Tria Prima Experience Design Methodology

First, a True Story of Failure 

About 18 years ago, I was asked to lead a series of projects that were intended to completely overhaul how a 75-year-old company went to market. This was an incredibly large effort, and one of the projects included improving the experience for consumers as they crossed from a live channel, such as a sales environment, to a call center, a website, or service center without the experience breaking down. Today, this is a little easier but a couple of decades ago it was an incredibly difficult endeavor. To compound the difficulty, the organization was almost $4 billion in revenue and already had millions of financial customers across 26 lines of business. Being much younger at the time, I didn't see the impending disaster that this was about to become.  

I often use this as an example because it was such a learning experience of how to grow from repeated failure. My team and I would show up to meetings where I assumed there would be seven, maybe 10 people. Instead, there would be 50 people in a small auditorium waiting to have a meeting. It was a disaster of infighting, sandbox protection, and posturing. I personally killed this project and restarted it again four different times…all complete failures. 

But that didn’t make the initiative any less important, and we truly believed that a better experience would drive results ranging from retention and cross sell to better CSAT. After some very detailed analysis (and a time to heal) about why we were failing, we concluded that it wasn't because so many people were involved or that there were so many moving parts in the problem we were solving. The problem was that the project leadership (it’s me, hi, I was the problem) didn't have a good way to isolate the questions that would drive a good experience all the way down to the measurable outcome of engagement while also being able to determine who should be accountable for each portion of the experience being measured. 

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention  

That may sound trite, but it’s so true! We embarked upon deep business analysis that resulted in a new methodology to define experiences. And because we shifted focus to start with the customer, we were able to identify the tools that could positively influence customers across teams as they managed their portion of the experience. I didn’t know it then, but this was the inception of Tria Prima’s Experience Design Methodology. It all comes down to isolating what we now see as discrete stages of the client experience, combined with that stage’s entry and exit criteria. 

That sounds like a bunch of consulting speak, but if you really look at the words (stages, entry, and exit criteria) it has very specific meaning that allow individuals or teams to own their outcomes and, in some cases, own them without having to even communicate other teams.  In an environment of ownership and accountability, each group or individual must rely on others to perform their duties and achieve their results.  And those results must be achieved without having to hold everyone’s hand or take every opinion on how to do everything. Believe me, I know. 

From the necessity to complete this project was born a client experience methodology that allows each team to maintain ownership and at the same time achieve interdependent results that roll up to a higher level of strategic success. 

Extreme Ownership in the Client Experience 

The experience analysis that we use is based on having gradually modified the methodology over the last 18 years, during which time it has been used with multi-billion-dollar companies as well as pre-revenue companies. The result is the same.  

• There are five stages to the client experience that begin with how marketing engages a potential buyer and end with how that newly acquired buyer becomes an advocate of your company. This works equally well for B2B and B2C companies. 

• Each stage normally has a “corporate owner,” such as marketing, web development, sales, or service. This allows them to function completely autonomously if that is your culture or have a heavy amount of interdependence if you prefer. Regardless, it requires extreme ownership by that division, department, or individual who oversees an individual stage of the experience. 

• Each of the five stages has entry criteria and exit criteria. To enter a new stage of the experience, there are criteria that must be met by the prior Stage Owner. These criteria are the objectives of that Stage Owner and are enforced by the overall Experience Owner as well as the subsequent Stage’s Owner. The subsequent Stage Owner is usually the one that is most interested in their entry criteria because it sets them, and the stage of the experience they manage, up for success. If the entry criteria are not met, then it is often unlikely that the Stage Owner will meet their objectives. This is where extreme ownership comes into play. Each group owns the objectives that they must meet. At the same time, they are a constant source of evaluation of their upstream peers while being constantly evaluated by their downstream peers. See how this isn’t a silo but a connected group of accountable owners? 

• When entry criteria and exit criteria are designed correctly, they are based upon a simple concept that says, “in order to create a great experience that is also efficient and effective for the company, we need potential customers to progress through each stage anonymously and with as little help from a live person as possible.” The key to this is “as possible.” Sometimes your sales process is designed specifically to have potential customers contact a team member to show the value of your product, other more simple sales cycles, that information is given freely with the hope that company teams never have to be involved. The latter is more ecommerce based. 

• The measurement of this entry and exit criteria is done ongoing by the Experience Owner and the Stage Owners. 

I’ve personally used this design methodology on services that range from financial products to technology products to retail products, for companies with thousands of employees to those with only a few. When you base the experience upon an understanding of potential customer needs, then you can be intentional about designing in triggers to success and designing out inhibitors to success. The depth of value that this can create for any company is incredible.  Some of the sample deliverables that we have created using this experience methodology include: 

1. end-to-end experience design 

2. sales process design  

3. service process design 

4. consumer incentive and referral programs 

5. marketing positioning and value proposition 

6. marketing messaging 

7. marketing programs and technology 

8. sales playbooks with objection handling 

9. organizational realignment, and  

10. business operating models 

Imagine if your teams had all the deliverables above based on the common understanding of the customer needs, triggers to success, inhibitors to success and extreme ownership by the groups doing the work. When that exists work becomes simpler, experiences become better, and results flow easier for the entire team. 

If you would like to discuss how Tria Prima’s Experience Design Methodology might help you and your organization, we're happy to walk through an overview of the details of this model and find out where your biggest pain points exist so we can help you address them...for good.