The Experience Mindset summary

Imagine you order something from Amazon. It takes under a minute, and an email promises delivery by tomorrow evening. But the package turns up half a day late, the following morning instead. You’re irritated – even though, by twentieth-century standards, that’s an astonishingly fast delivery.

That’s the dilemma every company faces. However great the customer experience, they always want more. What amazed them last year is simply expected this year.

On a Southwest flight, the management writer Tom Peters watched a pilot leave the plane to push a passenger’s wheelchair up the jet bridge. The passenger was stunned, but at Southwest, care like that is routine. The airline has long put its employees first, trusting them to treat customers just as well in return.

But does it work? Can looking after employees really drive growth?

In 2013, Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, was hiring a new head of HR. Chesky told his leading candidate, Mark Levy, that he had no clear idea what HR did and he wasn’t sure he liked what he had heard. He wondered if Airbnb might be able to reinvent HR and turn it into something better.

Levy got to work. His task was made easier when he learned of Ground Control, a self-organized group of employees who kept Airbnb’s culture alive through events, recognition, and internal news. Ground Control’s efforts gave Levy an idea. Airbnb already had a team devoted to customer experience – so why not create one for employees, built around efforts like this? Chesky agreed. Levy soon became widely seen as the first person to lead employee experience at a big American company.

Back in 2012, the consumer electronics store Best Buy looked doomed. Profits and sales were on the slide and staff were disengaged. Not one analyst recommended buying its stock. Everyone had the same advice: slash costs, close stores, and lay off workers. But the new CEO, Hubert Joly, didn’t agree. He wanted to try something else. So wearing a blue shirt, khakis, and a badge reading “CEO in Training,” he spent seven days on the floor of a St. Cloud store. He spent the time simply listening to the staff; the frontline staff, he said, came up with all the solutions.

To turn Best Buy’s situation around, Joly decided to treat job cuts as a last resort. Instead he focused first on growing revenue and trimming non-salary costs. Those non-salary costs made up around 70 percent of the roughly $2 billion that Best Buy saved, though some layoffs did happen. At the same time, the company also invested in training and benefits for its staff.

By 1982, Ford was in deep trouble – it had lost billions since 1979 and things showed no signs of improving soon. In an attempt to halt the slide, the company hired W. Edwards Deming, a statistician, to help it build better cars. Deming did look at Ford, but he didn’t look at the cars. Instead he studied how the company operated. Shockingly, he found that 85 percent of the problems holding Ford back came from the way management had set up the company’s systems and procedures. Fixing them, he argued, starting with the leadership, needed to be the management’s core job. Ford acted on his advice, and by 1986 it was America’s most profitable carmaker.

Ford’s recovery shows the second element, process, in action. W. Edwards Deming’s key lesson was that when work goes wrong, you should look at the system before blaming the people working inside it. A process here refers to a repeatable set of steps meant to deliver a consistent outcome efficiently, whoever performs it. Processes can be very hard to change; left unchecked, processes multiply and harden into bureaucracy.

At Chipotle, when a restaurant gets busy a robot called Chippy helps make tortilla chips. Technology like this is something that Chipotle is very keen on. What’s more, they bring their employees right to the heart of their automation efforts.

A few years ago, Chipotle’s tech team asked employees which jobs they’d most like to hand over to machines. Their aim was to strip out the chores people dislike and leave more time for what they enjoy, such as serving guests. In 2022, Chipotle even set up a $50 million fund to back any new ideas that would improve things for both guests and staff.

We’ve just discussed people, processes, and technology. In this section we’ll look at the final element, culture.

In 1993, Lou Gerstner took over IBM. The company was close to collapse; it had lost $5 billion the year before, and its share price had fallen from $43 to $13. Gerstner was an outsider with no background in computing. So he spent his early days in the role listening to employees and customers. What he found was loyal, talented people who had grown wary of risk and who poured their energy into internal rivalries instead of fighting outside competitors. Customers, meanwhile, felt IBM no longer served them well.

So how can you tell whether any of this is working? Well, you have to measure it, but how do you do this effectively? Many companies measure the wrong things. Ask most executives how their call center is doing, and they’ll quote calls handled per day, but that metric doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. A better metric asks why customers call at all. If you fix why people are calling in the first place, you’ll drastically cut the number of calls and make the experience for those who do much better.

Metrics shape employee behavior. If you measure things like call time or volume of calls taken, you’ll reward people for quick calls, and they’ll rush. This will frustrate customers and limit staff appreciation for the job – staff should never lose out for doing right by a customer.