Customer Experience Can Make or Break a Brand
This article shares best principles and practices relating to improving the customer service experience. While we all know what poor customer service and a rough customer experience looks and feels like, we sometimes can't summarize what needs to be done to improve it. In this article, there is a strong call to both understand and improve all touchpoints of the customer journey, and to personalize the experience for today's consumers. Of note, this article reminds us that marketers are key players in customer experience framing, and that they can derive deep insight to advantage other marketing efforts.
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.
