I recently picked up a business book circa mid 90’s sitting on a colleague’s desk. The premise of this book was that for companies to excel, they would need to choose to focus on customer service, operations or supply chain. One of three, take your pick. The world is not so simple now, hence the choice of focus is not so clear.
Unless you focus on the customer. They can be the beacon, the guiding light for every business decision across your organization. But you say, isn’t that just great customer service? Yes, many companies stop there. However, the ones who get it right, who create tremendous value for their customers and secure that coveted loyalty, go beyond the obvious call center aspects of their business to create an experience that the customer enjoys with each and every encounter with you.
Customer experience is the feeling your customer gets as they engage with you and your products or services. It is the emotion you evoke, things like security, elegance, fun, relaxing, or serious. Your marketing people love this; they can produce a laundry list of the feelings they want to convey to customers in their words. There are two things wrong with the marketing approach: 1) to really get it right, you need to focus on one emotion, one ultimate feeling that emanates from your solution and 2) you need to walk the talk, ensuring every employee, technology, and process is engaged to deliver that emotion.
Case in point – Disney parks are the, “happiest place on earth”. Every customer encounter is designed to deliver happiness, from the greeters at the gate to the princesses on every corner and even the menus in the food establishments. When you go to Disneyland, you can see this on the face of every visitor: it’s in their smiles and the crinkle of their eyes. Disney truly delivers happiness, and because of this, it is hard to find a time to visit when the park is not packed full of happy people (believe me, I’ve tried!).
Once you have that word that conveys the emotion your experience will induce in your customers, effective delivery of the experience requires you look at every customer touchpoint, every engagement they have across the lifecycle of your solution. At HP we used a TCE wheel to capture the touchpoints and to purposely design how we could deliver our experience at every step.
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For example, a consumer electronics product bought off the shelves at Best Buy would have this list of touchpoints:
- Product reviews and comparisons
- Company website where customer learns about product
- Box on the shelf in Best Buy
- Pricing model
- Best Buy service rep who sells the product
- OOBE – out of box experience including setup documentation
- Hardware and software interface
- Product registration
- Warranty
- Online help
- Customer service and repair
- Software updates
- Usage supplies purchasing, packaging, pricing
- Product decommission and replacement consideration
Or a B2B service provider might have these customer touchpoints:
- Analyst opinion and product comparison
- Promotional materials, whitepapers, case studies
- Referrals and recommendations from other customers
- Sales presentation and proposal
- Contract terms and conditions, and negotiations
- Service level agreement
- Installation service
- User interfaces
- Customer service
- Billing and Accounts Receivable
- Maintenance and repairs
- Updates and upgrades
The best thing about delivering an experience? It is human centered, and no two organizations will deliver the same experience. Which means that at the same time you are delighting your customers, you are securing differentiation that will be hard for your competitors to replicate. The combination of unique DNA of your business delivering an lasting emotional connection? Nobody can mess with that!