Customer Experience Simplified

July 27, 2010 | by Tim Sanchez | Customer Experience, Featured

Customer Experience is a broad and elaborate subject. Trying to manage something so complex can make you feel like Homer on a bad day at the office. Thankfully, a bad day for us won’t cause a nuclear meltdown, but sometimes it feels like that.

My last post on the Value of Customer Experience attempted to explain the three large components of customer experience, but it was a lot to chew on. Chistophe Van Bael commented,

Isn’t perception largely determined by the alignment of performance and expectations? If so, shouldn’t we primarily focus on setting honest expectations and meeting and/or exceeding them? A few (well, many) uncontrollable variables aside, one could argue that by focusing on these two fundamentals, we would already be managing the customer perception (and hence also the customer experience).

That is exactly what my post was supposed to convey, but I knew it was a little confusing from the start. In fact, the image I chose for the piece was less to do with the message and more to do with how I felt while writing it. I knew where all the puzzle pieces were; I just couldn’t seem to put them all together to clearly communicate my point.

Perceived Value and Customer Experience

My comment back to Christophe had a short summary of my ramblings, which I have slightly revised and illustrated here:

Customer Experience Simplified

The messages we send to our customers must be authentic.
We create expectations in our customers based on our messages and past performance.
Our customers’ expectations serve as the metric for which our future performance is measured. We need to perform extremely well in the core aspects of our business.
The variance between expectations and performance creates some level of perceived value. Value can be expressed in terms of money, time, emotion, and/or reputation our customers invest with us.
The Customer Experience will be judged largely on our customers’ perceived value of their tangible and intangible investments.

Is customer experience more complex than this? Of course it is, but managing the value we provide to our customers is a great start to being the real leaders in customer experience.

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http://exectweets.com/2010/07/27/19665857179/ Exectweets » jeanniecw at 07/27/10 03:38:20

[...] post from @deliverbliss: Customer Experience Simplified – http://deliverbliss.com/2010/07/customer-experience-simplified/ jeanniecw – Tue 27 Jul 15:38 previous next onsaas [...]
http://twitter.com/bsdalton Barry Dalton

Tim
Agree with your premise. And Christophe is right on. Alignment is key. Alignment in the way companies operationalize a customer-centric business, where expectations is the linchpin, connected to the right capabilities encouraged by the right rewards system, is paramount.
Two things if I may. First authentic or otherwise, companies and marketeers need to accelerate the shift in mindset from messaging to dialog and active listening. Messaging, not matter how authentic, still means the carnival barker yelling at me.

Second, as you pointed out in you post about your Apple experience, expectations are formed and influenced by many factors; the company, friends (that WOM thing), news sources, whatever. So while companies influence expectations, they have less to do with creating them than ever before. Their job is to satisfy them (ok, exceed them)

Too fine a points? Maybe. But I think not.

Thanks
Barry
http://deliverbliss.com Tim Sanchez

I agree with your point about listening. I think “authentic messages” can be better described as “authenticity in our communications.”

I'm not so sure about your view on expectations though. Expectations reside within the customer, but the company is still the single largest influencer of them. The friends, news, reviews, etc are all influenced by the communications and products/services (performance) delivered by the company.

When your friend tells you about how awesome the new iPhone is, it's because Apple created, launched, marketed, advertised, delivered, and now supports it. They are in control of those factors, and they are what drive our expectations of future interactions.
http://deliverbliss.com Tim Sanchez

I agree with your point about listening. I think “authentic messages” can be better described as “authenticity in our communications.”

I'm not so sure about your view on expectations though. Expectations reside within the customer, but the company is still the single largest influencer of them. The friends, news, reviews, etc are all influenced by the communications and products/services (performance) delivered by the company.

When your friend tells you about how awesome the new iPhone is, it's because Apple created, launched, marketed, advertised, delivered, and now supports it. They are in control of those factors, and they are what drive our expectations of future interactions.
http://twitter.com/bsdalton Barry Dalton

Fair point. Saw an interesting tweet this morning with this link to Gartner study claiming “most peoples' purchases influenced by social networks”. While I am suspect at the “most” claim and am going to dive into the statistics, I wonder who has the most impact on expectation setting. Apple can build “the best” iPhone. But until one of my friends validates it, its only the best according to Apple. And Apple's reputation and word is only valid because a prior friend had a good experience and said “hey they are good. listen to them. You can trust them.”

So, there are a lot of influencers of expectation. I just believe that the brand is becoming less and less influencial in setting expecations; more so for repeat customers (past performance, less so for new interactions). Another example. So, you walk into company X expecting a really good experience based on the company's messaging. But right before you go to the store, your most trusted friend tells you company x stinks. What does that do to your expectation? Even if the experience then lives up to the messaging, is your perceived value different because of the impact of your friends comments?

all good stuff. Keep it up and keep me thinking!