Exceeding Customer Expectation May Be a Unnecessary Resource Drain
Recently, I consumed with great enthusiasm the book "The Effortless Experience" by Dixon/Toman/DeLisi - who share the premise that in the name of exception customer experience, many "overshoot" the target - in part because they've misunderstood the target. Their data indicate that what we truly seek, as consumers, is an effortless consumer experience - we just don't want things to get in our way. We are more primed for self-service than ever before. So this excellent article by Urko Wood synthesizes the same point made in the book - that when we "overshoot" on customer experience, we actually may be diverting resources that can be better used in other corporate pursuits. So - keep it modest, and bring some analytics to thinking about creating effortless experiences.
One Customer Service Mistake Might Be The Only One You'll Get to Make
Pretty significant research from LoyaltyOne, the Verde Group and Dr. Deborah Small, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, indicate that just about half of all customers experienced a customer service problem during their last shopping trip, and that leads to relationship abandonment a good part of the time. By the numbers:
The report indicates that a whole lot of revenue is being put at risk by retailers who aren't delivering great customer experiences.
Personalizing Email (and Websites) Can Drive Customer Engagement and Loyalty - A Case Study with Soma Water
In this article, Mark Johnson of Loyalty360 draws our attention to a case study involving Soma Water - which eschewed traditional email blasts by implementing technologies to support customer insight processing and tailored/targeted email activities at a very personalized level. It requires enormous amounts of work to write the right content; it takes a lot of technology to process the data; but in the end, the ability to create highly personalized experiences, customer journeys of one, are helping Soma Water win over loyalty, bloggers and more. The Guiding Star team buys into this - with a website-based technology for mobile devices that we use called QRomium.