“It’s important to know if you’re delivering the experience you want customers to have and making it better,” he says Joel K. Shapiro, clinical associate professor of data analytics at Kellogg. “To do that, you have to measure as much as you can about what’s happening to them.”
But according to Shapiro, too many companies are ignoring some of the juiciest data. This is the head-scratching data, the metrics that don’t quite fit existing models. These are the extremes. And they can highlight your product or service’s biggest weaknesses—as well as where it has the potential to really shine.
Companies can and should use this knowledge to optimize the customer experience.
“The mere presence of outliers in customer experience data means that really good or bad things can happen to customers,” says Shapiro. “Maybe you can move it [experience] towards something that either increases the number of positive experiences or does not decrease them.”
Keep your extremes
When data scientists encounter an outlier, their first inclination may be to discard it in favor of “cleaning” or “smoothing” the data. Besides, the data may have been entered incorrectly or appear as a result of a modeling error. Or it may represent a freak accident—a set of circumstances unlikely to happen again. Why waste time considering easy discounts?
Resist that urge, says Shapiro. It is always worth considering why the extreme happened.
Shapiro comes to this insight first hand. While studying the effectiveness of Spanish language instruction in West Virginia high schools, she found that overall, students who received online instruction scored about the same as those who received it in person. But he also found that face-to-face classroom instruction produced a wider range of experiences. Investigating further, Shapiro learned that most of the high-achieving students came from a particular class.
After presenting his results, the state board of education advised him to exclude that class from the analysis because its instructor was known to work well with the students. “They said it was the best thing that ever happened to the state of West Virginia in terms of education,” Shapiro says.
But Shapiro realized that, instead of expelling this instructor’s students, the board of education should do the exact opposite. They should find out what that person did and try to replicate it.
What this outlier ultimately demonstrated was that, under the right circumstances, the in-person classroom model had the potential to outperform online instruction. This is an important first step toward understanding the potential of these extremes, Shapiro says. “They shouldn’t just be crunched and smoothed out for some kind of overall analysis. They must be brought to the fore.”
Get some context
It’s important to note that Shapiro only learned about the outstanding teacher after he disclosed his results to the state board of education. This highlights another critical step in using data: business leaders must work closely with data scientists to interpret these outliers, as leaders are often the only ones with the necessary institutional knowledge or business context.
“It’s unfortunate when the business person, driven by analytics, gets these aggregated trends without having these outliers identified to him or her by the data scientist,” says Shapiro. “Interacting with the data people is critical so business experts can determine what’s really going on.”
Use Outliers to Optimize Automation
The example of Spanish directives implies another important lesson about extremes: one of the biggest opportunities comes in knowing which aspects of the customer experience are ripe for automation and which are better kept in person.
Automation can produce a more consistent customer experience—that is, fewer outliers. Depending on the situation, this can be good or bad.
“Automation tends to create a ceiling on the best experience you can have and a floor on the worst experience,” says Shapiro. “It drives everyone down the middle.”
Think of it this way: If your cell phone breaks and you need to call your service provider, you’d rather wait several minutes to speak to a friendly representative or have direct contact with a chatbot—an artificial intelligence program that can respond quickly in basic questions ;
“Today’s chatbots may be able to solve my problem, but they probably won’t make me feel great about the experience,” says Shapiro. “If I’m talking to a live person, they might say, ‘Hey, you’re in Chicago today. God, I hear it’s -3 and the wind chill is -40. They are all fine;”. A human touch can provide an emotional connection that most automations can’t compete with.”
The extremes can be useful in helping companies determine where a given customer interaction should fall along the continuum between personal and automated, Shapiro says. “Each organization has to answer for itself where it wants to introduce variation and where it wants to standardize or automate that variation away.”
In other words, where do the benefits of a personal interaction have the potential to outweigh the costs?
Know your brand
Shapiro recommends that companies determine how each customer experience model fits their brand identity. For example, Dutch Bros. Oregon-based Coffee, known for its “bro-istas“—Men and women who memorize customer preferences and hand out free coffee to successful patrons lean toward personalization. Domino’s, on the other hand, has re-emerged as the leader of the American pizza market automation customer orders through the mobile app.
“Automation, done well, can be extremely efficient. Most places would say that when they’re running orders, they’re fine with standardizing or automating it to be fast and accurate,” says Shapiro. “But there are other elements of that customer journey that may be worth the lack of automation.”
It also depends on a company’s willingness to forgo consistency in favor of a personal touch. Shapiro estimates that many hotel chains now offer automated check-in service. But he also understands why others would want a front desk clerk to handle that job. “It could be important for them to create a relationship,” he says. “For example, my conversation with the nice Midwesterner behind the counter at the Hilton hotel where I’m staying can be a really important part of their brand.”
This personal contact has, of course, a cost in personnel. And, if these people are not properly trained and trained regularly, they can deviate from established protocols or otherwise provide poor customer experiences. Companies with brands known for great service may forgo automation, but in their quest to get that personal touch, they should invest in minimizing bad results.
“Outliers show what your problems are and where your biggest successes are,” says Shapiro, “and allow you to facilitate those big successes and eliminate the problems.”
