Driving CX Transformation with the TCQ Framework

Aric Zion

All right, well, hello, everyone. We’re back for another webinar and we have Amanda Johnson and Arne de Keyser here with us today. Amanda is a member of our Zion and Zion team. And honestly, sometimes Arne feels like he’s a member of our Zion and Zion team. But we’re going to talk about some very interesting work we’ve all done together, our agency and Arne and several academics in the field of customer experience and also applying it to clients. So let me quickly turn it over, Amanda, your name and title and what you work on, and then we’ll let Arne introduce himself.

Amanda Johnson

Yeah, my name is Amanda Johnson. I am a senior customer experience and user experience strategist here at Zion and Zion, and I work with everything from customer journeys to evaluating the customer experience to. To developing wireframes and websites.

Arne de Keyser

My name is Arne de Keyser. I’m a professor of marketing at EDHEC Business School, which is located in France. Research wise, I’m doing a lot logically on customer experience, understanding what is the concept, but also as an organization, how can we implement it strategically, think about it, and also very much interested in the role of new technologies and how they can come and enhance the experience, but also sometimes kind of work against the experience. So how can we avoid that type of negative interaction to happen as well?

Aric Zion

All right, so, you know, we’ve done a lot of work together over. I feel like it’s two or three years now, but why don’t we start? Arne, where did your work in the TCQ framework kind of originate, and how would you summarize what that framework is about?

Arne de Keyser

Well, it started even a couple of years before that, so it feels I’m very quickly becoming very old in that way. But I think we started around 2015, something like that. And it originated essentially through some of my co authors that I worked with on this project, including Kay Lemon, who was at the time the head of the Marketing Science Institute, which is an institute which aims to practice. And every two years they bring out a set of research priorities for academics that are determined by practitioners. And for a couple of research priorities in a row, customer experience had been on top of that list, where a lot of practitioners are saying, well, we’re all talking about it, it’s super popular, super hip. But we seem to have this slightly different notion depending on who’s talking about it. It sounds a little bit different, the meaning is a little bit different, and so on. So what we miss is some sort of common way to talk about cx. And if you don’t have that, well, how can you actually get something done? So at that point that inspired us because there was a growing research stream on experience. So what we set out to do is, okay, let’s try to develop some sort of language system to that helps us capture, well, what is cx? And if we talk cx, what are the building blocks? A little bit like playing with LEGO bricks. If you have different LEGO bricks, you can make very nice creations. But if you don’t have the bricks, there are no creations. So what are the LEGO bricks underlying CX? And that’s how we came to TCQ is kind of three major building blocks, all with subcomponents under them. T would stand for touch points in that there’s never an experience without a touch point. You need to have some form of interaction with an organization for an experience to happen. Touch points can be, I mean, they can be human, digital, physical, name it. An important distinction that we had there was they can be under the control of the organization, but there are also touch points that are not under the control of the organization. Stuff that I do with what I bought that maybe leads to a negative experience, but that is not under the control of the organization itself. And there’s a whole bunch of them. And then you obviously have the journey stages, something pre purchase purchase or post purchase. And that kind of helps you think about touch points as such. Now it could be that Amanda and I have the exact same touch point, but that Amanda is super positive and I’m very negative about something.

Well, that’s the second letter, the C. The context can be different. I can be in a super bad mood. Maybe my kids didn’t allow me to sleep at night, and then I go to the store and I’m very perceptive to all negative stuff. And then while Amanda, as I understood, it’s super nice weather, now in Arizona, you’re super positive. And then your experience, by definition, in interacting with any organization becomes better because of it. So context is essentially an entire set of factors that can impact two people having the same touch point in a very different way. Could be very individual, could be people around you, could be your kids, could be other customers, could be colleagues, family members and so on. It could be market factors. Name it a particular competitor that does a certain activity in a particular market that makes that the experience shifts. And then while you’ve got environmental factors, I mean the weather, political climate, name it, that could fall under that. So touch points are always in a context. And then we have the cue, which essentially are the aspects that reflect the nature of the experience. And there we make a distinction between what we call dimensionality. An experience can be cognitive. It makes you think about something. It can be super emotional, makes you happy, it makes you sad. Name it. Can be a social experience, can be sensorial. I mean, you go to a bakery, the smells that come there, that is very typical of that experience. Or it could be very physical, it makes you move around and so on. And then there’s also kind of an intensity subcomponent there, which is composed of how active does a customer need to be in interacting with the organization? Can be super passive. If you sit in the cinema, or can be super active. You’ve got some of these people that go on very long trail runs or do a marathon race. Well, it’s a very active experience in that way. And some people really, really like that. You’ve got Valens there. Everyone always assumes an experience has to be positive. Well, going to a dentist, it’s kind of hard to make that a super positive experience. Kind of. That negativity is a little bit part of that. An example I always give as well is like mouthwash. As mouthwash, you don’t want to taste too good. There needs to be something off for people to believe that it actually works. So you almost need to have that thing off and then you’ve got time flow. Is it fast, Is it slow? And we also have, with intensity, some sort of ordinariness. Is it super special or is it super common in everyday experience and kind of bringing that all together, you can pick a T, you can pick a C, you can pick a Q and you can start thinking about what is the experience that people are going through, what qualities are super important, what contextual elements are super important, and what are the touch points that we’re delivering as an organization. So that kind of, in a super big nutshell, summarizes here what TCQ stands for.

Aric Zion

And Amanda, that’s probably a great place for you to. So with that framework in mind as a checklist, as a methodology, why don’t you talk about, you know, how we’ve applied that, how you’ve applied that to clients, you know, and provided structure and results achieved or.

Amanda Johnson

Yeah, so I’d say historically, just to start, prior to us implementing this framework, there was still an aspect of customer journey mapping, of course, but we found that that was really broad. You know, the main kind of measurement that we had to implement as a framework was NET Promoter score, which wasn’t really helpful. For us to produce outcomes or find ways to actually impact the customer experience. So we had kind of started mapping the customer journey, looking at the pain points and the moments of truth. And we just ultimately felt like there was a need for more. So that’s really where the TCQ framework has become so valuable. The first client that we applied this to, where we got to put it into practice for the first time and really kind of put the rubber to the road, was an international retailer of DIY sealants and coating. And they had an aspect or they had different aspects of their customer experience that was both digital and physical. So that was a really interesting way to apply the framework and really obviously looking at the stages of what happens in the research for a customer for this client, what happens when they’re actually buying the product in that purchase phase. The post purchase phase for this client was actually the customers kind of using the sealants and coatings. So there was a really interesting journey to be evaluated here using the framework TCQ specifically when we were looking at those touch points help us grasp a ton more touch points than honestly probably we wouldn’t have dug deep to find without the structure of the framework to help us think through not just what are those kind of surface level touch points that you think of, but what are all of those different interactions from word of mouth to YouTubing tutorial videos. So that t the touch points is really helpful in that kind of checklist manner. And then the context and the qualities was just a complete game changer from our perspective of, of looking at how we can evaluate a customer experience and impact it. We like to think of those, those qualities and that cue specifically as kind of scales on a DJ board. So when we went through and evaluated the customer experience for this client, we were, we were looking at each of these touch points on those scales saying, you know, where is this on the, the time flow? Is this a really quick part of the process or a slow part of the process? And kind of what would that look like if we were to, so to speak, dial this up or dial this down and kind of going through that process of adjusting each thing, you know, a little way and seeing how that might impact the experience just gave us a lot of great ideas for innovation, many of which that we actually implemented and have seen impacts from, but also just to kind of also get a baseline of where is the customer experience today and where can it grow to be. So in that first implementation obviously found a ton of great value in it and just the depth of the framework that it provided that was several years ago. And since then we’ve applied it to multiple different clients across varying industries. And just each time we get new insights and it’s really, it’s proven its value for sure.

Aric Zion

Well, and you know, I can certainly chime in here that I think one of the incredible value, valuable things certainly that I’ve seen is Arne alluded to the nomenclature. And you know, we would see organizations, client organizations, they get a bunch of people in a room like said, they’d map out the customer journey, they’d have all kinds of notes, they’d have smiley faces, were they happy? Frown faces, were they sad? They all sit around trying to decide what do we do about this giant map of stuff? And they have no common language and no place to start. Starting with the TCQ framework, which then we further adapted for our use and expanded, etc. It allows you to sit in a room, that same room, and say, all right, everyone, we’re going to discuss the time flow characteristics of this touch point or these touch points. And one of the examples I love to give that I think a lot of people will personally experience is think about for how many decades people stood in long, long lines at Disney rides, and the only choice they ever had was to just stand in long, long lines. And now in very recent times, you go into many Disney lines and you will find interactive things to do and observe, et cetera, throughout the line in order to break up the time flow and to create the perception that it is a shorter, more interesting weight. And I guarantee it, if somebody took those people 30 years ago and stuck them in a room and said, we’re going to discuss the dynamic nature of what standing in a line like this feels like and what makes time feel like it goes faster, slower, et cetera, et cetera. It would have come up with these ideas decades ago. So it’s a perfect example of how having the nomenclature and the topic you’re going to discuss pulled from the framework accelerates the discussion and focuses everyone in on new outcomes. And you can see them applying in the digital world too well, and you see little examples of it. We’re going to tell you there’s five steps in the process, so it feels like it’s going slower, or we’re going to tell you the process is going to take four and a half minutes, but there’s so much more room for improvement if you focus, you know, through things like this. So I’m curious, Amanda, there have been other elements besides the framework that we’ve kind of bolted onto it that we felt were also useful. You want to talk about a couple of those?

Amanda Johnson

Yeah, definitely. I think one that comes to mind right off the bat is in the, the context of, you know, obviously there’s the four different categories that we talked about, but there’s a lot of different almost sub qualities that support that, so to speak. So we used Bruner’s marketing skills and kind of helped use that almost as a checklist is maybe not the right word, but just to kind of add some additional thought process on our end of if we were to get people in a room and we’re talking about this and we have this shared goal in mind and you know, we’re talking about environmental context. Well, what does that mean? So just adding some additional depth and layers to that using those marketing scales. And there were thousands of those that, that can be applied and fit very nicely in with this framework. So that’s just kind of been one additional, additional layer that we’ve added that.

Aric Zion

That’s a great one. And yeah, you know, and marketers that are, that are listening to this and we did this, you know, you can either buy or go into a library and you can look through, you know, and this gives Gordon Bruner, the professor that developed these marketing scale handbooks, a plug here. But his handbooks, hard copies of his handbooks can be found in libraries. And you can go in there and you can look through those and you can think about, well, I’m thinking about context for my client. Well, I want to think about their individual differences. And you can look through those scales and be inspired by things you might want to measure. Is this person risk averse? Is this. There are literally thousands. And Arne also had compiled hundreds and hundreds of scales used in the CX literature. And I think that was one of the most useful things we did was you could go to a library, look up Brunner stuff. We have Arnie’s list, there are other lists out there, et cetera. And it allows you again back to that same room of people where you say, let’s talk about our customer. What’s in their head? And you can say, let’s pick a bunch of scales that measure the following 20 characteristics of an individual, of a customer. Which of these do we think is relevant to our customer and how do we think that impacts their experience at the touchpoint? Like, are my customers nervous Nellies when they call a home services provider because they’re in a lurch, their heat or cool is out and they feel, wow, I really need These guys, you know, they’re highly anxious, et cetera. Well, personal scales as to how prone the customer is toward anxiety as being a trait of that person becomes relevant. And now the customer service people can begin, if they think of it that way, can begin to say things to themselves. Like, I know in general that people are stressed, but how can I implement processes in the call center and questions and be attuned to whether I’m dealing with an individual who is biased toward a high level of personal stress? And now, once again, you can modify the customer experience at that call center touch point because your team knows to look for that individual difference and leaning. So, yeah, I thought that was a very, very interesting one. So. So, Arnie, where to from here?

Arne de Keyser

Good question. A couple of things. I guess there’s more work needed. I mean, it started with scales and so on, but to help organizations figure out, okay, what contextual factors are really important to me. Like, Bruner is super good for individual and social context, but there’s also other stuff out there on, okay, where do we prioritize? How do we make up an initial list of contextual elements that could be at play here? I think there’s work there to be done. The measurement of the qualities, again, existing skills can be a starting point there, but novel work that looks into, okay, how do we measure the cognitive dimension, the emotional dimension, sensorial thing, the ordinariness, the time flow? And how do we do that in a simple way? I mean, academically speaking, sometimes you can have very long scales. How do we do that in a much shorter way, one item scales, or even not by scales, but in textual data, visual data, how can you extract certain qualities from that as well? I think there’s a lot to be gained there as well. Looking further into the visualization tools, I know you’ve also worked on like an extended version of the journey map, but how can that be refined? How can that be even become more TCQ specific and so on? So I guess there’s a lot to do there. Probably also in the B2B space, doing some work in that area right now. So far, TCQ seems to apply very robustly. But again, different contextual factors might be at play there. And how do I identify those? How do we move ahead? I guess purely TCQ related, those would be a couple of challenges that would already take up a lot of time to get these covered.

Aric Zion

Amanda, you were at a conference actually in France last year, and I believe you had some interesting conversations with academics around B2B application of the Framework as well, right?

Amanda Johnson

Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think bringing in a buyer committee rather than a single customer and looking at how TCQ applies to that, I think there’s a lot of great research going on that helps support but ultimately, like the structure and those building blocks of looking at those qualities as those kind of different scales, I think it applies immensely and can definitely be a great way to evaluate what that customer journey looks like. Like, even when it’s applied to a buying committee.

Aric Zion

Yeah, I mean, definitely. You know, account based marketing buying committees really can complicate the context because it’s not just, you know, a family of four now making a decision or something like that. You have this diverse group of people that don’t necessarily know each other anywhere near as well as a family, with all kinds of different backgrounds and goals, et cetera, et cetera, all interacting with each other, changing and reshaping dynamically on the fly. The context for everyone in the buying group. I mean, it’s really interesting. I think we’ve seen content marketing groups in our B2B clients try and develop materials for different audiences. They’ll write the the white paper this way for the CFO and they’ll write it this way for the purchasing person, etc. But what they often don’t consider, rarely consider, is when they write for that role, they think, well, the CFO wants to know X, but they usually do not consider, no. The CFO is also going to have a conversation with the chief purchasing person, the CEO, the HR manager, the product manager, et cetera. And therefore the paper needs to be written not just to the goals of the CFO, but to enable the CFO to have conversations with the other roles. So it’s a perfect example of how the context, again, just sitting in a room and going, what do we mean by context here? And how do these interactions occur among these group members? Totally reshapes a B2B organization’s way that they would go about content strategy in what they produce. So it’s really fascinating stuff. And now we have our latest. We’ve all the three of us, plus how many other co authors do we have? Arne have written that?

Arne de Keyser

Three others.

Aric Zion

Three others. What are their names? You pronounce their names better than I do.

Arne de Keyser

Yeah, well, we’ve got Kay Lemon on board, which I already mentioned. We have Kathleen Lea who is from Ghent University, and then Chiara Orsinger from the University of Bologna.

Aric Zion

Got it. So, yeah, we’ve all written that chapter in the new Handbook of Service Experience that it’s out or almost out. I know we saw a couple out.

Arne de Keyser

It’s out. Yeah, it’s out. It’s published by Edward Elgar.

Aric Zion

Okay. Well, it’s been really exciting working together. Hopefully, we’ll continue on this path that has yielded a lot of fruits, a lot of efficiencies and a lot of insights that we just wouldn’t have gotten to in other ways. And I know, Amanda, you’ve presented on this more than once, like at the Arizona State University center for Services Leadership. Didn’t you just present on it again.

Amanda Johnson

Just the other day at the center for Services Leadership? Yeah. Conference presented to several MBA classes at Boston College and asu. Arne and I got to present in Bordeaux this past year. So lots of great opportunities to share the work that we’ve been collaborating on.

Aric Zion

Very exciting. All right. Well, with that, I will thank you both for giving up a portion of your day and we’ll talk to you both soon.