Ever so often I get an invitation from a company wanting to boost their customer experience . The request is always the same . They want someone to talk to their front office and customer facing people . They still do not get it .
We live in a highly sensitive era where customer behaviour has drastically changed . The customer of yesterday was patient , largely ignorant and very forgiving . The customer of today is the exact opposite of that . The customer of today is very impatient , very exposed and highly unforgiving . As such , what worked for the customer of yesterday will not work for the customer of today .
In theory people talk about this all the time but in practice they don ’ t get it . They are so fixated on customer service that they have not embraced the notion that the world has moved beyond that and that only a well thought out customer experience can give companies a relevant edge today .
Again , what is the difference ? Customer Service is a smaller part of a larger system which is called the Customer Experience . The customer experience ecosystem comprises numerous components made up of individual parts . Each individual part represents the customer service but the combination of all the parts represents the customer experience .
Let us imagine that you are planning a vacation . The experience starts from when you make your booking to the day of the trip . You arrive at the airport , check-in your luggage and once it is time , you board the flight . Once on board , you meet the most courteous flight attendant who caters for your every demand on board . The pilot is one of the best in the country and the food is great .
Besides this , they have all your favourite drinks and so you land at your destination a very happy person . By the time you go through immigration and customs , your luggage has arrived and you pick it up and head straight to the waiting car that whisks you off to the hotel where you are staying .
Again , let us paint a different scenario . What if at the baggage check in , they were very unco-operative and handled your luggage carelessly and broke one of the wheels on your suitcase ? What if the flight attendant was very rude to you and served you with a nonchalant attitude ? What if the food was cold or too salty and what if the pilot gave you the bumpiest ride and most terrible landing of your life ? Or what if everything was perfect until you landed and realized that they had lost your luggage ?
Note that even the people that are not on the frontline contribute to the experience . The cook will not be seen but the cook contributes to the experience and if the cook does not perform with excellence , it will affect the entire experience .
Next , we will look at how this scenario plays out in a bank . The sales people who came to you offered you heaven on earth . So , you open an account with the bank and your relationship manager takes over from the sales people and again you are assured of heaven on earth . However , when the promise made by the sales people and relationship manager gets behind the scenes , the operations people are not able to support what has been promised . This happens a lot with many banks and so no matter how great the salesperson or the relationship manager are , the experience of the customer with the bank will be a negative one .
These illustrations bring out some more components of a great customer experience that are not often talked about and these components include the need for excellence and the need for alignment of the entire chain . For the experience to be a great one , every single person in the experience value chain must operate with a spirit of excellence . They must all operate at their peak . If one person operates below the level of the envisioned excellence , the entire experience will be ruined .
Steve Jobs was so particular with the unseen inside of the Apple computers they made as much as he was with the visible outside . He said it was important to think like artists . This is so vital in the experience chain . Even the unseen and hidden parts of the experience like the people who prepare the food for the flight , the non-customer facing operations people in the bank and the baggage handlers at the airport ; must all operate with the spirit of excellence and their performance must always be aligned with the performance of the customerfacing people .
If any part of this customer experience value chain is not aligned and at the optimum , it will mess up the rest . One fact that is consistently overlooked is that the experience will always be defined by the lowest level of performance . Therefore , leaders who do not manage the experience value chain will pay for it dearly . This becomes doubly important when you consider the fact that the person messing up the experience for your organization may not even be a direct staff member of your organization .
A customer may have had a great time inside the bank but is messed up by the security man who is not even an employee of the bank . It is therefore imperative that leaders must be very cognizant of the entire experience value chain and manage it well . Remember that even though the security or the cleaners may be outsourced , they must be aligned with your culture or else they will be the controllers of your customer experience .
No matter how great the flight and the experience on the plane , if your luggage was lost , you will always remember that trip as the one where the airline lost the luggage and never the one where the pilot was great , the attendants were fantastic and where the food was excellent . It will forever be the flight where your luggage was lost and that memory will always come with a negative emotion which is contagious and which will be passed on to others for years to come .
The unforgettable rule of customer experience is that the experience will always be defined from the lowest point .
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Customer Service is a smaller part of a larger system which is called the Customer Experience . The customer experience ecosystem comprises numerous components made up of individual parts . Each individual part represents the customer service but the combination of all the parts represents the customer experience .