When Moses Isn’t Around, You Have to Create Your Own Miracle

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Bob Adams

According to the authors of Solving Problems with Design Thinking, most managers they meet harbor a deep, dark secret: They believe in their hearts that they are not creative.

In today’s seemingly rampant innovation mania, managers and leaders cannot appear unimaginative, let alone fail to come up with brilliant solutions to vexing problems on a whim.

For most of us there will be no Moses-like parting of the waters of the status quo that we might safely cross the Red Sea of innovation. Drowning is more likely our fate. – from Solving Design Problems

There is hope.

Instead of trying to part the waters, leaders need to build a bridge to take us from the current reality to a new future.

In other words, we must manufacture our own miracles.

According to Liedtka et al, the technology for better bridge building already exists, right under our noses. What to call it is a matter of dispute, but they call it design thinking.

This approach to problem solving is distinguished by the following attributes:

It emphasizes the importance of discovery in advance of solution generation using market research approaches that are empathetic and user driven
It expands the boundaries of both our problem definition and our solutions
It is enthusiastic about engaging partners in co-creation
It is committed to conducting real-world experiments rather than just running analyses using historical data

And it works.

Design thinking is capable of reliably producing new and better ways of creatively solving a host of organizational problems.

inspired by and adapted from Solving Problems with Design Thinking by Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King, and Kevin Bennett

For further reading:

Why Design Thinking?

What If Leaders Thought Like Designers?

Leaders Need to Work Our of Both Sides of Their Brains

Waiting is a Less Risky Form of Saying “No”

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Bob Adams

A few thoughts from the intersection of Seth Godin, George Harrison, Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Seuss, and Todd Henry…

Auxano’s Founder and Team Leader, Will Mancini posed the following question in a morning text to our team:

Where could you use breakthrough clarity on your leadership team?

The question is intended to be asked by our Navigators to the leaders they are connecting with in churches – but it’s also appropriate for leaders everywhere. Most leaders can immediately identify a barrier or roadblock that stands in their way of moving forward to better future. Many leaders also have some idea about how to break that barrier.

It begs another question: What are you waiting for?

That question was on my mind as I began my day’s reading, researching, curating, and editing – and over a period of a few hours, the following came together:

Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing. It’s a personal, urgent, this-is-my-calling way to do your job. Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them. – Seth Godin

Mapmakers are those who can effectively circumnavigate constraints in order to make things happen. We all deal with constraints, especially if we are working inside an organization. There will always be organizational charts, reporting structures, budgets, and defined career paths of some sort. The question isn’t whether constraints exist, but whether persist in finding our way around and through them.

Where in your life and work are you waiting for permission? Don’t anticipate that someone is going to hand you a map. You’ll probably have to make your own. The good news is that once you get moving, the terrain becomes more visible and navigable. It’s only when you’re standing still, unaware of what’s over the next hill, that the path of progress is opaque and frightening.

Say yes, then figure it out along the way.

– Todd Henry, Die Empty

A quote often wrongly attributed to The Cheshire Cat:

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. – George Harrison, from his song “Any Road”

The actual conversation between Alice and The Cheshire Cate:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

And, from everyone’s favorite graduation gift book,

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…

– Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

A closing challenge from Todd Henry:

When you look back on your life, the moments you will be most proud of will likely be the ones where you stepped out of your comfort zone in the pursuit of something you believed in. Don’t allow the lull of comfort to keep you trapped in a place of complacency and subpar engagement.

You must own your own growth and take responsibility for your own progress.

inspired by, and adapted from, Todd Henry’s Die Empty

with a little help from Dr. Seuss, Seth Godin, George Harrison, and Lewis Carroll

The Heart of Leadership

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Bob Adams

There is a lot more to leadership than great individual work. – Mark Miller, The Heart of Leadership

Mark Miller, VP of Organizational Effectiveness at Chick-Fil-A, has just released his newest book, The Heart of Leadership. In his latest enlightening and entertaining business fable, he describes the five unique character traits exhibited by exceptional leaders and how to cultivate them.

If you don’t demonstrate leadership character, your skills, and your results will be discounted, if not dismissed. – Mark Miller

In setting up the true “heart” of leadership, Miller uses the familiar and helpful metaphor of the iceberg: typically we only see about 10% above the waterline, with 90% below. Miller depicts the iceberg as a picture of leadership, with leadership skills being the visible 10%.

Great Leaders SERVE

See the Future
Engage and Develop Others
Reinvent Continuously
Value Results and Relationships
Embody the Values

That metaphor in itself is a helpful reminder, but the true strength of the book comes as Miller develops the “heart” of leadership – the 90% below the waterline.

Leadership is not about what you do nearly as much as it’s about who you are becoming – the heart of leadership is a matter of the heart. – Mark Miller

Download a sample chapter here.

Weekly Reader

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Bob Adams

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Just saying’…

Yield

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Bob Adams

…wrapping up this short throw-back series with the metaphor of a rockslide on I-40 on the NC/TN border that happened in 1997. That rockslide caused a lot of detours for months, and in the pre-GPS days, you had to pay attention to the road signs.

When a rockslide closes the highway, and you have to take a detour, you learn to rely a lot on road signs…

A “Yield” sign means I should stop and relinquish my progress to someone else. The last sign on this brief road trip is “yielding” our lives to God in worship.

courtesy highwaytrafficsupply.com

Worship is any activity in which believers experience God in a meaningful, spiritually transforming way. True worship should lead worshipers to a deeper appreciation for God, a better understanding of His ways, and to a deeper commitment to Him. Encountering God in worship transforms us more and more into His likeness.

Worship begins with God, and not people. Worship is not something people do because they want to influence God. Worship is not something people do just out of gratitude, love, or fear. Emotions do not control worship; God controls worship. God instructs us how to worship and how not to worship.

God is sovereign and holy. Worship must not be done according to our small notions of Him, our limited conceptions of what He wants, or what might please us. God is above all, and we are to worship Him in the manner He desires.

God is in charge of worship. He created us and redeems us at His pleasure. He gave forms of worship in the Old Testament to direct Israel’s worship and has given His Holy Spirit in the New Testament to give us liberty and guidance in how to worship Him for who He is and what He has done. The Spirit brings liberty and freedom to worship.

The purpose of worship is to come before the Lord in obedience to praise Him, to hear from Him, to confess Him, and to commit our lives to Him. Every worship service is to be an encounter with the Lord, transcending our feelings, desires, and even our abilities to perform.

So that’s end of this quick trip, looking for road signs to guide us in the journey:

Evangelism – One Way
Discipleship – School Zone
Ministry – Men at Work
Fellowship – Merging Traffic
Worship – Yield

These five functions of the church are vital signs that must be followed in balance if we are to complete our journey.

When you come upon a rockslide, look to the signs to guide you to your destination.

part of a series taken from presentations 16 years ago, introducing the Purpose Driven Church principles to a church leadership team

brought back today to connect to Auxano’s release of the first Team UP resource, featuring the Top 100 Quotes from Purpose Driven Church, with applications and exercises from Church Unique

energized by the steady, deliberate journey in generational learning

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