Who Sees the Whole Job to Get Done?
Chapter Four: Principle 3—Customers need the Whole Job to Get Done
Dear Friends,
Today is the start of chapter 4 in the Experience Strategy Book Project. Most companies understand why they need to focus on the customer and are aware of the idea of jobs to be done. This chapter is not to remind them of that.
Instead, I want to focus on what’s missing from customer-centricity work today. No one seems to be focused on aligning a whole understanding of the customer’s needs with a whole understanding of the company’s business model. There are lots of small projects, lots of fail fast programs, and lots of micro innovations.
But we can leverage the business model if we can’t see the whole job to be done.
Who Sees the Whole Job to Get Done?
Chapter Objective
While many companies have embraced innovation, problem resolution, and needs-based solution making—and they understand the threat of disruptive innovation to their companies, they struggle to get the whole job done for the customer. In this chapter, I delve into the root causes for why companies can’t deliver on the full need of the customer. Then, I share frameworks and tools to help you get the whole job done.
Chapter Summary
· The innovator focuses on the job to be done. The experience strategist focuses on the whole job to get done
· Why jobs to be done is still the best way to study customer needs
· Some industries (like healthcare) don’t allow one company to do the whole job
· People’s expectations drive what ‘the whole job’ means
· Customer journey should be about the whole job
· Channel strategy should be about the whole job
· Context is about the whole job
· Developing whole job partnerships
Introduction
It took a lot of effort, from a lot of people in very different parts of the business world to change the way that business strategists think about customer needs. The biggest accomplishment of the last 20 years has been to shift strategy away from ‘how to dominate an industry’ to ‘how to give the customer exactly what they need.’ Clayton Christensen, Joe Pine, Jim Gilmore, and even Fred Reichheld helped to create the thought leadership. Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg built technology companies that showed how much wealth can be amassed from focusing on the job the customer is trying to get done—and the near future needs of people.
Great design firms, like IDEO and Ziba, promoted the user experience, putting an emphasis on qualitative insights discovered by highly trained researchers. Stanford and Harvard business schools promoted customer-centricity as the most important factor in business model design. We created new disciplines like Lean Six Sigma, CX, UX, and Open Innovation, each focused on keeping customers at the center of the equation.
Even many marketers have changed the way that they think about engagement. They promote customer centered brand strategies.
I do not pretend that every leader in every company has gotten the message. I meet regularly with frustrated experience strategists who tell me that their company doesn’t get customer centricity or experience strategy. But compared with how business was run 20 years ago, we’ve come a long way.
Companies understand better than ever that customers hire them to get the job done. They realize that they must innovate or perish. They fear disruption. All of which is right and good.
But there is more to do. What most companies do not grasp is how to get the whole job done for the customer. Innovators focus on the specific, individual, case-in-point jobs to be done. Experience strategists need to look across everything that the company is doing and see how the pieces should fit together. And to see how all of the pieces fit together, the experience strategist must see the whole job the customer needs done.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why focusing on the whole job to be done is crucial.
First, the customer doesn’t need part of the job done. They need the whole job done. Today my wife woke up with a painful upper jaw ache. She’d already gone to the dentist two weeks before but he couldn’t find the reason for the pain. Yesterday, she went to see an ENT (ears, nose, and throat) specialist. But even though he poked and probed in the sinus cavity (I know, poor woman!) he couldn’t see the problem. So today she called the radiologist to schedule a CAT scan. She said to me, “I hope the insurance approves the scan.” And then she went and took a prescription pain killer
.
Everyone that she worked with and will work with is a specialist. They use the best technology they can. They are highly trained. And they care about their patients. But none of them can solve her problem alone. So instead she becomes the expert in her pain. She has to navigate the system to solve the problem. Most consumers have similar problems in all aspects of their lives. They have a portfolio of solution providers for their homes, their families, their work, and their entertainment. But they can’t get any one source to understand the whole job they are trying to get done.
The second reason companies need to focus on the whole job to be done is related to the first. Because customers are frequently become the experts of their own needs, they gravitate to new channels and tools regularly. Much of what companies call innovation today is actually catching up on new tools and channels so that they can keep their customers. They often build new tools and channels without a full understand of the customer’s situation. They rarely have a point of view that is driving how they build new tools and channels.
In fact, many companies deploy fail fast innovation techniques that are focused a very specific, case in point needs without thinking through the holistic needs of their customers at all. If the innovation catches on, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, then it’s bad.
The net effect on companies is added complexity to the business model. Added costs. Added risk of service disruption. Added confusion. Which brings us to the third reason why the experience strategist must understand the whole job to get done.
Silos. Most companies of any size have silos. And most companies with experience programs suffer from silos. Silos hinder innovation. Silos slow things down. And silos make it so that no one can see the whole picture. The customer-centricity disciplines actually create confusion around the job to be done for the customer because they too are siloed. The strategy team is separate from the innovation team. The innovation team sees the customer differently from the CX team, who sees things differently from the UX team. Each channel has its own experience people. Each team is solving for one specific part of a much bigger puzzle.
And unfortunately the only way that most companies know to keep the experience coordinated is through a journey map and persona document. Both of which are completely inadequate for the challenge.
To be continued …