CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
The Experience : From Customer To Brand Ambassador
By Dr . Wale Akinyemi
Customer Service Versus Customer Experience
Customer experience is not an academic matter . It is a heart matter and as such people who approach it from a purely technical and academic perspective never get it right . In fact , a number of organizations that have tried to make it a complex matter rarely score high in customer experience surveys . They may have all the right terminology and all the right positions in place but at the end of the day , customer experience is about what your customer thinks about you and what you offer after their encounter with you .
Most people define customer experience as a snapshot event . It is however not an event . There is a customer experience value chain that many do not talk about . Every customer experience is made up of anticipation of the moment , the moment itself and then the memories from the moment .
We are all customers somewhere and so a very good place to start a conversation on customer experience is to look inwards . What are the great experiences you have had and why were they great ? Similarly , you need to also look at the bad experiences that you have had and ask what made them bad .
Customer service deals largely with the moment . It deals with how the person on the phone handled your matter . It deals with how the attendant served you at the store and how the waiter waited on you in the restaurant . The experience however deals with a value chain or better put the ecosystem around the moment . This is why a lot of people miss out on providing a great customer experience . They focus on the moment . They are so locked into the traditional customer service expectation and so they are never able to make the shift from customer service to customer experience . You may have the greatest customer service in the world but it is just a snapshot of what makes the experience and not the totality of the experience .
Good customer service is like a onenight stand while customer experience is like a happy marriage . The one-night stand requires no emotions . The two parties don ’ t have to like each other and they don ’ t even need to know each other ’ s names . What has brought them together is the pleasure or the economics of a moment . Walking down the altar together is never a consideration for such people .
“ Good customer service is like a onenight stand while customer experience is like a happy marriage . The onenight stand requires no emotions . The two parties don ’ t have to like each other and they don ’ t even need to know each other ’ s names . What has brought them together is the pleasure or the economics of a moment .”
If however one person sees another person that has aroused interest in them like it happened to me when I wanted to propose to my wife , it is a whole different ball game . I remember how I would go from Lagos to Ibadan which is a distance of over one hundred kilometres to pick Taiwo from her home , to drop her in a church that was about a five-minute drive from her house for a 7am service on Sunday morning ! When I got there , she would look me up and down and ask why I had come because she liked me as a friend but nothing more .
On the other hand , I had seen the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with . I was totally unmoved by her lack of appreciation of the fact that I had to get up early and travel all that way with my friend to take her to church . Over time and with me ensuring that everything I did was with her in mind , I eventually got a breakthrough and as at the penning of this piece , we have been married for thirty years .
Customer experience is about the long haul . We give customer service for the present but we give customer experiences for the long haul . Think of the disrespect of walking up to someone and proposing to them without a history of kindness and courtship . This is what happens when we focus on customer service without thinking of the customer experience . One can build good customer service without one ’ s heart being there but it is impossible to build a great customer experience without an emotional connection .
Think of it , you can have great customer service with automation but then there is a wholesome user experience that
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