Customer experience is a curious thing because two customers who should theoretically share the same experience, often don’t. Have you seen a film with a friend, ordered the same meal, shopped in the same store, traveled in the same brand of car or shared the same broadband supplier – and had widely varying views. Why? And what does this mean for customer services and your brand?
In business it’s a mistake to try to appeal to everyone because customers aren’t the same which means their perceptions and so experiences will differ. It's better to focus on your the people who already trust you and understand what it is you’re trying to do and trust is built by keeping promises. If you’ve made a promise and kept it you’ll soon have a strong and trusted brand with its own followers who know what to expect. They love you for what you do and they’ll already be telling the rest of their tribe about your services.
But if people don’t get it, it’s more often than not because they expect something other than what you are able to offer – not because your company couldn’t deliver what they want. I know that when we pull out all the stops we can please anyone – but should we? Think hard before you go and change your product or service offering for disgruntled customers. Someone much smarter than me who wore jeans and a black turtleneck once said "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.".
I’m not suggesting that customer complaints are irrelevant, because each one is important, only that some are more important than others in maintaining a customer experience, keeping a promise and therefore in building a brand. Every company screws up and to my mind the measurement of customer experience is how you recover the situation afterwards.
Gartner describes the customer experience as ”the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”
Because we’re dealing with people, perceptions and feelings we’ll never win them all over to our brand. Not each expectation can be met, and most brands shouldn’t try to, but it’s very important to recognise when the brand promise has been broken and empower teams to fix it quickly.
This means that everyone in the company must understand the brand promise and how it's used to differentiate for the competitors. Each staff member, at each customer touch point must be empowered to isolate and fix the customer issue quickly in line with the promise made. It's critical this is done because when a customer is fully engaged with your organisation (for the better or worse), this is where the emotional signposts identified with a brand (perceptions and feelings) are created. This is the time to pull out all the stops and delight them.
So it’s often when things go wrong (based on expectation brand promise) that the opportunity to build an emotional connection (perceptions and feelings) presents itself. This is how brands are built and destroyed.