Transforming Customer Experience
A top-down focus on customer experience is transforming organisations, both in the private and public sectors. And in turn it is transforming how organisations view and value their contact centre operations.
The siloed customer service and telemarketing functions, which are still all too common, are now being correctly recognised by senior management as vital components of an integrated customer experience strategy.
But what is a customer experience strategy?
In fact what is customer experience?
The answer is experience is a feeling. A gut reaction to something. It’s a human nature thing!
Now that doesn’t help much does it? The above definition isn’t in any way scientific!
How can management scientists devise a metric to measure a ‘human nature thing’?
The need to pigeonhole
Those who compose management theory – usually consultants – love to pigeonhole things. They love to have a hard yes or no answer, or be able to rate something on a scale. In the perfect world they would want a customer experience measure that would say categorically that company X delivers a good customer experience, while company Y delivers a bad experience.
But this is not the perfect world and customer experience cannot be pigeonholed or simply analysed with a crude metric.
Experience is unique to each customer. A simple example shows this. Go on TripAdvisor.com and look up a popular hotel in your favourite holiday resort. Read through the comments/reviews dated in the same month. The experiences are shockingly diverse. To some the hotel represented the best they have ever been in, they highly recommend it, and the food and facilities are second to none. To others it’s the worst place ever, it was dirty, the staff unfriendly and the food inedible.
Why such polar reactions (as well as those whose experiences fall between the two)?
The answer is experience is personal and highly linked to a larger number of divers, including intelligence, education, past life experiences, expectations, family status, and economic circumstances.
Trip Advisor is in fact a customer experience portal. And their ratings (although crude) provide the customer a powerful means of communicating their experiences, as seen through their eyes. I personally wont book a hotel which appears 95th out of 105 on the Trip Advisor ranking for a particular resort.
Such collective expressions customer experience are gaining economic muscle and can influence purchase decision making.
Other examples are customer product ratings on websites such as Argos. If you are looking to purchase a digital camera for £100, would you buy the one that scores 2 out of 10, based on a reasonable number of respondents? I wouldn’t!
To end my first blog entry, we can conclude that customer experience is highly personal and we all rate experiences differently, while a collective expression of customer experience can pack a powerful marketing punch.
Next time I will give my views on when customer experience begins.