Today’s interview is with Joe Macleod, the Founder & Head of Endineering at AndEnd and a two-time author. Joe joins me today to talk his new book: Endineering: Designing consumption lifecycles that end as well as they begin, why the end of the customer experience is so important, often looked, what that is costing us and what we should be doing about it.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CRM is not just about technology; it’s actually about relationships – Interview with Victoria Wejchert of Kinship – and is number 409 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Joe:

• How do we end things?
• I am fascinated with the social history of endings.
• The first book came out four years ago and is called Ends and it’s all about why we don’t do endings.
• The next book Endineering is just out and tells you how to design endings.
• People talk about how we start things, but we don’t pay enough attention to how we end things.
• We know how to sell stuff and we know how to make great customer experiences but we are not leveraging that skillset to think about off-boarding and endings.
• The end of the consumer experience is barren of emotion and meaning for the consumer.
• That has consequences for how we dispose of products and thus waste and landfill.
• I did some research into cookies and cookie consents and found one that a lifespan of 7,800 years!
• Many consumers have terrible hoarding habits because of a lack of discussion, instruction and wider cultural norms about the end of the consumer life cycle.
• UK homes have 10 old mobile phones, on average, stuffed in a drawer.
• We haven’t got an answer for the end of the consumer lifecycle i.e. to say this is what you do when you are done with a product.
• Consider the cost of that. For example, look at the environmental impact of not dealing with plastics.
• This applies to digital, physical or service sector products.
• Netflix has an ending, which is super simple to go through as a consumer. They’re engaged with ending as a company. They’re apparently very proud of it. Their CEO has talked about their simple and easy to end relationship. But, of course, the consumer can also easily start that relationship again.
• The importance of endings is based around the Peak End Rule, which many people will have heard of via Daniel Kahneman.
• The are eight different types of endings discussed in the book.
• Think about the impact Kia had on the car market when it introduced its 7 year warranty. This created a totally different mindset within customers and the relationship they have with the brand.
• Since offering the seven year warranty, their global market share has doubled, their consumers are amongst the most loyal customers, and they love the Kia in terms of customer preference about the product itself. They like the seven year warranty above every other aspect of the product offering.
• Knowing the end is really beneficial to sales too. Because when people know about the ending, they trust that brand a lot more.
• How we measure endings is very different to how we measure onboarding and usage periods.
• Conversation that I had on the podcast in 2018 with Pauline Wilson of Virgin Holidays about how the finish is just as important as the start of any experience.
• Netflix assume people are going to leave, so they’ve designed something for it. Cable companies, for example, trap you in because they don’t want you to leave. But, the damage of operating that way is long term. It’s critical and it will ruin your brand.
• Businesses tend to talk about retention a lot but the aggression in retention undermines a lot of the credibility of having a good off boarding experience.
• We resort to this 20, 30, 40 year old retention model, which is based around the idea that we’re going to stop you leaving, we’re gonna throw paperwork at you, and we’re going to charge you for it etc. How does that make for a good ending?
• Dharmesh Shah, one of the founders of Hubspot, is quoted as saying “We want to make it emotionally difficult for our customers to leave but procedurally easy.”
• If you’re in the telecoms industry then everyone thinks that if you make it easy to leave, then more people will leave. But there’s no evidence for that when you dig into it and if you make it easier to leave then there’s actually a lot of benefits you get in terms of feedback.
• Key questions to ask yourself:
  • Have I considered the end of the experience I’m creating?
  • How often do you talk about endings and your business?
• Interestingly creating good endings can improve advocacy rates.
• Punk CX word: Challenging.
• Punk CX brand: The World Health Organisation

About Joe

Joe Macleod is founder of the worlds first customer ending business, AndEnd. A veteran of product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors. Author of the Ends book, that iFixIt^⁠ called the best book about consumer e-waste. And the new book Endineering, which provides tools, methods and philosophy around this new genre of practice.

Head of Endineering at AndEnd. TEDx Speaker.^⁠ Wired says “An energetic Englishman, Macleod advises companies on how to game out their endgames. Every product faces a cycle of endings, from breakage to customer burnout to falling behind consumption trends. It’s important to plan for each of them. Not all companies do.”

Check out AndEnd, grab a copy of Joe’s Endineering book here, saw Hi to AndEnd and Joe on Twitter at @andend_co and @mrmacleod respectively and feel free to connect with Jo on LinkedIn here.

 Thanks to geralt on Pixabay for the image