Page Goals are a way to operationalize Customer-Centric strategy in the web channel.

Lost benefits
Once the process of improving the website kicks off, customer-centric blueprints and wireframes are produced, which have the intention of producing major performance improvements to the website. However, many of these improvements will never see the light of day. In a surprisingly high number of web projects, the Customer Experience improvements don’t seem to make it through the production cycle.

So what’s going wrong in these cases? The strategy is right, the blueprint is right, but the benefits are being lost in the process between concept and go-live.

This is where Page Goals step in.

Page Goals is a methodology for making sure that a web page meets the goals it is supposed to meet, and for protecting these goals as it moves through the production process. I began developing the methodology as an Information Architect just over 10 years ago, and have continued to develop it as I’ve moved into Customer-Centric strategy, and incorporated a variety of  tricks and techniques I’ve picked up along the way.

Conflicting goals
The Page Goals methodology is based around the idea that each page is trying to achieve a range of goals which are often conflicting. An effective webpage achieves balance between these goals, and it is the role of the website improvement project to maintain these goals over the course of the project, but this can be difficult. Some of these goals originate far away from the project (Corporate Strategy), and in particular, some of them originate from the Customer, who is not present.

The strongest influence on the project is usually the project stakeholders, who may or may not hold these business and customer needs close. By defining the goals of the page early on, when the user insight and corporate strategy have been balanced to produce the solution that works best for both, the inevitable twists and turns of implementation can be navigated without undoing the benefits of the project.

An example
An example might help illustrate this. I’m sure you will be familiar with some web pages which are full or promotions – banners everywhere, every part of the page ‘shouting’ at the customer, with all kinds of conflicting messages. This is a classic example of a conflicted page, with unclear page goals.
I’ve sat in many meetings in various companies negotiating how to keep the stakeholder happy whilst also making the page more effective. In a stakeholder-centric environment, the discussion can go something like this …

The person responsible for the Customer Experience:
- “The customer is being confused by this barrage of ‘shouting’ banners and colour – can we focus on just a few things we want this page to achieve?”

To which the stakeholders in the room will reply:
- “We need this page to drive sales to my part of the business”
- “We need this page to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- “Yes, but we also need to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- …. Etc.

And so the page ends up turning out very much like the meeting might turn out – a tug of war, with the overall objectives of the business being lost in the process.

Page Goals provide a set of processes for maintaining strategic direction and customer focus throughout the lifetime of a web project, not just when the Customer Experience team are involved. Once the site is complete, they can then be used for measurement of the website against its original goals.

There must be a more effective way of managing the web channel to deliver on strategic goals, and the Page Goals methodology provides this more results-focused way of managing websites.

I predict two changes to Customer Experience measurement in the future:
• It will increasingly make the connection between strategic and operational factors and Customer Experience outcomes.
• Measures will increasingly allow companies to quantify the impact on the Customer Experience of operational and strategic initiatives.

These cause and effect relationships will make the measurement of the Customer Experience an increasingly important measure of company performance, turning the spotlight on the accuracy of current measurements. This is long overdue, as many incorrect measures of the Customer Experience are currently being used by companies.

Connecting Customer Experiences to strategic and operational causes will, in my opinion, be the big challenge in Customer Experience over the latter half of this decade.

The answer, in a nutshell, is that the Customer Experience outcomes are factored into all decisions in the organisation which will affect the Customer Experience.  On the surface, this seems fairly easy to achieve – the management of customer channels should take into account Customer Experience outcomes – but in reality this goes right to the heart of the way the organisation operates.

Perhaps some examples will illustrate this:

• A company implemented a new method of managing the high street outlets for its products. Unfortunately, this created confusion around stocking, and customers were not able to access all the products consistently from one high street to another. Since the Customer Experience was not being connected to the organisational cause, it took quite some time for this to be uncovered and solved.
• A company implemented a new call handling process for the call centre which forced agents to handle calls in a standardised process. This met the goals of the software implementation project, but failed to take into account the needs of the customers, and the agents, and call handling times went up, as well as satisfaction going down.
• A company has various Customer Experience initiatives, but still uses sales conversions as the primary measure of success. Whenever there is a tradeoff between going for the short term sell or an improved Customer Experience, the short term sell always wins. Over the long term, the Customer Experience suffers.
• Each customer-facing channel is managed separately within the company, and operates in a silo, and this is reflected in the channels themselves – print, web, mobile, TV, Social Media and phone all have completely different Customer Experiences, are unconnected, and seldom cross-promote.

In each example, the way the company is organised has a major impact on the Customer Experience. The systems, processes, structures and rewards which the company has chosen to use have resulted in particular Customer Experience problems.

This is strange, because, as we see from the multichannel report, companies see the Customer Experience as a major problem, and all of the companies in the examples are strategically focussed on solving this. The only explanation can be that the connections between cause and effect are not being made.

Here are some more questions to ask about the way the company organises itself around Customer Experience outcomes:

• When the IT department purchases a new software system, even internal-facing ones such as KM systems, are the Customer Experience outcomes accounted for?
• If they are, are the measures of Customer Experience accurate? (or does it just measure a component or Customer Experience, such as satisfaction)
• Companies are naturally organised into silos, but do these silos help or hinder the customer experience? Where they hinder it, are there mechanisms in place to counter this?

So what can companies do to become more Customer-Centric?
Here are the three steps to success.

1. Identify which Operational and strategic decisions are affecting the Customer Experience by carrying out an Operational and Strategic Customer Experience audit.
2. Make improvements to these Operational and Strategic factors
3. Measure the improvements.

If you have any questions about becoming more Customer-Centric, please feel free to get in touch.

Back in 2000, the usability industry was starting to realise that their core techniques could easily be extended to measure not just whether people could use something, but their total experience of it. This was a natural extension – the three component measures of usability are “effectiveness”, “efficiency” and “satisfaction”. All it needed was a fourth measure – “engagement” – and a measure of the whole experience could be established.

Over the course of 2000 and 2001, this understanding started to solidify into a new discipline, and discussions at places like the Usability Professionals Association and the Information Design Association started to include the words “Customer Experience” and “User Experience”. These rapidly gained momentum, and by 2001 the industry was forming, with companies starting to advertise “Customer Experience” solutions, and the first job adverts emerging asking for “Customer Experience” experts.

As the terms “User Experience” and “Customer Experience” started to gain a foothold, in February 2001, I started a company called ‘UXP’, standing for “User Experience”. This trend for shortening ‘experience’ to ‘XP’ was common at the time, and was solidified in October of that year when Microsoft released Windows XP (where the “XP” stands for “Experience”). As it turns out, they hadn’t really solved very much of the User Experience of that Operating system, although it was still a lot better than Windows 2000. The power of this shift is clear – ten years later, 60% of Corporate Desktops still run Windows XP, while only 0.1% run Windows 2000.

Whilst “XP” is no longer used, the use of the ‘X’ is still maintained today in the common practise of shortening “User Experience” to UX and “Customer Experience” to CX.

2001 was also the year when Foviance, the company I now work for, was born, as “the Usability Company”. Over the last 10 years, the industry has undergone a series of consolidations, and lots of other industries have pushed into the market, with several mergers and acquisitions. However, Foviance’s grounding in the basics of Customer Experience measurement has always given it a solid basis. It was always one of the bigger players, and is now in the top 5 Customer Experience specialist consultancies in the world. (I’m not including the “not-Customer-Experience-but-branded-as-it” agencies, which are essentially creative design etc – not at all what Customer Experience is about).

Being a part of an industry as it was born was very exciting. Helping to shape an industry as it has matured, and developing new methodologies has been a lot of fun, and seeing it become accepted, and increasingly adopted by major clients as a core part of their strategy and business operations has been both a relief and an affirmation of what many of us realised back in 2001 – The Customer Experience is a key differentiator in most industries.

I’m looking forward to the next 10 years, as Customer Experience becomes more integrated into strategies and business operations. As companies place more and more focus on the Customer Experience, more will realise that the core measures of that experience must be based in solid methodologies. Those who were around in 2001, when we talked about hypertext theory, library science, psychological profiling and information design will increasingly see their industry going through major transformations, yet remaining strangely familiar.

Thanks to everyone who was there when we started this wonderful thing back in 2001.

But how to break the cycle? Essentially, there are a couple of ways that I’ve identified.

(1) Use a ‘we need proper insight’ argument to put in the proper measures, and, once implemented, use these to develop business cases for improvements to the channel and organisation to improve the Customer Experience outcomes. This is a very logical argument and will convince many leaders, but it does take time, and will not convince those with a more short-term focus.

(2) An alternative (or perhaps short term) fix is to take them on a ‘leap of faith’; cobble together the measures that you already have, and build a case, perhaps built on the experiences of other companies, or industry trends, which says that “we should probably improve our channels and/or operations, and we’ll end up with a better Customer Experience.” The risk is that any improvement might not be quantifiable, but at least there will be an improvement to the Customer Experience, and that is, after all, the end which your company, and your customers are looking for.

Even if the second option is pursued, the first should also be pursued, because habitually using the second method will erode the position of any Customer Experience Officer or Manager over time.

1. AVAILABILITY Give customers a choice of channel based on their preferences.
2. AWARENESS Make customers aware of all channels available, with channels promoted from other channels.
3. PULL To drive channel shift, the channel shifting ‘to’ needs to have a better customer experience
4. CONSISTENCY Provide a consistent experience across channels, whilst utilising the benefits of each channel.
5. UNDERSTANDING Regardless of channel choice, make sure customers gain the understanding they need to effectively engage with the products.
6. ENGAGEMENT  Pull customers into deeper engagement within their preferred channel.
7. OPTIMISATION  Optimise the Customer Experience of each channel.
8. INTEGRATION  Each channel is aware of previous  customer interactions, regardless of channel.
9. PRODUCTS  Produce quality products which meet customer expectations and requirements.
10. MEASUREMENT  Get the right Customer Experience measures in place.

By defining clear Customer Experience outcomes, the purpose and success measures for social media can be established. The channels and organisation required can then be focused on these Customer Experience outcomes.

Starting small with carefully targeted pilot projects allows companies to gain rapid insights into the effects on specific customer groups, so that social channels can be developed in an iterative way, rapidly learning from each initiative to optimise the Customer Experience outcomes.

The booking process was pretty simple, and pretty much matched the process for booking a flight. The best part, however, was when we arrived at the ferry terminal in Dover. This is a classic case of a “moment of truth” – the customer is under stress, and the way customers are dealt with at times like this makes or breaks a customer experience.

We pulled straight off the motorway, through a well-organised and signposted road system, a good example of how the customer experience before the customer arrives into your company’s property is important, so the Port Authority of Dover and the Highways Agency played their part in making this a good customer experience.

Next came the really clever bit. I’d like you to imagine the most efficient possible way you could process people onto a ferry, and I bet that the way P&O do it exceeds this.

We came to an arrangement of check-in booths with barriers, like motorway tollbooths, and as we pulled up to the barrier, the man in the booth said “Mr Raistrick, how many people are travelling with you today?”. I was shocked and delighted. This was like arriving at the Ritz.

A camera at the gate, connected to a car number plate recognition system had matched the plate to the booking record, and appeared on the screen in the booth within a few seconds. This is the most important aspect of the multichannel customer experience – touchpoints between channels, and what makes or breaks this is whether the channel you’re using (in this case face to face) knows about the last channel you used to interact with the company (in this case web).

We were processed extremely rapidly, which was good for us, and good for P&O – a great example of how customer experience and cost-saving can go hand-in-hand. We were then given a lane number, which we hung on our reversing mirror, and drove through a well-organised system of hundreds of lanes, until we found ours.  A man checked the number on the mirror as we drove onto the ferry, increasing their efficiency and reducing delays.

Once on the ferry, the first thing which improved the customer experience was the usability of the navigation. We were on deck 5, and took the orange stairs, a fantastic cross-referencing system to allow us to find our car again.

The food and seating on ferry were, I must admit, nowhere near as good as what I’ve experienced on other ferries recently in Scotland, the Baltic and New Zealand, but then again, it was a lot cheaper too, so I didn’t necessarily expect this. A good example of how a company’s Customer Experience strategy can focus effort on those “moments of truth”, whilst not needing to improve the entire Customer Experience to maximise the RoI of Customer Experience investment.

Whilst on holiday, we decided to move our return date forward a day, so I logged onto the website, because this is much cheaper and easier than calling when you’re abroad. This was one moment of truth where I was disappointed – there was no way to change it online, and no information on how to do it either. I was wasting time – I wanted to be visiting castles, and here I was fishing around a website (or “some stupid website” as I no doubt referred to it at the time). At least the website had a phone number, so I called up, and they charged a nominal £10 fee to move the day. Stress over.

Customer service is often neglected as it is not seen as ‘critical path’, or is managed by a different team with a different budget. However, it is a key part of the customer experience, and relatively cheap improvements could make a lot of difference (and, in this case, reduce costs too, as channel shift from phone to web usually does).

When we returned from our holiday in Belgium, feeling suntanned (yes, suntanned!) and full of chocolate, we arrived at the port a bit early. Having driven quite a way, we were not in the mood for any hassle, but the same efficient booth greeted us, and we were booked onto the next available ferry hassle-free. The airlines could learn a thing or two from this high level of consistency between the way the customer is processed in different countries.

Not having to take the plane was a breath of fresh air. I didn’t have to stand in a line, take my shoes off, remove my laptop, deny myself access to liquids, have my retina scanned, or have my luggage rummaged. The airlines have no control over this, but it’s an important lesson in how third parties can make or break a customer experience. ‘Verified by Visa’ take note.

Although not perfect, my experience with P&O helped us to have the most relaxing holiday we’ve had in ages. A superb cross-channel customer experience.

Essentially I operate both in the core IT organisation as well as the marketing organisation, and in both cases perform the function of tying the users (or the customers) into the business in various ways.

I’m concious that I often find it hard to explain the domain areas I cover and how these fit together, so this is one way to represent it. Maybe I’ll evolve this further to expand/ clarify it. In terms of what I want to do next, well I want to use some of these skillsets and techniques I’ve developed, many of which are genre-busting so are a bit hard to describe …