Customer Experience: The Better The Experience The Better The Bottomline

 “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy

Michael LeBoeuf

What Exactly Does the Customer Want?

Say it as it is, customers are tired of paying for mediocrity. When it comes to customers’ experience from the customer perspective, the experience stinks! And this is without any exception to any industry– Retail, Healthcare, Financial Services, Personal Services, Education, Real Estate, Hotels and Restaurants, the experience is the same.

What exactly does the customer want? Often, business leaders may even ask “what exactly do they want again? ”The first question shows concern and the need to understand how to serve the customers better. The second question is an expression of frustration laced with self-praise that connotes: having done your “best” what else do they want again? Why are they still displeased? Murmurings, as implied in the second question, is a demonstration of a lack of understanding of your customer.  Bain & Co survey of 362 companies shows that though 80% of the companies believe they deliver a “superior experience” to customers, however only 8% of their customers feel the same way.  Without doubt, relationships are hard to build and customers difficult to understand, it is for this reason that organisations will always perform better than their competitors.

The critical question you want to ask therefore is: when your customers interact with your organisation, what do they see? How do they feel? And why should it matter?

Customers are frustrated for different reasons: poor delivery of your product or services, the distasteful attitude of your employees, and so on. Customers want to feel that you genuinely care about their interests and that your service or product will help them solve their problems or help them get their jobs done. They want to feel valued, welcomed and appreciated. Failure to deliver this will make your business struggle where others thrive.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience (CX) is a customer’s perception of your brand. Regardless of what you think of your brand, if a customer perceives it as different, then it becomes their reality. If your business prides itself as customer-centric and a first-time customer is treated rudely because one employee was having a bad day, that customer will leave there with sad stories, and that becomes their reality if not managed. Therefore, it is vital that organisations design and deliver an end-to-end customer service. 

How does Walt Disney Corporation make everything look easy and fun to their customers? Walt Disney is popularly quoted saying; 

“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do”.

Disney has continued to relentlessly and deliberately apply themselves to make every mundane thing feel magical for their customers, and today, they are renowned for delightful experiences and service excellence. Their business objective is clear: “We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.”

To build a business that outperforms competitors, you must be relentless in the resolve to create the best experience for your clients and customers. To create an atmosphere that delights customers, you need patience and strong determination.

Where Does Your Customer Experience Stand?

In a study of over 500 service-oriented corporations and closely held small businesses, Bruce Loeffler and Brian T. Church, developed a model of the five levels of experiences, as could be seen in the table and figure below:

Compare your service and customers’ experience to the table above, what level of experience are you creating for your customers? Every organisation is delivering one of these five experiences to their customers. However, the goal is to consistently work towards being in among the 3% creating exceptional service.

How to Create Exceptional Customer Experience

The best way to understand whether your services delight your customer is through an analysis of the Customer Journey.  The Customer journey is that end to end experience that the customer has with your business. The experience is how customers feel at all the touch points when they interact with your brand. A touch point is where they interact with your brand.  The customer journey can be analysed through a visually expressive tool known as the customer journey map. The essence of CX is to ensure an optimal and high satisfying experience for your customers as they use your services or product.  How best could this be captured? The customer journey map helps you to visualise and narrate the story of different customers’ personas’ touch points from the customer point of view.  The map captures the emotions, the feelings, the motivations of the customer in using your products/services. It captures their overall experience in usage, the continued usage of that product/services and the willingness to recommend your brand to their circle of influence. With the customer journey map, you can gain a better understanding of how every customer should be treated as they interact with different functions in your organisation. You should bear in mind that customer experience is like a chain link, if it gets broken in one unit, it will affect the overall impression of the customer impression in respect to your product/services. So how do you create a distinct and delightful experience for your customers?  Here are 5 points to note.

1. Decide What You Want the CX to Be: Develop a brief, succinct description of what your Organisation’s CX must be. With a clear explanation, every member of your organisation can understand and see how their roles tie into the larger picture. This is a great way to ensure goal congruence.
2. View CX as What It Is – A Business Driver: Research shows that the average person with a complaint will tell roughly 16 others of their frustration — a domino effect that has only been magnified by pervasive technology. Nowadays, a customer’s power to positively or negatively affect a brand or an organisation has been enhanced. A bad or good experience can get millions of impressions on social media within hours. With bad reviews about your businesses, referrals will drop, revenue is likely to fall, so will profit and market share. On the flip side, you can tremendously rack up goodwill, customer loyalty, referrals, and grow revenue by ensuring that every customer is leaves with a plan to return with someone else.
3. Think Like a Designer: Hopefully, we agree that to create exceptional experiences for your customer, you must understand them. Design thinking is a concept that brings this to life. Design thinkers solve problems by understanding their subjects deeply and building solutions around them. Businesses must borrow a leaf from the Design thinking framework. Ask your customers about their pain points; sometimes you might find that the customers have an idea of how to best meet their needs. Other times, you might have to go the extra mile to solve those problems. To create exceptional experiences, seek out the pains of your customers before even they realise this pain and creatively solve them.
4. CEO as the Chief Impression Officer: CEOs (and indeed, leaders in every organisation) should continuously see themselves as Chief Impression Officers. He or she must be relentless in building a culture where every member of staff within the organisation understands how their action creates an impression in the mind of the customers. Therefore, employees must be thoroughly trained on how they could delight customers with their service.
5. Build a Caring Culture: The top management staff should understand that one of their non-negotiable responsibility is building a caring culture in their organisation. If employees don’t feel that employers care for them and that their supervisor have their interest at heart, such employees will show little or no care to the customer. If you do not take good care of our frontline staff, they will not be motivated to delight the customers. The way you treat your team is the way they will treat your customers.

Conclusion

The Business of Consumer Experience is the backbone of every single business. No matter how different corporate organisations, brands, governments are, they are all united by the customer experience.  If you create a delightful customer experience, you will be indirectly delighting your bottom-line. In a Customer Experience Impact Report by Harris Interactive, 9 out of 10 customers would pay more to ensure a superior customer experience. If you stop providing a lousy experience for your customer, you will achieve superior performance. To create a great experience, you must be purposeful in the design and delivery of the experience. Better customer experience will result in a better bottom-line.