Customer experience strategies are often conceived and described using the techniques of storytelling: we consider the needs of our customers and the actions they may take to discover plausible scenarios in which he might purchase and use our products. If we write a convincing story, in which the details are carefully considered, this yields a strategy that has a better chance of success than a story that is unconvincing, poorly thought out, and highly implausible.
However, man customer experience stories are quite bad: “a person walks into a store and buys our product” is a hope, but many questions remain unanswered, such as “Who is this person?” and “Why does he need our product?” and without knowing those and other details, the stories are unsatisfactory – they don’t make much sense, seem highly unlikely, and do not provide much direction or inspiration.
To be successful in customer experience design, it’s necessary first to be able to write a good customer story, and to write a good story requires a little bit of skill and a fair amount of knowledge about what a story is and what it must include. To that end, let’s explore what a “story” is as a whole, and explore each of its components.
Story Structure
To begin, “a person walks into a store and buys our product” is not a story, it’s just a narrative – and not all narratives are stories. A narrative is a description of any sequence of events, whether or not there is any flow or logical connection among the activities that are described. To be a story, a narrative must “go” somewhere – the sequence of events culminate in the achievement of a goal. There is a standard pattern that is followed by virtually every story, and it is this:
Once upon a time, there was a person whose life was going along very well until the day he discovered that he wanted something. He strived to overcome obstacles that prevented him from having it until he achieved the goal and lived happily even after.
The reason I say “virtually every” story is that the pattern has been used for thousands of years and some writers seek to do something a little different by deviating from the pattern. They tell stories about a person who wanders about aimlessly, or who abandons their goal, or for whom the achievement of the goal does not produce happiness. While such accounts can have novelty appeal, they are not very satisfying to the audience. They may hold attention and seem a bit unusual, but there is generally a sense of disappointment when the “story” comes to a weak ending.
Since our goal is to satisfy rather than disappoint the customer, the deviations will be set aside to focus on the basic, successful, and satisfying pattern. This pattern is generally successful if it is well executed; and good execution requires attention to details, particularly the ones highlighted above.
There Was a Person
First of all, a story is about a person, called “the protagonist” in literary terms. Granted, in the age of mass markets we generally seek to serve a mass of customers, but even then we analyze the market, determine what kind of person we are marketing, and devise a persona so that we can understand the customer and consider common qualities that enable us to serve many people as if they were a single person.
Importance and value are significant qualities of a good protagonist. As far back as Aristotle, it was recognized that stories about people who were unimportant and unlikable were generally unsuccessful. You have to care about the protagonist to care what happens to him, just as you have to care about the customer in order to be diligent and attentive in designing to serve his needs.
Most stories start with at least a little background information about the protagonist so that the audience comes to know him, to understand his motivations, and to be favorably disposed toward him. And again, the same is true of design strategies: the more you know about someone, the more effective you can be in designing for them because you understand and respect them.
So when writing your customer story, begin with a description of customer you are serving – which is generally the person who purchases and uses the good or service (though sometimes, those are two different people). Be as specific and detailed as necessary to present a complete picture of someone who is worthy of being served by your effort.
Life was going along very well
The “real” action of a story doesn’t begin until something interesting happens, but it is a mistake to attempt to start the story at that very moment because the audience doesn’t know the character (as mentioned in the previous section) or his situation. This part of the story, called “exposition” is generally done in the first chapter – though sometimes it is disclosed to the audience later in the story, that always seems contrived, as if the writer forgot to do it and is making up details as he goes along.
And so, a story begins before things go awry, as knowing what the protagonist’s life is like before the action begins is necessary to understand the goals of the character. This is particularly true of disaster stories, where the entire point of the story is to restore the happy life that the protagonist had before something went wrong. In order for the audience to see restoring the status quo as a worthy goal, they must know what the “status quo” actually is. But it is also true of growth stories, in which the point of the story is to achieve something, because appreciating the change means comparing the final situation to that which existed before the change was made.
The exposition answers many questions that will distract the audience later. If you tell the story about someone travelling through the wilderness, the audience wants to know why they are making such an arduous journey. They will interrupt the story to ask this question, and lose interest if they do not receive a satisfactory answer – so while it can be argued that exposition is just “fluff,” it is the kind of detail that makes a story interesting and compelling, and helps the audience to accept that what the author describes is both necessary and plausible.
When writing customer stories, consider the exposition as part of the profile so that the “why” is clear to the audience. If your customer’s task is to buy a good or use a service, it’s important to know the reason, given their situation, that the purchase is necessary as well as to consider whether there might be a better way to accomplish their goal. It is often in considering these alternate methods and imagining better ways that innovative solutions are discovered.
Discovered that he wanted something
The is moment at which the drama of the story begins: the protagonist recognizes that something is wrong or lacking with his current situation, and that he must undertake some action to rectify this problem to restore or improve the status quo. Called the “inciting incident,” the recognition of the difference between the present situation and the desired state must cause the protagonist sufficient irritation that he is incited to action.
The irritation factor is significant to the story. A screwball comedy might tell the story of a protagonist who goes to inordinate lengths to swat a fly, and the humor is from the recognition that his problem is small and the effort he undertakes is grossly disproportionate, but most serious stories are about people with serious problems that merit the level of effort they must expend to solve them.
Ideally, the protagonist knows exactly what must be done and has the resources to perform the necessary actions – but in many stories the protagonist must undertake a quest of discovery to learn how to solve his problem, then another quest to get some item he needs to do the job. This is common in novels and sagas, as having prerequisites to action helps to make the story longer and keeps the audience engaged in these mini-plots that take place before the main line of the story can be pursued.
When writing customer stories, consider the inciting incident. At what exact moment does your customer discover his need? Does he know what is necessary and does he have the means to do it? Does he consider solving the problem to be worth the cost (money and effort) to solve it? Each of these questions must be satisfactorily answered to have a compelling story – and to avoid writing a story that fizzles because the customer later discovers he is on the wrong path or lacks the necessary resources to solve his problem.
Strived to overcome obstacles
Conflict is what makes stories dramatic, and this conflict primarily arises from discovering and struggling to overcome obstacles that occur while the protagonist is attempting to solve his problem. Called the “rising action,” this sequence of events often involves a number of failed attempts and setbacks before success is finally achieved.
If the story is engaging, each failure or setback brings the protagonist a little closer to the goal, or builds the emotional tension as he becomes more passionate about the task because of the resistance he encounters. Any setback or failure that does not provide at least a little progress becomes “fluff,” an interesting side-trip that is essentially unnecessary and is likely to be cut out by a good editor.
While a good story involves a sequence of obstacles, a good customer experience attempts to solve a problem with as little effort as possible and there are no unexpected obstacles that arise. In marketing terms, a simple story with an easy solution describes the qualities of a generic mass-market product. The more obstacles a customer faces, the greater his need for a specialized product that is differentiated, hence the greater opportunity to gain competitive advantage by providing a product that is designed to overcome obstacles that a generic product does not – resulting in a smaller number of customers who will pay more for the product and become more loyal to the brand.
Where the obstacles are arbitrary and setbacks seem to pop up out of nowhere, the story seems contrived and the audience is disappointed at the teller’s lack of imagination. Good obstacles arise out of the character and the situation, and make the story more compelling. Audiences are far more captivated by the story of a character with some physical impediment accomplishing something that their impediment would seem to make impossible (a person born without hands becoming a sculptor) or whose situation makes a the problem more difficult to solve (fetching a drink of water at a lake is less interesting than fetching water in the desert).
When writing customer stories, consider the obstacles that the customer might face in completing a task. If the course of action is simple, then so should be the solution – and in fact there is likely already a product available to solve it. Also consider what obstacles might arise along the way as well as any special needs that might exist because of the limitations of the customer or his situation.
He achieved the goal
A story reaches its apex at the moment in which the main character takes the action that resolves the conflict, achieves their objective, and establishes themselves in the new and better situation that they had hoped to achieve. It is the reason that the story exists, and the reason that the audience has given it any attention.
However, the climax of the story is given far too much attention, and is often stressed to the detriment of the other parts of the plot. A well-conceived climax has little power if the audience does not understand and sympathize with a character and is not emotionally engaged in the drama of the story, nor if the climax fails to produce a satisfactory resolution. It is a critical moment, but it must work in the context of the rest of the story: a poorly told story with a dramatic climax is still a poorly told story.
Another common problem with climactic moments is that they are often unsatisfactory: the action that is taken, which the author means to be the resolution of the crisis, is not something that actually resolves the crisis. When the dragon is slain, the village still remains a charred ruin – its death ensures that the village will not be attacked again, but the villagers are still left with a significant problem: their crops and homes are destroyed and winter is still coming.
It probably is not necessary to suggest that it’s important to have a clear and well-defined climax when writing customer stories – as it’s well known that achieving the goal is what a story is all about. But it is worth stressing that in order to be compelling and plausible, the peak of the story is supported by all the other factors, and must make sense in their context. Very often, a writer’s revision process consists of fixing problems that are detrimental to the climax that is good unto itself but disappointing in context.
Lived happily ever after
A well-told story does not end the moment that the main objective is accomplished: the foe is vanquished, fade to black. The audience must be satisfied that the climactic action actually resolved the problem or achieved the objective that the protagonist sought after. The writer must provide an ending to the story, rather than leave the audience to “make up their own ending” – that is the hallmark of a weak storyteller who cannot craft a good ending for his story.
This part of the story, called the “denouement,” depicts the events that occur after the problem-solving action has taken place to prove that it was actually effective. Going back to the previous example, this is why dragons have treasure-troves: when the beast is slain and the village is still in ruins, the hero brings home a huge pile of gold to buy provisions for the winter and rebuild what has been destroyed.
Particularly when marketing tells a story, it often ends with “and the customer bought our product,” because that is the moment that they get what they want (money) – but it is not the moment at which the customer gets what he wants, as he may have purchased a product that doesn’t really solve his problem. And since the customer is (or ought to be) the hero of the story, the story fails: it seems pointless and futile.
When writing customer stories, don’t neglect the denouement. Refer back to the exposition and the problem that the protagonist was trying to solve. Provide proof that it has actually been solved in a satisfactory manner, and show that the user did indeed live happily ever after for having undertaken his ordeal, made his purchase, and put the product to good use. If the customer is not satisfied, he does not become an advocate and a regular customer, but instead becomes a disgruntled critic of the brand – and that story is a tragedy.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the structure and components of storytelling. To make some practical use of this, simply apply it to your customers’ situation. Seek to learn about who they are and how they live, when they might discover problems for which your product may be a solution, understand what they might try to do to solve their problems, help them to discover and make use of your product to achieve a solution.
Unlike writing a fiction story, customer stories don’t require a fanciful imagination – in fact, fanciful imagination is often detrimental. The details of your story should be drawn from marketing research, so that your story is a plausible account that people can believe in. The stakeholders in your organization should say “this could possibly happen” and work to make it happen for the customer. The customer should say “this could possibly happen to me” and work to emulate the hero of your story – who buys your product, solves his problem, and lives happily ever after.