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What if your best ideas about how to improve customer experience are wrong?
This may sound harsh, especially if you have spent years or even decades working with customers. Yes, that experience matters. So does intuition. But neither guarantees that what worked yesterday will improve the customer experience tomorrow.
I recently interviewed Stefan Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Scientific Mindset: How Thinking Scientifically Drives Better Business Decisions, who has spent more than three decades studying experimentation, innovation and how companies make decisions.
Beware of Situational Arrogance
Thomke discusses Ron Johnson, who had a successful track record at Target and helped create Apple’s retail stores. He was hired to help turn around JCPenney and immediately used his experience to make major changes to the retail customer experience. About 17 months later, he was let go. His ideas just didn’t work.
Thomke calls this situation arrogance, and says, “When we get so sure about things … we get a little arrogant. We think we have all the answers.”
Past success can create confidence, but too much confidence can turn an assumption into a decision before it’s been tested.
Test More, Assume Less
Thomke uses Booking.com, the online travel company, as a case study in the book. The company is constantly looking for ways to improve its website and get more customers to book trips. It has experts, programmers, data and plenty of ideas about what they believe will work. But Booking.com’s own statistics show that about nine out of 10 ideas they test don’t produce the expected results
It’s not that the experts are coming up with bad ideas. It’s that they recognize an idea is just that, an idea, until it is tested … and then tested again … and again.
That’s the scientific mindset Thomke wants leaders to embrace: Test more and assume less.
Experiment Before You Commit
In our interview, I shared the story of a client with a chain of 250 retail stores. The company was struggling with its customer experience and wanted to hire us to deliver a training program to the managers and assistant managers of all 250 stores.
They wanted us to roll this out quickly, and as much as I wanted the large contract, I suggested we start with five stores: two top performers, two struggling stores and one average store. The goal was to move the average store closer to excellence and the struggling stores to at least average, to start.
The client loved the approach. Thomke confirmed that without realizing it, I was practicing the scientific mindset. Prove it before rolling it out company-wide.
