4ROCKS: Reduce Effort, Drive Loyalty, Transform the Customer Journey

I greatly enjoyed reading "4ROCKS: Reduce Effort, Drive Loyalty, Transform the Customer Journey" by Sean Albertson. I love Sean’s metaphor for the four types of rocks that represent obstacles along the customer journey that lead to effort and frustration. It’s an insightful way of framing up pain points that take shape over time and tailoring your approach to address them. The book offers a pragmatic way to apply journey mapping and turn insights into action for your organization. Sean also reinforces the importance of cultivating a more customer-centric culture, where the entire organization is aligned around the goal of reducing customer effort. He emphasizes how paying attention to CX and culture together is necessary to drive sustained improvements to your CX and measurable value for the business. I couldn’t agree more, given the title of my own book and podcast, both called The CX and Culture Connection!

The first of three sections of Sean’s book introduces the four types of rocks and recommends focusing on Customer Effort Score (CES) within your system of metrics, given that higher CES scores are linked to negative business outcomes like increased churn and lower loyalty. Sean also emphasizes the value of combining experience (X) data such as CES with operational (O) data, such as resolution rate and handle time, that have predictive value for business outcomes such as customer lifetime value.

Here are the 4 types of rocks below. As you’ll see, these provide a way of framing up how the rocks create friction along your river full of rocks, Sean’s metaphor for your customer journey. Some of these rocks are the result of behaviors and decisions made over time by employees within your company, and some are out of your control but still create the need to act or they will create rapids for your CX.

Sedimentary Rocks build up over time due to complexity, lack of clarity, and siloed organizational structures, as organizations add layers of policy, procedure, and technology without considering the cumulative impact on the customer experience.

Metamorphic Rocks result from introducing larger changes, such as new technology implementations or policy changes, but without consideration of the friction and high-effort experiences these can create if not managed carefully.

Igneous Rocks are sudden, unexpected issues that arise, often in the form of crises or system outages. These rocks require immediate attention and resolution to prevent long-term damage to customer trust and loyalty.

Meteoric Rocks are beyond your company’s control and cause a sudden disruptive shift in customer behavior, such as the pandemic or a major recession. They require companies to be agile and create a stronger sense-and-respond culture for how they adapt their CX.

In Section 1 of the book, Sean discusses how customer journey mapping can be used as a tool to visualize the customer experience and identify where rocks lead to significant pain points along the customer journey that drive up your CES scores. This is helpful in prioritizing where to focus and ensuring that your CX efforts are well aligned to other strategic and operational improvements you are focused on as a business to drive enterprise value.

I agree that journey maps can be quite useful and that focusing on pain points is important to prioritize where to focus. In my experience, it is important to take a balanced approach that also addresses love points. Pain points on the journey are, indeed, key drivers of customer effort, and have a significant impact on customer emotion and how this impacts churn and their likelihood to be detractors. Love points, however, are an opportunity to tap into deeper meaning for the customer that goes beyond their experience with the functional benefits of your product and service. In many cases, love points result from behaviors of your employees, when they go above and beyond, which in many cases helps to overcome pain points. As you focus on the CX from both human-to-human interactions (which are made better or worse due to the cultural behaviors of your employees) and digital experiences, it is helpful to take a balanced approach across both pain points and love points. Without addressing both, you won’t fully deliver on the potential for CX to strengthen your brand.

In Section 2 of the book, Sean delves into how organizations can systematically identify, analyze, and prioritize rocks that hinder the customer experience. Beyond showing how you can use customer journey maps and “heat map” the level of effort across the journey based on the presence of different rocks, Sean also emphasizes the importance of building up data along the customer journey so that you can take pragmatic steps to orchestrate the journey and measure the impact you are having on business outcomes. For example, by tailoring your approach across your call center vs. digital assets based on your journey analytics, you can deliver a more differentiated customer experience that optimizes business outcomes.

In Section 3, Sean lays out a detailed approach to turn insights into action to drive continuous improvement in your CX. The focus shifts from identifying and prioritizing where to focus, to how to build a more tailored approach that reflects differences in the types of rocks you are focused on removing along the journey. This is reflected in the B.R.E.A.K. methodology shown below that is tailored to the types of rocks impeding the flow of your metaphorical river.

Blast: Sometimes you need to take swift and decisive action to address CX issues, which Sean compares to blasting larger rocks. He also calls out the need to be careful to avoid “collateral damage,” which are unintended consequences of changes in your CX.

Remove: In other cases, you need methodical planning and execution to eliminate or improve processes, often with the aid of technology updates. This strategy is about careful removal or improvement of processes and systems that hinder the customer and employee experience.

Erode: When there is just too much resistance to change, you need to focus instead on a more gradual approach, making small, incremental improvements over time, steadily reducing the negative impact of these rocks.

Accept: Some rocks cannot be immediately removed due to constraints, such as budgetary limitations or technological hurdles. This strategy involves acknowledging these challenges while keeping them in focus for future action.

Keep: In some cases, certain rocks need to be maintained due to regulatory requirements or other essential business processes. The key here is to clearly communicate why they are needed and turn them into “features rather than bugs.”

In talking about how to pragmatically apply the B.R.E.A.K. methodology, Sean calls out the need for a more holistic approach to engage your employees across the organization, underscoring the importance of change management and being sensitive to how your culture helps or hinders your efforts. This is very well aligned to my own focus in The CX and Culture Connection.

I hope reading this review sparks further interest in buying and reading the full book. Please stay tuned for an upcoming episode with Sean on The CX and Culture Connection podcast!