Eckhart Boehme is the former Curriculum Architect Marketing Excellence @Microsoft Corporation. He is the founder and managing director of strategy consulting firm unipro solutions and an internationally recognized Jobs to Be Done expert. Eckhart was the initiator and co-developer of The Wheel of Progress® Canvas – a tool for structuring qualitative customer research. He is the developer of the Customer Progress Design method. Eckhart is a frequent guest at business podcasts and has taught classes to Master Students at the Wiesbaden Business School and Michigan State University.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CXO Magazine, Eckhart shared his professional trajectory, the inspiration behind establishing unipro solutions, personal hobbies and interests, future plans, pearls of wisdom, and much more. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Hi Eckhart. How did you first get into customer experience, and what inspires you to stay?
In the early 1990s, I worked for a service organization at Microsoft. This was the time I first got in touch with the subject of customer experience. The topic fascinated me due to the profound impact on a brand’s perception. I tried to read every book on customer service and became much more sensitive about my experience as a customer. In the early 2000s I started to blog about this topic. I wrote about good and bad service experiences. Since then, my understanding of what great customer experience is has evolved. Today, I believe a great customer experience is not limited to a highly satisfactory service or product experience. I concluded that helping customers make progress in life or business is the highest form of value an organization can provide. In my opinion, customer experience should be viewed as a service, not just an end in itself.
What inspires me to stay is the ongoing need to understand customers better to serve them well and create growth for the company. The pre-and-post-project customer knowledge analysis has shown that organizations have huge knowledge gaps. We believe there many organizations are stuck in a plausibility trap: The company’s assumptions about customers are plausible but it does not know its biases and blind spots. We found out that on average, only 30% of an organization’s assumptions about customers could be validated. This shows the need for purposeful and targeted customer discovery.
What was the inspiration behind establishing unipro solutions? What sets it apart from other market competitors?
In the summer of 2019, I started to develop a tool to capture and structure customer interviews. In these interviews, customers told us about their efforts to make progress, their hopes, their fears and aspirations, their successes and pain points. This work triggered the development of an entire customer-centric, or to be more exact, customer progress-centric strategy development method.
In 2021 I decided to found unipro solutions, a company that is dedicated to helping organizations understand the notion of progress. Today, we teach this methodology to our clients from startups to enterprise organizations and help them understand the desire for progress. Our approach is completely based on insights from qualitative research and covers all phases of the customer journey and product or service experience. This holistic perspective leads to a deep understanding of the purpose of certain customer behavior and thus provides a north star for the organization.
Also, how has branding changed over the years to become what it is today? What marketing metrics do you value most for brand management?
In my mind, branding has always been about personality. Branding goes way beyond creating corporate identity, logo, and slogans, etc. These are just expressions of brands. Brand should be first and foremost about personality. A great brand puts the customer’s interest at the center of its actions. It tries to be as helpful as possible. I think of a great brand as a “trusted advisor”, a term popularized by the book “The Trusted Advisor”. A great brand tries to understand the jobs, customers try to get done and serve them exceptionally well. A great brand looks ahead to how the lives of customers can be improved.
How do you see the role of technology, specifically data analytics and AI, in shaping the future of customer experience? Are there any specific tools or platforms that you believe are essential for organizations to adopt?
I believe digitization and especially AI opens lots of opportunities for efficiency gains and the potential for improvements in customer relations. However, use cases that create a value-add need to be well understood. The wrong use of technology has backfired in the past, as I was able to observe through the work with clients. Replacing human beings with AI technology needs to be well understood to create satisfying experiences. For example, the once popular chatbots have often led to frustrating experiences. Such bad experiences need to be avoided by understanding exactly what jobs, customers try to get done. A separation of the problem from the solution can be most helpful to tackle the question what solution might be right. Secondly, AI provides great opportunities to process data from qualitative research. For example, we built an AI Companion that helps analyze qualitative research data. This tool helps to create results much quicker and more complete.
Looking back now, what is one thing you wish you knew at the beginning of your career?
I wish I had known earlier my calling. My motives for making certain educational and career choices hinted at my interest and motivation but it took decades to fully understand where I can add the most value in the business world.
What does the term “authentic leadership” mean to you?
The term means to me a lot because of my experience with leaders who have not been authentic and were under a lot of pressure to try to be the smartest person in the room. To me, “authentic leadership” represents an attitude. It means to acknowledge that you are not perfect and that you are not always right. So, you don’t have to know everything. It is okay to admit that. Even as a consultant it is. It builds trust. It is not about always winning. It is about doing what’s right in the situation. It means striking the right balance between being self-confident and humble. Leaders who are self-aware and able to exercise judgment on what behavior is right in any given situation are the ones who will earn the most respect.
What are your passions outside of work?
Besides physical activities like hiking, running, water sports, and table tennis, I have a passion for art, design, and architecture. My wife and I were fortunate to visit some of the best-known sites of Bauhaus architecture, including two of the Bauhaus universities. I admire the innovation mindset, the thoughtfulness of the design process, and the human-centeredness philosophy of the Bauhaus movement. I also like great design. In the early 90s I was able to join my wife at BRAUN AG for some apprenticeships. There, I have learned a lot about the timelessness of great design. Great design, and longevity of the product create a great customer experience.
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
I can see that what we are doing provides breakthrough thinking that is relevant to businesses worldwide. Adopting a customer-centric mindset is what many organizations aspire to, but they lack the definition, tools, and processes to realize it. The Jobs to be done (JTBD) theory provided us with the foundation for a breakthrough understanding of customer needs. We developed the tools and process to bring JTBD to life. I certainly hope that we can start a movement where many organizations realize the value of holistic and purpose-driven thinking and adopt our strategy development framework.
What are your tips for delivering great CX with a limited budget?
The best way in my mind is to create empathy and help the organization understand the needs of customers. Storytelling, sharing quotes, and any kind of data that helps employees be empathetic with customers are most effective. In my mind, there is nothing more powerful than relating to customers’ feelings. To take that a step further, help employees understand the jobs, customers may try to get done when “hiring” the company, their possible circumstances, desired outcomes, and anxieties. Doing work on the “front-end” i. e. analyzing customer behavior and emotions, collecting their stories about trying to make progress in life, and extracting and sharing customer statements helps a lot to help employees connect to customers and does not cost a lot of money.
What is the one trend or approach in CX that every organization should be implementing?
Trends and fads come and go. What stays forever is what customers care about. With an attitude to take good care of customers as best as possible, one can never go wrong. Organizations should fill the term “customer-centricity” with life and use technology not only to cut costs but also to the benefit of customers. They should think about the outcomes of deploying technology to avoid unintended negative consequences for customers. History is full of examples of when technology made things worse for customers, especially in the area of automation. There is no substitute for understanding the outcomes customers want to achieve, what pains they suffer, and what gains they want to achieve before deploying technology.