Customer Experience: More Important Than Ever in Tough Times
>>by Jim Barnes, Barnes Marketing Associates, Inc.
If customer experience is a viable differentiation strategy in good
times, it is doubly so today. At a time when most firms will naturally
gravitate toward a strategy of cutting back, hunkering down and laying
off—because that's what one is expected to do in hard times—this is a
wonderful time for those who truly understand the potential of the
customer experience to rise to the occasion.
But I see three problems with the application of customer experience as a component of customer strategy:
- it is an extremely difficult concept to nail down because, like
value, quality, service and relationships, it exists principally in the
mind of the customer;
- it is poorly understood, as are most of the others, given at
best superficial thought by most managers and conceptualized in
exceedingly narrow terms;
- as has been the case with our recent passion with customer
relationships, few managers approach customer experience from the
perspective of the customer.
In well over 30 years of surveying thousands of customers on both sides
of the Atlantic, I have developed a framework of how customers view
their experiences at the hands of businesses. It may uncreatively be
labeled the 4P's of customer experience—not to be confused with a
time-worn and now largely seen as inadequate conceptualization of
Marketing. My 4P's represent a progression in how customers view their
interactions with businesses and other organizations, based on what I
have learned from customers themselves.
Processes
At its most fundamental level, customer experience may be viewed
as the result of certain PROCESSES that the firm has in place to deal
with its customers. This is the view that most managers bring to
discussions of customer experience and the definition that is most
often written about. It is essentially a point-of-sale and
contact-center view: how quickly do we answer their calls? how long do
they have to wait? do we resolve complaints quickly? Essentially, how
easy and convenient do we make it for customers to deal with us? This
is a very functional, procedural view of customer experience, dealing
with what most customers would consider table stakes.
This is also the view that many firms bring to measuring their delivery
of customer experience, because these are the most easily measured
components of the experience. These represent the backbone of the
customer experience. If we fail to deliver on these fundamentals then
we can wave goodbye to any hope of creating memorable or meaningful
experiences. They are also the elements of the experience that are most
vulnerable in the face of cutbacks, because customers will notice
immediately when there are fewer employees to serve them, when service
is noticeably slower, and when they can't get through to your help
desk.
People
The second stage of our conceptualization of customer experience
involves PEOPLE. Most customer-centric organizations will readily
acknowledge that a central component of customer experience is the
interaction that customers have with the firm's employees. I can
confirm that most memorable (both positive and negative) customer
experiences that I have heard about in countless focus groups and depth
interviews involved interaction with staff.
Employees are, quite simply, the custodians of the customer
experience. This is why the Human Resources department should arguably
be the most influential player in a firm's customer experience
strategy. It is also why a company will cut back on its staff in tough
times at its peril. Customers will notice and will miss those employees
who have been laid off, let alone finding it more difficult to get
served. There are internal repercussions as well, as layoffs inevitably
trigger employee uncertainty and decreased morale and these get
translated into poor service. For the same reasons, this is no time to
cut back on training and employee incentives.
Performance
Tough economic times are no time to renege on promises or to
leave customers in the lurch, feeling you have let them down—you are
going to need them when things start to turn up again and they have
long memories. This is why we need to focus on the PERFORMANCE
component of the customer experience. The prevailing limited view of
the customer experience, focused as it is on customer interaction,
fails to acknowledge that the customer's experience continues long
after he or she leave the store. In some industries, the customer is
left to his or her own devices in determining how to use the product or
service or to get the greatest value from it.
Recognizing that the customer's experience does not only
involve direct interaction with the firm should spark some discussion
of how we can enhance the customer's ongoing enjoyment and perceived
value of what we have sold him or her. Access to toll-free customer
advice and occasional keep-in-touch calls with suggestions for
improving value perception will be doubly appreciated in difficult
times when many companies will be abandoning their customers.
Possibilities
Finally, let's turn to what I consider the greatest potential of
the customer experience concept; the view that deals with
POSSIBILITIES. Let's think creatively about the experiences that
companies can create, enable and make possible for their customers. The
most creative companies do things that their competitors do not do;
they "behave" differently. They recognize implicitly that customers are
trying to get things done and deliver solutions to help them along the
way. I'm thinking of the camera store that organizes classes and field
trips to teach its customers to take photographs that get a "You took
that?" response from friends or the food distribution company that
helps the food service director of a seniors' home "make dinner
interesting" for her residents.
In difficult times, customers are likely to be especially
appreciative of initiatives that are surprising and that are genuinely
helpful. Companies should be looking for opportunities to impress,
empowering their employees to step into a situation to make things
easier for a customer. My research confirms that customers are most
impressed with the experiences that they were not expecting. These
spark conversations and storytelling —"you'll never believe what
____did for me this week." Whenever you can leave a customer with "one
less thing to worry about", you have a winner.
Most customers, when facing uncertain economic times, will want
to deal with companies they can trust and on which they can rely; those
that seem to have their interests genuinely at heart. Experiences must
engender those feelings. This makes solid business sense in "normal"
times, and is even more important today.
This is no time to skimp on the customer experience. The rush
in many firms will be to downsize, to strip costs out of the
organization, to hunker down. But, the result of such actions is often
to leave the firm vulnerable because it is unable to deliver solid
customer experiences at precisely the time when they will have the
greatest impact. Now is the time to invest in customer experience, to
expand the firm's view and to look for opportunities to create
experiences that customers will remember when good times return.
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