Where is the customer experience headed?

The customer experience was barely even considered only a couple decades ago.  What drove the engine was sales, and sales alone.  Once the product was gone, there was no real relationship to think about, let alone maintain.  This was the result of customers simply being so far removed from the company selling the goods, both physically and emotionally.  There was no chat feature with support staff, there was no on-line review, and word of mouth only traveled about four blocks.

In the not-so-distant past, a couple extra pairs of Levi’s stuffed in your bag for a trip to Japan would virtually cover your entire travel expense when sold to a brand crazed local.  Deals on leather in Spain, or shoes in Italy were common refrains the globe-trotters.  Those days are gone and gone for one reason only…. technology has made the world smaller.  It’s hard for us to even imagine not being able to by virtually any brand, product, or service we can think of with the click of a button.  That convenience comes from the technology that’s a part of our daily lives, but that technology has also created the personal connection that was absent in the past.

Think of any customer experience you have today.  Not only can you research out everything there is to know about the product, but you can easily get a sense for how the company selling that product treats their customers, how long they’ve been around, what makes them special (or not….), and why you’d pick them over someone else.  54.7 percent of us read at least four reviews prior to making a purchase, and almost half of us leave a review after we’ve made a purchase.

What does that mean to me if I’m the company selling that product………  I’ll assume that means that I’m going to want to focus on the experience that customer has; ideally, because it’s the right thing to do, but from a simply objective point of view, because I’m going to lose business if I don’t.  But focusing on it isn’t enough, we must make it special.

Nothings I’m saying here should be surprising, and that’s because any company surviving, let alone thriving, in today’s market know this to be true.  So if that’s the case, what are the things we should be focusing on to succeed?

1. Focus on leveraging technology to automate the mundane, or tedious, but don’t automate everything!  We’ve all had the experience of trying to punch our way through a call center selection list to simply find a human being.  That type of automation is making the company’s lives easier, not ours.
2. Focus on creating customers, not sales.  Sales are one offs, customer come back time and time again.  Make sure you deliver value, and value as your customer’s define it, not as your sales target defines it.
3. Think of every touch point of your company through the eyes of someone who will review you.  Was it easy for them, did it provide value, was it fun or joyful, or simple, or making the world a better place…..? Structure your business around what’s important to your customer, and value will be easy to define.
4. Lastly, embrace feedback.  Dismiss nothing (but don’t focus on everything).  Open yourself up to every review channel you can, build in NPS surveys, encourage feedback on your social channels, and build in objective means of capturing and analyzing the feedback you receive.

I’ll leave you with the thought that if we believe our customer experience is something our IT department should be focused on alone, however, we’ve missed an opportunity to better define what we’d like that experience to be.  Start by defining how you want your customers to feel when they hand you their money.  Then you’ll begin to view your people, processes, and technology as tools, instead of solutions.  Technology has improved our lives in almost every way, but I’ve yet to see a white-glove app.