A Top 10: Experience Planner Manifesto - Beta
Published July 20th, 2006 in Careers, Experience Planning, Agency 2.0This blog is called Experience Planner. A while ago, I blogged about what an Experience Planner might be. I’ve been letting this gestate for a bit, but I wanted to get this back on the agenda and open for debate again. A conversation I had with some co-workers today, inspired me to begin assembling a draft version of an Experience Planner Manifesto. More than anything else, this will be a good exercise that helps me sort things out in my head as well as begin to answer the question, “What is an Experience Planner?”
So, with that in mind, here’s a draft of the Experience Planner Manifesto. I fully expect this to change and evolve, over time, as the community weighs in and other influences come into play.
- An experience planner maps out a customer’s journey across all of a brand’s touch points
- It’s critical that an experience planner understands business objectives and user wants, needs and expectations
- An experience planner establishes a framework for measuring the customer experience over the short and long term
- As part of that framework, an experience planner monitors the customer experience, over time, and maps it back to external factors (competition, cultural events, etc.) as well as “chatter” occurring across touch points in order to determine pain points and areas for opportunity/innovation
- An experience planner relies on specialists to execute against portions of the plan but closely monitors the execution and messaging to ensure that it is “on strategy”
- An experience planner leads cross-channel marketing plans and facilitates cross-channel marketing planning
- An experience planner is a company’s master ethnographer
- An experience planner is channel agnostic
- An experience planner can be found working client side or at an agency; you’re needed everywhere
- An experience planner is a t-shaped thinker; you’re curiosity knows no boundaries
I expect this to grow beyond a top 10; but I needed a top 10 to help me kick-start this conversation. Thoughts? Suggestions?
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Great points! I’m curious about number 7 - can you expand, especially in relation to number 5?
Scott, this is a solid start. Nos. 4 & 10 are especially strong.
While the Experience Planner monitors the “chatter” that occurs across touch points, how much influence is there in directing the conversation - or at least defining the oppotunities for “chatter” along the journey? Does that fall into # 5?
Good stuff.
Scott,
I LOVE this idea, and encourage you to keep developing it. One general observation I had about this was that after reading it, my impression was that you could easily remove the word “experience” from planner and you’ve just described an account planner (in some ways).
What is it about an Experience Planner that seperates you from a Traditional Agency planner? You definitley cover it with the customer experience touchpoints and user wants, needs and expectations—but I feel it could go a little deeper.
In my mind, a traditional Planner from the Ad agency background lacks the expertise needed to plan deep meaningful customer interactions vs. communications.
Just a thought. I feel that the distinction could be more clear. But I think this is great and I’m bookmarking it.
Audrey,
Being a company’s master ethnographer is about two things. First, be the eyes and ears of your client. Get into their customers’ and non-customers’ worlds; discover their expectations and functional/emotional needs. Planning for experiences means you need to feel the pain of customers and non-customers first hand; there is no substitution.
Secondly - and to the second part of your question - when you can’t spend as much time in the “field” as you’d like, you need to make sure that you’ve created a positive framework, for others to carry out, so that you can extract the maximum amount of value. But again, to the first point, there is no substitution for getting out their observing matters first hand.
Is this helpful?
David,
Thanks for weighing in; your critical feedback helps me refine my thinking on this and that’s exactly what I’m looking for!
To your point - experience planner versus account planner; there’s no doubt in my mind - they are related. However, I would suggest that they are not same, though they are certainly complementary. I need to noodle on this more, but would it be out of the realm of possibility to suggest that the “account” in account planner, as opposed to “experience”, is the adjective that needs re-considering?
What if the account planner was re-framed as communication planner? As you point out in your comment, communications are what account planners are best equipped to carry out. When re-framed like that, experience planners and communication planners come off as complementary. There’s no reason why a t-shaped communication planner could make the shift to experience planning, and vice versa.
Experience planner as keeper of the customer experience? Communication planner as keeper of the message?
Thoughts?
“What if the account planner was re-framed as communication planner? As you point out in your comment, communications are what account planners are best equipped to carry out.”
Bingo. I think this notion will scare the fuck out of traditional account planners—but it needs to be said. It’s the big fat nasty Elephant in the room. And you need to be the one to point it out since you are so close to this topic (you live it and work it).
Traditional Planners much like traditional Creatives have grown up on the communications side of things. And if this is the case, they need to learn the language of experience. I did. I didn’t know what Experience Design was until I found myself designing complex interactive experiences that satisfied peoples wants, needs and expectations. And I did this for many years (still do).
Keep working on this, I’m REALLY interested where you end up with it. It think it’s an interesting idea. You should float this by people like Dino and Russell too (if you haven’t already).
Scott, thanks for starting this dialog. This subject really speaks to me. In response to your question of a title for one who engages in this work, I can add that the title may be more general than you supposed.
In my work and studies, I have become aware of a large and noisy convergence of folks from a variety of professional fields, who are eagerly describing their vision of this elephant. Here’s my take:
I come from the environmental design profession - the explanation of the physical world through visual media. I’ve been involved in signage and graphic design that educates and guides users through their built environment. My project work has
ranged in complexity from county jails to hospitals. Definitely offline.
I have found through my more recent involvement in IA work, that problems and solutions that appear in the physical world are paralleled in the virtual.
To me having done some IA work, it’s the online version of environmental design - the planner/designer, whatever, creates the best-formed environment based first on the user’s viewpoint, needs, expectations and understanding. Then to that container, they then apply colors, textures, word and image tools that come out of their training and experience to make the journey more enjoyable for their guests the users.
This crossover nexus is facinating because we have so many different practitioners applying their own methods and technology to the benefit of the user-centric vision.
In solving an organization’s problem(s), the successful ‘planner’ knows to align the product/service business needs of the organization to their customer/users. But instead of the traditional client-first approach of analyzing the organization, we turn instead to their customers for inspiration.
The big leap of faith happens when we turn back to reconcile what we discover of the organization to what we learn of the user. That’s a big ‘if’, but it’s where the magic lives.
Is this the tipping point of years spent grappling with a way to explain a true value of ‘customer service’? Can we come up with a convincing collection of professional metrics to finally prevail?
I’m curious to see how other practitioners respond to your discussion.
Thanks for kicking this off in a grand style.
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your comments.
“This crossover nexus is facinating because we have so many different practitioners applying their own methods and technology to the benefit of the user-centric vision.”
This is this beauty of it. It’s all coming to the fore-front. There is a collective awakening happening right now and it has a lot to do with conversations, like this, that are happening on blogs and in other community forums.
Please stayed tuned and keep the conversation rolling!
Scott - I’ve only just come across this and I’m intrigued by your approach. I work in a corporate Marketing department by the way, running a programme looking at how IT services we deliver impact the experiences our clients deliver to their customers.
Right now (in the UK where I am) Customer Experience is going through change - it’s no longer a terms just associated with websites, it’s getting much broader. To be honest the term is generally misunderstood but there are some organisations who do get it and are leading the charge. For them, it really is about looking at the experience a customer has during any moment of truth/touch point with the organisation. All customers have an experience when they deal with an organsiation whether they like it or not, and that experience has both a transactional and an emotional component.
The thing that strikes me in all the research I’ve done in this area is that to successfully develop an appropriate customer experience an organisation has to look seriously at its culture and ethos. I am not convinced that the role of Experience Planner as you describe it does or should exist - but I do think that pretty much everyone in an organisation has to have at least a bit of the Experience Planner as you describe it in them, if they are to truly put the customer at the centre of what they do…
Whatever the outcome, it’s great to see this debate happening, particularly with agencies (from my perspective in-house). An increasing number in the UK get it but the dinosaurs are still roaming!
Thank you very much for this post, and for the Manifesto.
I am trying to enhance my career from web marketing to experience management within the company I am working in or another, and I badly need a clear “job description” in order to try to explain this to some HR and/or recruiter.
Probably the manifesto is not clear enough for them, but is a very good starting point indeed, so I’ll translate in italian and I’ll try to pitch it to these geniuses…
thanks again