Hearts then Charts

Hearts, 

then 

Charts 

A practical framework for building (and leading) 

a customer-centered organization 

OCTOBER 2015

HEARTS THEN CHARTS 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

Few ideas have 

generated more column 

inches and conference 

keynotes in 

recent years than 

‘customer centricity’. 

So great is the focus that it would be reasonable 

to conclude that a fundamental philosophical shift 

is taking place. Trade publications espouse the 

virtues of a ‘customer mindset’ as part of a new 

operational model. 

Being customer-centric is hardly about a change in 

philosophy (nor is it new). Rather, it’s about execution. 

The numbers tell us that we tend to dramatically 

overstate the customer-centricity of our 

organizations. Similarly, we misunderstand the quality 

of the experiences we deliver. We build experiences 

that reflect individual functions and 

built-in biases rather than organizational insights. 

There is widespread confusion about how experiences 

are measured. We remain unsure who is accountable 

for improving that performance. 

This paper serves as a practical guide for building 

muscle memory around the basics of a customercentric 

organization. It outlines a vision for; of five 

key themes: 

1. A shared language for talking about our most 

important customers 

2. A common vocabulary for describing the stages 

and phases of our customer experience 

3. A means of defining customer needs throughout 

the entirety of our customer experience 

4. A framework for measuring the effectiveness 

of experiences, and connecting them to 

business outcomes 

5. A model for centralized accountability for the 

ongoing delivery of great customer experiences. 

It is not designed to replace existing investments in 

personas, customer journey maps, and 

customer experience metrics. Instead, it’s a framework 

for helping them permeate the enterprise. 

This is a tool for those who require a strong 

foundation upon which to execute. 

© 2015 ALMIGHTY LLC | 2


“It’s not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience 

of being your user.” 

PAUL GRAHAM, IN DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE 1 

We were promised jetpacks. 

The ‘age of the customer’ was to usher in a new era of organizational focus on the customer 

experience. Yet neither that focus nor the resulting prosperity has come to bear. 

Bain’s legendary 2005 study, Closing the Delivery Gap 2 , famously found that 80% of firms 

believe they delivered a ‘super experience’ to their customers, while the same was reported 

by only 8% of their customers. 

Ten years later, we managed a custom survey of more than 500 stakeholders at large 

enterprise organizations. We audited customer experience practices at 30 more 3 . The resulting 

data suggests that the narrative of customer-centricity doesn’t match the practice. 

Our view of the customer is dangerously misaligned. 

Fewer than 10% of the companies we audited use a consistent definition of their customers 

across the organization. This leads to products designed for one customer, marketed to 

another and sold to yet another. We’re employing costly, inefficient processes in a marketplace 

that’s increasingly indifferent to our brands. 

Our understanding of the customer experience is siloed and incomplete. Fewer than 5% 

regularly use a map of their customer’s experience to drive organizational decisions and 

investment. Complex brand interactions have led to skyrocketing customer service costs. 

‘Investment by fiefdom’ in platforms and services is rampant. Often, this investment has resulted 

in no tangible improvement in customer satisfaction. 

We continue to take a means-based approach to defining customer needs. Our assumptions 

around what our customers need from us frequently begin with what we already have to offer 

them. We fail to distinguish between the needs of different customer types, and lack the ability 

to measure whether we meet those needs. 

We’re not measuring the customer experience in ways that we can act upon. Almost half 

of C-Suite respondents to our survey said that their company uses no consistent measure of 

the customer experience. We lack the capacity to prove hypotheses or to prototype improved 

experiences for customers. ‘Customer experience’ is in danger of becoming a ‘squishy’ term. Like 

‘engagement’, it generates a lot of promise, but little consensus or informed investment. 

Accountability for the customer experience is almost non-existent. Fewer than 3% of the 

businesses we audited had employees who could consistently cite the person responsible for 

their organization’s customer experience. Fewer than half of C-suite respondents could identify 

that person. Instead, customer experience is managed at a functional level. Individual teams 

and departments invest extraordinary time, effort and budget into isolated interactions. By and 

large, they operate without incentives to drive toward business goals. 

1 

Graham, P, 2013 ‘Do Things that Don’t Scale’ | http://almty.co/graham | Written primarily for the startup community, this piece is indispensible reading for anyone interested in improving the quality of your customer 

experience, regardless of scale. 

2 

Allen, Reichheld, Hamilton, Markey, 2005, ‘Closing the Delivery Gap’, Bain & Co. | http://almty.co/gap | Absolutely required reading for anyone who makes things bought, sold, or processed. 

3 

The organizations we interviewed operated in the following vertical categories: apparel, athletic footwear, food and beverages, consumer packaged goods, education/educational services, electronics, 

entertainment, financial services (consumer), financial services (commercial), gyms and fitness, health care, home/durable good, information technology, insurance, manufacturing, professional services, real estate, 

restaurants, and security. 



QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF 

Can your employees 

connect the decisions 

they make every day 

to the experiences that 

result from them? 

Can they connect 

those experiences to 

the company’s stated 

business goals? 

Are they motivated 

and empowered 

to act upon those 

connections? 

If any of those questions give you pause, 

then this paper was written for you. 

This is a roadmap for leaders who are serious about improving their company’s customer 

experience. It is a guide for those invested in how customer experience drives measurable 

business outcomes. It is not a ready-built solution. Instead, it’s a framework for methodically 

changing the way we think about the customer. Used properly, it will inform cross-functional 

communications and purposeful investment. It underpins an enterprise equipped to adapt to 

a changing marketplace. 

My colleague Michael Sullivan speaks frequently of ‘aligned execution,’ in which an 

organization shares: 

1. A collective will to pursue a common purpose 

2. The skills required to apply that will toward a shared end 

3. Access to opportunities to apply that skill, across the breadth of the enterprise 

This paper outlines the skills required to deliver and sustain great customer experiences. Over 

time, it’s a tool that creates opportunities to apply those skills at every level of the enterprise. 

The collective will can be borne only of a desire to invest in outcomes, not outputs. That will is 

a powerful resource when applied to an informed understanding of the customer experience. 

AS RUSSELL DAVIES HAS WRITTEN 4 : 

“It’s not about innovation. It’s competence. It’s the basics.” 

4 

Davies, R, 2014, ‘Death to Innovation’’ | http://almty.co/basics | This blog post by the former Strategy Head at the Government Digital Service was one of the best pieces on brand experience I read in 2014. 



THEME ONE: 

Seeing our customers not as we are, 

but as they are 5 

The ability to focus on the needs of our customers begins with a useful picture of who those 

customers are. Typically, we find ourselves starting from one of three positions: 

We envision a ‘core customer’. This customer is an amalgam of several customer types. She 

is almost always a heavy buyer with deep brand knowledge 6 . This puts an especially heavy 

burden on design and product teams, as described by designer Scott Jenson in The Simplicity 

Shift (2002): 

“What often happens in companies that don’t do active user research 

is the companies base their concept of who the user is on one of 

two equally invalid stereotypes. The first is a user who reflects the 

company culture – a person “just like them.” It shouldn’t be surprising 

to know this person is competent and in need of many advanced 

features in the product. The second stereotype is motivated by 

marketing concerns. So many potential customers exist that what 

ends up being the target is a conglomeration of all possible users. 

This creates an impossibly demanding multiuser, who requires every 

possible feature from the product.” 

We find ourselves trapped in what ethnographer Hal Phillips calls a ‘strategic cul-de-sac’. 

This describes a set of deeply-held ‘truths’ about the customer that have become central 

to the organization’s DNA. Often, these stem not from primary research or data, but the 

tradition and lore of the enterprise. Company culture protects these assumptions, making 

them difficult or even dangerous to question. 


If you asked three colleagues 

within your company to 

describe your most valuable 

customers — their needs, their 

challenges, the processes by 

which they engage you and the 

marketplace— would you get a 

consistent set of responses? 

Would their answers be 

detailed and specific? 

What if you asked 

three members of your 

leadership team? 

5 

To borrow heavily from (and with minor apologies to) Anaïs Nin 

6 

She’s also a brand loyalist and sits by with bated breath waiting for your brand to unveil a new hashtag 



We’re organized around a fractured set of customer archetypes. Collections of personas, 

customer segmentations and shopper types exist, but don’t connect to one another. This results 

in a particularly-dangerous condition: a functional view of the customer. 

Often, the customer definitions employed within large firms exist independently within design 

and product groups, marketing organizations, and sales teams. It’s common to find a product 

designed for one customer, marketed to another and sold to yet another. That these are 

informed by legitimate, thoughtful research makes them no less inefficient. 

The point isn’t that our organizations need to be more human, but that they must better adapt to 

the needs of those of us who already are. As my colleague Gareth Kay wrote 7 in 2013: 

“We keep trying to anthropomorphize brands rather than trying to work 

out how we can make them more useful to people.” 

It’s not just you: customer misalignment is epidemic. 

In 2015, we conducted interviews with key stakeholders at thirty enterprise organizations — 15 

publicly-traded, 15 privately-held, with an average of 7.6 billion dollars in average annual revenue. 

These interviews span almost twenty categories from Commercial Banking to Quick Service 

Restaurants. We found striking inconsistencies about the use of customer definitions across the 

enterprise 8 . 

It’s not that we don’t have a picture of our customers. Roughly 40% of the organizations we 

spoke with use a form of customer profile inside product and design groups. An almost identical 

number regularly used formal personas within the marketing organization. 

The challenge is that we don’t use those views laterally. Only 4 of the 30 cited routine use of 

formal customer artefacts within both product development and marketing teams. While half of 

the organizations employed formal personas in the Retail or eCommerce operations, only 2 of 30 

used them across the entire enterprise. 

Typical of the respondents was a Director of Product Design for an enterprise B2B health firm, 

whose design team developed six robust personas, but regularly uses only one. 

“The thing that makes me itchy,” she relates, “is that our personas were 

developed eighteen months ago, and the landscape for wellness is 

evolving so quickly.” 

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding within our organizations. The people for whom 

we make things evolve much more slowly than the markets for our products and services. 

To deliver great experiences for people is to accept that their lives are almost never lived as 

customers. If our understanding of the customer quickly loses value as our offerings evolve, then 

we should examine whether we’ve developed a rich-enough understanding of them. 

Start here: find common internal ground around your view of your customers, and use it to 

build a shared customer vocabulary. 

Before we can examine the experiences we deliver, we need a shared language for describing 

and referring to our customers. There are many formal, extraordinarily useful tools and 

frameworks for developing these. Some organizations use formal personas. Others employ 

‘proto-personas 9 ’ or ‘archetypes’. We’re looking to create neither at this point. Instead, we need 

to create a foundation that will make formal tools incredibly useful. 

7 

Kay, G, 2013, ‘The Human Paradox’ | http://almty.co/human | This a few years old, and no less true today than it was the day it was written 

8 

Both, incidentally, were primarily B2C organizations — one a Consumer Packaged Goods firm and the other a manufacturer of audio equipment 

9 

If you’re interested in learning more about persona development, which takes a number of different forms, Eeva Ilama’s account of Alan Cooper’s personas workshop is a great place to start | http://almty.co/cooper 



We’re looking to identify ‘Nancy’ — and to ensure that one group’s Nancy is largely analogous 

to another’s. 

Before you begin: 

• You’ll need to assemble a cross-functional team of between 8 and 20 individuals, each 

with a stake in the performance of their teams and departments. 

• You’ll want a comfortable working space in which the team can work without distraction 

for a full eight-hour day 

• Ideally, you’ll have the capacity to schedule recurring monthly check-ins with the same 

group for at least a six month period 10 . 

Getting to Nancy: a step-by-step approach 

1. Charge this team with identifying and 

describing 2–3 of your most important 

customers. 

2. Begin with data. Use existing customer 

data to inform basic decisions about 

the kinds of people you’re describing. 

If you’re actively looking to acquire a 

customer base that skews heavily female, 

focus on describing her. If your existing 

commercial buyers are clustered in East 

Coast metro areas, describe a customer 

who lives in Boston or New York City. 

3. If you have existing personas or 

segmentations used by some internal 

teams, find ways to incorporate elements 

from them. The challenge is not to replace 

these, but to extend their value to other 

corners of the enterprise. 

4. If you have a recent hire from a direct 

competitor who’s done similar work, use 

their experience as a starting 

point. Competitors within the same 

category not only share customer types, 

but generally share them in the same 

proportion 11 . 

5. Add texture to these people with 

anecdotes and existing qualitative 

research. If it’s possible to use primary 

research or customer service verbatims, 

take full advantage of this information. 

6. At every turn, check your work. Ensure 

that the picture you’re painting describes 

a person, not a customer (that’s a 

segmentation). Remember: you’re 

working to understand what people need 

from the world (some of which you can 

meet), not what you need from them. 

7. Give names to these people. Some 

organizations employ given names 

(‘Nancy’), others more functional titles 

(‘DIY Dad’). Be sure that the names 

you’ve chosen (and details you’ve 

outlined) describe the person, not their 

relationship to your organization. There’s 

nothing less customer-centric than 

describing people who are focused 

primarily on you 12 . 

8. Evaluate the utility of what the team 

creates. Are the descriptions crisp, or 

have you smashed together a handful 

of segments into the ‘core customer’ 

described above? Are you using language 

that is memorable? Will the names 

you use help people internalize them? 

Some organizations use photos and 

illustrations to help employees build 

visual representations of customers. At 

this point, being memorable and useful is 

more important than being precise. 

10 

You’ll find that it’s particularly helpful to schedule these recurring check-ins prior to kicking off the initiative, as it creates a sense of accountability from the outset, and binds members of the team to one another. 

These check-ins can be as short as 30 minutes, but they should be in-person meetings if at all possible. 

11 

Hammond, K, Ehrenberg, A & Goodhardt, G 1996, ‘Market segmentation for competitive brands’, European Journal of Marketing, vol. 30, pp. 39-49 | I came across this article via Byron Sharp’s wonderful book How 

Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010), which I can’t recommend enough. 

12 

Also: no such person exists 



Remember: abstraction, generalization, and mythology increase by orders of magnitude 

the farther you get from the customer. To build more useful customer description, assemble 

a team of people who interact with your customers every day. Sales associates, call center 

staff, field technicians, and researchers are among the best sources of insights. Surround 

them with people who can support the conversation with data and context. You’ll often 

need participation from senior members of your organization. Remember, though, that they 

carry the baggage of existing assumptions (and tend to drown out more junior members of 

the team). 

Success will be found in everyday conversations, rather than a moment of enlightenment. 

A succinct description — and shared understanding — of your customers forms a basis for 

more elaborate artefacts. They can set the stage for persona development by internal teams 

or agency partners. More immediately, they allow members of your organization to ask 

essential questions like: 

‘Why would Nancy do that?’ 

Or: 

‘Is this headline aimed at the DIY Dad? It seems off.’ 

These customer descriptions also act as guard rails. When a department or team outlines 

a program aimed at a customer that the organization hasn’t defined, we’re presented with 

a choice. On some occasions, we’ll identify a need to collectively define a new customer. 

Other times, we’ll have the vocabulary to orient that team around an existing customer type. 

Either way, we’ll have a tool that prevents our view of the customer from being arbitrary and 

circumstantial. 

When our views of people become tools that we can use to ask better questions, we get 

closer to the customer. 

Building an ongoing practice: Much as the quality revolution that took hold in Japan in the 

1970s was predicated on the consistent application of basic techniques, sustained customer 

focus hinges on accessible repetition. 

At your scheduled monthly check-ins, focus on collecting feedback on a handful of simple 

questions: 

• Are the people we initially outlined still relevant to our most-pressing needs? 

• Do our colleagues understand the customers we outlined? 

• Are they using them? If not, what are the obstacles to getting this to happen? 

• What detail can we add to these customer types that is both a.) true and b.) helpful? 

You’ll want to schedule check-ins at 30 and 90 days from the kickoff to collect feedback. 

These are also opportunities to identify areas that need more detail, or extraneous elements. 

Collaborate on a plan to socialize these customer types across the organization. This can 

take many forms, but the most effective is to simply begin using them in the normal course 

of business. Include references to them in internal documents. Use them in conversation. 

Reference them in presentations. When colleagues ask about them, take the time to explain 

what they are and how they’re used. If you ‘reveal’ them, they become a trinket. If you use 

them, they become a de facto tool of the enterprise. Repetition builds the muscle memory 

that allows these to become useful. 



THEME TWO: 

Plotting a comprehensive view of 

customer experiences that are, 

increasingly, outside of our control 

Omnichannel and cross-channel operations have made the delivery of great customer 

experiences more challenging. They’ve fostered new forms of transactions, such as those 

where brick and mortar collides with eCommerce. They’ve also accelerated the organizational 

dependence on third party platforms and partners. 

The result is a system in which we no longer control the entirety of the customer experience. 

We often don’t even have a particularly clear picture of large pieces of it. 

Brand experiences are becoming more specialized and reliant on vendor platforms and 

systems. This pushes customer experience decisions down to a departmental level. Just 

how far those experiences live from the sources of customer insight and expertise varies by 

organization. 

We need a shared, comprehensive understanding of the experience of being our customer. 

That understanding helps us identify the needs of specific customers across the experience. 

This is especially critical when the delivery of our products and services is managed by 

third-parties. Consider: 

• The third party APIs that power an organization’s website. The typical enterprise site now 

consumes more than a dozen of them. 

• The shipping partners we use. Whether FedEx, UPS, DHL, or USPS, we’re accountable for 

meeting delivery expectations 13 . 

• The fulfillment centers that ship our products. 

• The call centers that support our products. 

• The retailers that distribute our products. 


Has your organization 

plotted the full endto-end 

experience of 

being your customer, 

in a way that allows 

you to see the 

world through your 

customer’s eyes? 

If so, does it extend 

beyond the specific 

functions and 

interactions delivered 

directly by your 

organization? 

If you have, is that 

map current? Does it 

have buy-in across the 

organization, or only 

in silos? 

Is this map used to 

make meaningful 

decisions, or is it just 

an document? 

13 

An example: when your organization enables package tracking through your website, that data is typically provided through an API managed by the courier you use. The quality of the specific data you can provide 

through your website is limited by the specificity (and accuracy) of that data provided by that courier. This has been an especially sore subject for companies locked into contracts with USPS. 



It’s not just you: institutional knowledge stored in mailing tubes and archival boxes 

Of the thirty organizations we audited, only nine had mapped even part of their customer’s 

journey. Of those nine, only one reported that customer journeys or maps were regularly 

used to drive decisions. 

Six of the thirty reported broader organizational attempts to map or segment the 

experiences of their customers. Only three of those companies continue to use those maps 

today. All three indicated that the documents are used only by the teams who created them. 

Artifacts are only as valuable as the collective will to use them. With regular use, the 

organization develops a muscle memory that amplifies their utility. When used in isolation 

their utility is limited by the influence of those who commission them. 

Customer experience suffers when customer insights are hoarded — and at great cost to the 

enterprise. We heard this from a VP of Product Marketing at a large Consumer Packaged 

Goods brand: 

“We turn over the majority of our workforce every six or seven years. 

After the rollout of our customer journey work five years ago, the 

consulting firm we collaborated with left and we didn’t have a lot of 

subsequent opportunities to re-introduce the work to our teams.” 

Notably, only one of the six reported that the map used by the organization included 

interactions and experiences not directly delivered by the organization. 

Start here: build an (imperfect) map of the experience of being your customer. 

We tend to be extraordinarily poor at outlining the experiences of our customers. The 

availability heuristic 14 biases us toward describing experiences that tie closely to our 

organizational structures. 

To demonstrate this, ask a customer to list out the steps involved in purchasing one of 

your products or services. Ask a key member of your operations team to do the same. 

The differences between the two will almost always reveal areas in which your customer 

experience has significant room for improvement. 

We take a significant step forward when we can divide the customer experience into 

stages that see the process not through our organization’s structure, but through the eyes 

of the user. We make even more progress when we can use that process to make 

decisions at every level of the organization. 


• Assemble another cross-functional team of between 8 and 20 individuals. It’s not 

necessary that this team be entirely distinct from the group that helped define your 

customer types. It is, however, a good opportunity to involve more members of your 

organization in the process. 



• Again, you’ll want to schedule recurring monthly check-ins with the same group for at 

least a six month period 

• Ideally, the team will have access to the customer types you defined in the first exercise 

14 

a common bias that leads us to over-rely on easily-recalled models and examples in the evaluation of a system or process 



Defining customer phases: a step-by-step approach 

1. Challenge the team with diagramming the discrete phases of being your customer. You’re 

not looking for every step in the process, but rather a series of generally agreed-upon 

phases. Most organizations will be able to identify at least four phases. More than eight 

gets cumbersome. It can be something as simple as: 

• Figuring out what I need 

• Researching my options 

• Placing an order 

• Waiting for my order to arrive 

• Unboxing / first use 

• Ongoing use 

2. Before proceeding, check to see that you’ve included phases that live outside of the 

direct control of the organization. These often include parts of the fulfillment and delivery 

process. Customer support lines are also a commonly-outsourced service. 

3. Next, check to ensure that the phases you’ve outlined reflect the world of your customers, 

not that of your own operation. Almost no one has a customer experience that maps 

logically to an org chart. 

4. On a large worksheet or wall, build a simple chart. Along the Y-axis, list the customers you 

developed in the previous exercise. Along the X-axis, list your phases. This is where the 

true heavy lifting of a customer-focused organization can begin. 

FIGURING 

OUT WHAT… 

RESEARCH 

OPTIONS 

PLACING 

ORDER 

WAITING 

FOR ORDER 

FIRST USE 

ONGOING 

USE 

Nancy 

Steve 

Cathy 

Robert 

Karen 

Remember: our lives almost never look like a sales funnel. It’s tempting to plot our 

customer experiences in phases that mirror a classic marketing funnel. Actual customer 

experiences are almost never that linear, nor that simple. If your find that the team is 

identifying stages that look a lot like ‘Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Usage > 

Loyalty’, prompt them to take a step back. They’ll usually find their footing when they 

contemplate their own experiences as customers. 

Success is a mindset that doesn’t buy into the orthodoxy of templated solutions. There’s 

nothing radical about the suggestion that Cathy and Nancy have different needs while 

waiting for an order to be filled. By identifying those distinctions, though, we begin to think 

about addressing user needs in distinct ways. This can lead to outcomes as mundane as 

distinct Customer Relationship Management streams, and as profound as a product like 

Amazon Prime. Remarkable innovation often stems from insights about the different needs 

customers have in otherwise-mundane processes. 



This challenges the orthodoxy of templated solutions. We’re accustomed to the idea that 

the product pages on our websites need to be uniform. We assume a uniform level of 

service on the sales floor. When we begin to view needs as highly differentiated and distinct, 

assumptions are challenged in exciting ways. 

To ask these questions — and imagine the possibilities they create — is to begin to take 

that journey with the customer. When we can build regular use of these phases through 

the organization, we set the stage for adopting more formal tools. Artefacts like customer 

journeys and experience maps can be extraordinarily powerful in the hands of an organization 

that not only knows its customers, but can put itself in their shoes. 

Building an ongoing practice: The phases of your customer experience are unlikely to 

change often. With that in mind, focus on refining rather than adding to them. 

At your scheduled monthly check-ins, focus on collecting feedback on a handful of 

simple questions: 

• Are the words we’ve chosen to describe these phases memorable and accurate? 

• Do our colleagues understand the phases we outlined? 

• Are they using them? If not, what are the obstacles to getting this to happen? 

• Is it clear to people where each of these phases begins and ends? If not, 

how can we add clarity? 



THEME THREE: 

Developing a multi-dimensional view of 

customer needs. 

With an understanding of our customer types and the experiences we deliver them, we can 

begin contemplating their needs. The challenge facing our organizations lies in seeing people 

not solely as customers, but rather as people with specific work to do. 

Of course, customer experiences are not utilities. Not every task or interaction can be boiled 

down to its utilitarian essence. The challenge is building a model that embraces the functional, 

social, and emotional needs of these people. In doing so, we can begin to measure the quality 

of these experiences. 

From a Product Development manager at a large insurance provider we spoke with: 


Do the members of 

your organization 

speak distinctly about 

the emotional and 

rational needs of our 

multiple customers? 

Are these distinctions 

used to deliver 

appropriate responses 

and interactions 

at different points 

within our customer 

experience? 

Is there a shared 

vocabulary that we 

currently use to 

describe customer 

needs, or are the 

words we use arbitrary 

and varied? 

Is this map used to 

make meaningful 

decisions, or is it just 

an document? 

“I think we sometimes forget that our enterprise customers are just 

people like you and me. It’s really easy to gloss over the human side 

of a buyer at a large client and say ‘she’s just focused on making 

the transaction really easy’. There’s this mindset that overlooks that 

customers — especially at B2B businesses like ours — are emotional 

beings. I take pride in my work. Most people do. And I think we could 

do a better job of thinking how we help our customers take pride in 

theirs.” 

Start here: connect customers’ actions with their desired outcomes. 

The customer-focused organization works from an understanding of customer need 15 at every 

interaction. This is not necessarily the same as meeting or fulfilling every customer need. 

Instead, it means developing intuition around the emotional and functional needs of the 

people you deliver things to — and acknowledging that those needs are not static. 

When we can succinctly define needs, then we have a north star to guide our execution. 

Once we’ve established a defined set of key customers and a set of discrete phases, we have 

a framework for identifying customer needs. In the most basic sense, needs are dependent 

on people and circumstance. Our existing grid serves as a fine foundation for understanding 

those needs and the ways in which they evolve. 

15 

In fact, it almost never is 




• Assemble yet another cross-functional team of between 8 and 20 individuals. For this 

exercise, build a team that is split evenly between new and past participants. The former 

gives you the opportunity to involve even more people in the exercise. The latter helps 

protect against the urge to challenge the underlying grid and keeps you moving forward. 



• As always, you’ll want to schedule recurring monthly check-ins with the same group for at 

least a six month period 

• You’ll want a large-format version of your grid at your disposal. It’s helpful to have a large 

erasable surface on which to work, such as a whiteboard or chalkboard. This exercise will 

get very iterative. 

A first pass at identifying customer needs: a step-by-step approach 

This approach builds upon Clay Christensen’s ‘Jobs to Be Done’ framework 16 , since advanced 

by the likes of Helge Tenno’s Job Statement Canvas 17 . 

1. Using the grid established by your teams, 

work to complete a simple statement 

in each box. Each statement will be 

comprised of two components. The first is 

single verb — i.e. ’decide’, ‘learn’, ’return’, 

‘choose’ — that describes what 

the customer wants to do in that phase. 

The second describes the emotional, 

social, or functional outcome they hope 

to derive. A fully-formed statement takes 

the form ‘X so that Y’ — ‘RETURN so that I 

GET MONEY BACK’, ‘SHARE so that FRIENDS 

ADMIRE ME’, ‘LEARN so that I AM CONFIDENT 

IN MY DECISION’. 

2. Charge the team with filling in each 

box in the grid, developing consensus 

around each opportunity. Encourage 

them to use empirical data whenever 

possible, and to frame needs through the 

customer’s eyes. Almost no one has a 

need to ‘BUY YOUR PRODUCT’. Encourage 

free-flowing discussion. It’s enormously 

satisfying to hear a cross-functional team 

debate ‘Cathy’s needs in first-use’. These 

discussions force teams to step outside of 

their immediate roles and consider the end 

user. It is these first steps that build the 

muscle memory that will form the basis of 

an ongoing intimacy with the customer. 

3. Instruct team members to share the 

exercise with their colleagues. Ask them to 

defend their word choices, and to actively 

solicit dissent. Pushing the debate down to 

departmental teams awakens a sensitivity 

to the customer that may not already exist. 

4. As with the customer profiles, plan to 

socialize these needs throughout the 

organization. Incite their regular use in 

the normal course of business. Reference 

them in conversations and meetings. 

Repeat and explain, and ask for feedback 

from every corner of the enterprise. Again, 

accessible repetition will embed them in 

the way you work. 

16 

Christensen, C, ‘Jobs to Be Done’, The Christensen Institute’ | http://almty.co/jobstodo 

17 

Tenno, H, 2014, ‘The Job Statement Canvas’ | http://almty.co/canvas 



FIGURING 

OUT WHAT… 

RESEARCH 

OPTIONS 

PLACING 

ORDER 

WAITING 

FOR ORDER 

FIRST USE 

ONGOING 

USE 

Nancy 

AUDIT so that I 

KNOW MY OWN 

NEEDS 

UNDERSTAND 

so that I MAKE A 

GOOD CHOICE 

VISIT STORE 

so that I CAN 

TOUCH IT 

PREPARE so that 

I AM READY TO 

USE IT 

DEDICATE 

TIME so that I 

CAN GET TO 

KNOW IT 

CLEAN 

REGULARLY so 

that IT LASTS A 

LONG TIME 

Steve 

SOLICIT INPUT 

so that I DON’T 

WASTE MONEY 

RESEARCH 

so that I CAN 

CHOOSE EASILY 

ORDER RUSH 

so that I GET IT 

RIGHT AWAY 

TRACK so 

that I CAN BE 

HOME WHEN IT 

ARRIVES 

DEDICATE 


CAN GET TO 

KNOW IT 

DEDICATE 

SPACE so that IT 

ALWAYS HAS A 

HOME 

Note that it’s not necessary for every box to be distinct. It’s often the case that several 

different customers will have identical needs in the same phase of the experience. You want 

only to avoid defining a single, universal need for all customers, as this is rarely true. 

Remember: Customer needs, like customers themselves, are complex and multi-faceted. 

Note that in the table some needs are emotional (“I CAN GET TO KNOW IT”), some social 

(“I MAKE A GOOD CHOICE”), and some functional (“I GET IT RIGHT AWAY”). A thoughtful grid 

of customer needs will usually reflect a mix of the three. Teams frequently over-emphasize 

functional needs, often at the expense of customers’ emotional needs. If you find that these 

are out of balance, try challenging some of the underlying assumptions that power your 

responses. Color-coding them by need type will help you quickly spot an imbalance. 

Success comes through the ability to thoughtfully execute and measure. We can build or 

buy tools that allow Steve to SOLICIT INPUT before making a purchase. We can survey Steve 

to measure his feeling that he DIDN’T WASTE MONEY. Mapping customer needs to outcomes 

gives us something tangible that we can act upon. This is true even if our data later shows 

us to have acted sub-optimally. Defining these needs informs allocation of time, money and 

resources against the customer experience. 

Building an ongoing practice: The collective will that drives sustained change comes not 

from executive edicts but from giving people the tools and opportunities to affect that 

change. There are few opportunities more immediate and open-ended than that of helping to 

define customer needs. It allows associates of all levels to apply their experiences inside the 

organization to their own experiences as customers. 

The process of giving shape to these needs and validating them in the marketplace can take 

months, or even years. This creates an enormous opportunity to involve people in the broader 

process of considering the customer experience, and will naturally help socialize the process. 

If your organization can build muscle memory around this matrix, then you may find value in 

a more-detailed experience map. Partnering with an outside firm can give you an enhanced 

view of the Moments of Truth (MOTs 18 ) that you deliver. Large enterprises might explore 

participation in the Forrester Customer Experience Index (CxPi 19 ). 

18 

If you’re not fa miliar with it, Google’s explanation of the ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) is worthwhile reading | http://almty.co/zmot 

19 

The Forrester Customer Experience Index comes with a tool that allows you to evaluate your organizations’ ‘customer experience maturity’ | http://almty.co/cxpi 



THEME FOUR: 

Defining meaningful measures for the 

quality of our interactions 

Until we can measure the quality of the experiences we deliver, we’re guessing our way 

toward customer-centricity. That guesswork is heavily biased toward assumptions and 

conventional wisdom that focus on the needs of the enterprise. 

An extraordinary number of organizations — both B2B and B2C — lack meaningful measures 

of the quality of their customer experiences. Of those that do measure, it’s common to find 

a range of disconnected measures within silos of the organization. This leads to circumstances 

in which success in one department is entirely disconnected from success in another. 

Ironically, omni-channel and multi-channel operation are more critical than ever to enterprise 

success. 

It’s not uncommon to find organizations with customer service metrics that represent a 

woefully incomplete view of the customer experience as a whole. 

Those who choose not to be your customer rarely call hotlines. 

The opportunity to embrace broad measures of the customer experience is an enormous one. 

This is especially true when those measures drive investment and resource allocation within 

the organization. It is critical in categories with evaporating switching costs, where a large 

volume of light buyers is up for grabs. 

It’s not just you: data by the petabyte, scarce useful insights. 

In a June 2015, we conducted an online survey of 543 employees of enterprise companies, 

spanning a broad range of levels and departments. Roughly 2 in 3 respondents said that their 

employer applies specific measures to their customer experience. 

Barely half of C-Suite respondents said so. 

SAID ONE OF THOSE EXECUTIVES, FROM A LARGE PRIVATELY-HELD FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM: 

“I suspect that our metrics don’t influence our customer experience 

nearly as much as they influence how we report success.” 

Nearly 3/4 of respondents who indicated that their employers measure customer experience 

cited a ‘proprietary internal measure’. This suggests that organizations are measuring their 

customer experience through conversion and retention rates. This was less-true of B2B 

organizations, which demonstrated considerable bias for 3rd party measures. 

Three in five indicated that their organizations use social media data — follows, likes, 

sentiment analysis — as a primary measure of customer experience. 

Alarmingly, just over one in five responses indicated that social network data is their 

employer’s ONLY measure of customer experience. 



There’s an astonishingly poor understanding of which measures are actually employed by the 

respondents’ organizations. Consider the following responses from employees of a national 

health insurance network: 

ROLE 

METRICS CITED 

Marketing Manager 

Social Network Data 

Marketing Director 

Internal Measure, Social Network Data, Net Promoter Score 

Director of Operations 


Director of Marketing 

Social Network Data, Customer Satisfaction Surveys 

Director of Corporate Communications 

Net Promoter Score 

Vice President, IT 


Corporate Communications Manager 

Internal Measure 

Operations Manager 

Social Network Data, Net Promoter Score, Customer Advocacy 

Consultant (Training) 

(None cited) 

Distributions like this appear throughout the responses from 188 different enterprises. This 

indicates that measurement is happening. Yet, it reveals a wildly inconsistent set of known 

and used measures within individual organizations. In several cases, respondents with the 

same job title had entirely distinct sets of responses. 

Is it possible that we’re loaded with data, and still don’t understand which parts of our 

customer experience are working? 


Can you use the 

customer experience 

data available to you 

to make investment 

and operational 

decisions? 

Can you tie measures 

of customer 

experience to business 

value, or simply to 

affinity? 

If you asked colleagues 

for an assessment of 

your organization’s 

customer experience, 

would they deliver 

data or anecdotes? 


You’ll want to approach measurement in smaller, more-focused teams. A large workshop is a 

cumbersome venue for these exercises. Instead, assemble a small team of 3-4 people for each 

grid item. This is another occasion in which a mix of seniority can work in your favor. The most 

effective teams will be comprised both of people who engage the customer every day, and of 

those who shape business strategy. 



Be prepared to set aggressive timelines for each team. You want to give teams enough 

timeline to understand the problem and validate a solution, but not enough to slow 

overall progress. 

Low-fidelity customer experience measures: a step-by-step approach 

FIGURING 

OUT WHAT… 

RESEARCH 

OPTIONS 

PLACING 

ORDER 

WAITING 

FOR ORDER 

FIRST USE 

ONGOING 

USE 

Nancy 

AUDIT so that I 

KNOW MY OWN 

NEEDS 

UNDERSTAND 

so that I MAKE A 

GOOD CHOICE 

VISIT STORE 

so that I CAN 

TOUCH IT 

PREPARE so that 

I AM READY TO 

USE IT 

DEDICATE 


CAN GET TO 

KNOW IT 

CLEAN 

REGULARLY so 

that IT LASTS A 

LONG TIME 

1. Using the grid matrix that you developed, 

start by validating the needs you’ve 

outlined. You’re looking to validate that 

Nancy wants to VISIT THE STORE so that 

she CAN TOUCH THE PRODUCT before 

placing an order. This can take the form of 

qualitative research, customer interviews, 

customer polling, or other empirical forms 

of discovery. It need not be exhaustive. In 

fact, it probably should not be. 

2. If you’re unable to validate the need 

you’ve outlined, it’s worth revisiting 

that box. Often, insights uncovered in 

validation will be helpful in re-framing 

that need. This is one reason why 

qualitative inquiry is a great validation 

technique. 

3. If you are able to validate that need, then 

you’ll want to outline a clear measure 

of your ability to meet that need. You’re 

looking to ask ‘HOW EFFECTIVE ARE WE AT 

HELPING NANCY VISIT THE STORE IN ORDER 

TO TOUCH THE PRODUCT?’. You’re also 

asking ‘HOW EFFECTIVE IS PUTTING THE 

PRODUCT IN NANCY’S HANDS AT HELPING HER 

PLACE AN ORDER?’. It’s essential that each 

question is tackled distinctly. 

4. Again, you can measure these interactions 

in various ways, at varying levels of 

fidelity. You will usually want to define a 

quantitative benchmark for each of these 

needs, so that you can measure progress. 

Avoid the temptation to conflate these 

with other business metrics: retail 

conversion rate is not a proxy for Nancy’s 

in-store buying experience. 

5. Most organizations will benefit from 

a high-level measure that serves as a 

North Star. If you choose to embrace 

Net Promoter Score 20 as a metric, be 

sure to communicate that choice across 

the enterprise. Encourage employees 

to develop an understanding of how it 

is calculated, what it conveys, and how 

the work they do pulls the levers that 

affect it. A single metric, like NPS, is 

hardly a perfect measure — though it’s 

an effective tool for bringing teams into 

rapid alignment. 

6. Regardless of your choice of high-level 

measure, make it visible. Post your current 

score to display screens in your offices. 

Bake it into internal memos and status 

documents. Foster a culture in which 

knowing your customer experience scores 

is part of doing business. 

Remember: a transactional measure of success is not the same as a high-quality 

experience. Be wary of efforts to equate organizational metrics with the delivery of a great 

experience. It’s tempting, though dangerous, to use business measures that are already at 

our disposal. Encourage teams to tease out the nature of the interactions that live within your 

metrics. This will lay the groundwork for measuring the value that a great experience delivers. 

Success comes when we can make informed investments in experiences. The impact of 

applying measures to the customer experience is more valuable than our choice of metrics. 

20 

http://almty.co/nps 



When we articulate the necessity to measure these experiences, we work toward a better 

culture. In this culture, services, programs and campaigns begin from a place we can measure 

and test. In this culture, people understand which levers to pull to increase experience scores. 

This leads to a culture in which teams can invest in experiences with outcomes that benefit 

both the user and the enterprise. 

Building an ongoing practice: Much as needs are driven by ongoing validation, measurement 

is a constantly-evolving process. You’ll want to give measures time to take hold within the 

organization before employing them to great effect. 

A monthly review of measures can be useful for evaluating the use of CX metrics within the 

organization. 

Better yet, build an internal web-based dashboard that displays key customer metrics 

throughout the organization. Make it available across the organization in an effort drive real 

accountability and demonstrate the value of your investments. 



THEME FIVE: 

Creating executive accountability for 

the decisions that shape our customer 

experiences 

When everyone is responsible for the customer experience, no one is accountable for it. The 

functional understanding of the customer is not a benign threat, no matter how well-intended. 

A functional view results in registration forms that meet IT needs but add friction to the 

purchase funnel. A functional view results in customers with separate logins for your app, 

customer portal and loyalty program. A functional view leads to disconnected teams 

supporting disconnected experiences. Often, these are the result of disconnected agendas. 

When accountability for customer experience is decentralized, so are the insights collected 

from customer interactions. This makes it especially difficult to assemble a full view of the end 

customer. 

It’s not just you: certainty that someone’s in charge, uncertainty about just who that is. 

In our 2015 survey, about 60% of the 543 respondents cited a specific individual within the 

organization as ‘accountable for the quality of the customer experience’. 

Employees of B2B organizations were especially confident in this assertion. They were a 

standard deviation more likely to make this claim than their B2C counterparts. 

For all the confidence that such a person exists, there’s considerable disagreement about just 

who it is. 44 companies (out of 188 included in the study) had three or more respondents cite 

a leader accountable for customer experience. Only one company had all respondents name 

the same individual. 

More typical were response sets like this one, from a global shipping and courier service: 

RESPONDENT SOMEONE ACCOUNTABLE WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE? 

Entry-level engineer 

No 

Research manager Yes COO 

Director of Engineering Yes Administrative Director 

Entry-level operations Yes Chief Creative Officer 

Director of Product Dev. Yes Senior Designer 

VP, Design 

No 

Senior Product Dev. Yes Sr. Director, Marketing 

Senior Operations Mgr. Yes Director, Corp. Comms 



Or this, from one of the United States’ largest drugstore chains: 

RESPONDENT SOMEONE ACCOUNTABLE WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE? 

Administrative Manager Yes Administrative Manager 

Senior Designer 

Not Sure 

Sr. Project Manager Yes Design Director 

Senior IT Manager Yes Senior Designer 

Marketing Manager 

Not Sure 

Project Manager 

No 

Operations Trainee Yes Chief Sales Officer 

Operations Manager Yes Manager, Corp. Comms 

Clearly, there’s significant confusion about accountability for the quality of the 

customer experience. 


Do employees 

at your company 

know who to 

seek out for 

collaboration, 

support, or 

direction in 

decisions related 

to the customer 

experience? 

Do crossfunctional 

groups trust the 

information, data 

and insights 

you have about 

the customer 

experience, or are 

they selective in 

the views they 

adopt? 

Are insights about 

the customer 

experience 

actionable, and 

acted upon? 

Is the quality of 

your customer 

experience, and 

the measures 

of that quality, 

among the metrics 

regularly evaluated 

by your executive 

team? 

Can members of 

your leadership 

team cite your Net 

Promoter Score (or 

similar measures) 

with the same 

precision that they 

cite sales metrics? 

Start here: empower the executive team to be the loudest advocates for your customers 

Only 13% of those surveyed identified a member of the C-Suite as the individual ultimately 

accountable for ensuring a great customer experience. Yet, it is precisely from the 

organization’s executive team that the organization’s values, budget and initiatives 

frequently flow. 

It is from the leadership team that urgency flows. 



PER JOHN KOTTER 21 : 

“(Urgency) must be the engine for change. That same sense of 

urgency must be carried through all the way to the finish line. 

Transformation is a long-term process that requires consistent energy 

and enthusiasm, and everyone involved must be constantly reminded 

of the big opportunities that lie ahead. All too often, however, change 

efforts start off with a big bang, and quickly lose their firepower when 

people declare victory too soon.” 

The goal is not to develop an executive team with customer experience acumen and 

sensitivity. Instead, we need leadership that creates opportunities for others to meaningfully 

drive change on behalf of our customers. 

Customer experience in the C-Suite: a step-by-step approach 

There can be little sustained momentum toward the customer-centric organization without a 

designated leader. Organizations require a vocal advocate for the needs of their customers; 

a thoughtful source of insight; a resource for team seeking to align their initiatives to broader 

organizational metrics; someone who can lead the charge in the development of more formal 

artifacts as needs grow more sophisticated. 

1. Develop an executive point of view on the role of customer experience. This should be 

more than a tacit endorsement of the value of great experiences. It should bind customer 

experience to the organization’s mission in a tangible way. 

CONSIDER THIS PASSAGE FROM JETBLUE CEO ROBIN HAYES’ 2014 LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS 22 : 

“Culture is the foundation of our success and is what makes JetBlue 

unique. It’s that culture that inspires our 16,000 Crewmembers to 

deliver outstanding customer service each day while embodying 

our key values. In 2014, we were once again recognized for 

service excellence by J.D. Power, our tenth such award in a row! 

This recognition demonstrates the importance of our distinctive 

service and humanity driven culture and the difference each of our 

Crewmembers make. Further, we can see the benefits of our culture in 

our Net Promoter Scores. I firmly believe higher NPS scores translate 

to increased customer loyalty and a revenue premium.” 

2. Articulate a customer goal for the whole of the enterprise. Outline a clear mission for the 

organization to get behind. For example: 

“By 2017, we will have a Net Promoter Score on par with AXA, 

Vanguard and Wells Fargo.” 

or 

“In 2016, we will deliver a Temkin Emotion Rating at or above 70%.” 

3. Bake CX data into regular reporting. Use measures of customer experience, like Net 

21 

the full transcript and video are available at http://almty.co/kotter 

22 

the entire Jet Blue Annual Report and Letter to Shareholders can be found at http://almty.co/jetblue2014 



Promoter Score, as inputs for Senior Leadership Team meetings and discussions. Work to 

ensure that the broader executive team understands the metrics you’ve adopted, and the 

levers that drive changes in those metrics. 

4. Tie budgets and resource allocation to customer experience performance. Connect clear 

customer experience goals to budgets for teams and departments. Clearly communicate 

that proposals and programs are expected to work within the customer experience 

framework outlined by the organization. 

Remember: this is about building momentum, not reorganizing the enterprise. Avoid the 

temptation to make an outside hire. The CXO role has been a fashionable hire in recent years, 

but frequently serves only to further ghetto-ize customer experience, rather than imbue the 

enterprise with a sense of shared purpose. Building new habits at all levels of the organization 

requires credibility and the ability to drive change. Identify a well-regarded leader from 

within the organization, and ask them to evolve the culture. Subject matter expertise can be 

acquired more readily than leadership. 

Success lies in the capacity of our evangelists to make true believers of the indifferent among 

us. Creating a customer experience imperative at the highest level connects initiatives across 

the organization. This prevents well-intended programs in one department from fostering 

unintended consequences in another. 

As importantly, the customer experience leader can spread institutional behavior like wildfire. 

Our indifference to customers is born of an emphasis on systems over an emphasis on people. 

AS NEIL PERKIN PUTS IT 23 : 

“If your customers are at all frustrated by the use of automation, 

inflexible rules and systems then you are not customer centric. If your 

staff use scripts then you are not customer-centric.” 

Evangelists put hearts before charts. 

BUILDING AN ONGOING PRACTICE: FAMOUSLY, A SMALL SIGN ON A WALL IN APPLE’S CUPERTINO DESIGN 

STUDIO BEARS A SIMPLE MESSAGE: 

“The tools you give employees tell them how much their work is worth.” 

It’s tempting to think that, in building an ongoing practice around customer experience, 

we can bridge the gap to a better world with tools. Organizations as different as PillPack 

and L.L.Bean use large format dashboards 24 in their offices to display real-time customer 

experience metrics. That these two companies consistently post category-leading customer 

experience scores has little to do, though, with the dashboards. Instead, they succeed 

because the tools their employees have been given is the latitude to use those numbers to 

make informed decisions that impact the customer experience. The tools you give 

employees tell them how much you value their collective will. 

As leaders, the most valuable tool you can give to your organization is the belief that 

the mandate for delivering a better customer experience comes straight from the top. 

Communicate it loudly and often. 

23 

http://almty.co/perkin 

24 

This, from McKinsey’s 2013 report ‘The Truth About Customer Experience’ http://almty.co/mckinsey is worth remembering: ‘The company’s traditional customer-experience dashboard had missed the problem 

because it included no measure of end-to-end success. “Our dashboard metrics were like a watermelon,” one senior manager told us. “On the outside everything was green, but when you looked inside, it was red, 

red, red.”’ 



We need to get started. 

This is achievable. 

It’s achievable because — for all of the Fast Company rhetoric about 

the ‘age of the customer’ — being customer-centric is about doing the 

basics well: 

• Identify a set of customers we can rally the organization around. 

• Develop a full picture of what it means to be our customer. 

• Clearly articulate people’s real needs so that we can meet them. 

• Measure our effectiveness in ways that allow us to continually improve. 

• Create centralized accountability for the experiences that we deliver. 

This requires that we step outside ourselves, our assumptions, our 

vanity metrics, and our fiefdoms. It requires an emphasis on execution. 

It requires a steadfast belief that better experiences for the customer 

deliver better outcomes for the enterprise. 

Indeed, they do. 

We have no jetpacks. Instead, we offer a framework to help you get off 

the ground. 



Almighty builds 

experiences that trigger 

emotions people can’t 

ignore, for brands that 

refuse to be overlooked. 

We help brands build, reclaim and maintain 

their relevance in markets undergoing 

radical change. Almighty specializes 

in working with organizations that are 

expanding to support new channels and 

lines of business.” 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Ian Fitzpatrick is a founding partner at Almighty, where 

he leads a research and strategy practice charged with 

developing insights into the behaviors and needs of 

the people who use the products and services we build. 

He works across the breadth of Almighty’s client roster, 

from helping roll out the New Balance in-store digital 

experience to shaping the launch of Al Gore’s Climate 

Project to working with L.L.Bean to develop the guiding 

principles for the brand’s customer experiences. 

Ian is a frequent speaker and lecturer, and serves as 

an advisor at both TechStars and the Harvard 

Innovation Lab. 

Ian Fitzpatrick 

Chief Strategy Officer 

@ianfitzpatrick 

300 Western Ave., Fl. 2 Boston, Massachusetts 02134 | ALMIGHTY

Hearts then Charts

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