The importance of customer experience as a key component in delighting customers has been oft-repeated and emphasized. But, is customer experience a complex, intangible pie-in-the-sky wish that the marketers hope or promise to deliver, or is it accomplished through a systematic approach?
Keen observation shows that marketers need to trigger specific experience levers to delight and retain customers. Meticulous attention to detail, especially around customer touchpoints, in addition to intangibles like skills, customer orientation, and friendliness of staff, delivers such memorable customer experience that customers return to relive and build over the earlier experience, becoming loyal customers and advocates in the long run.
Customer acquisition is important, but ensuring superior experience and delighting existing customers is the key in building the corporate brand. A delighted customer often becomes your brand advocate using the powerful channel of positive word of mouth. Especially in the hospitality and service industry, the need for innovative customer experience management becomes essential. Even unavoidable and unpleasant activities like waiting in queues can be made pleasant and productive. Keeping waiting customers engaged in productive activities like hobbies, reading, or music can help to ensure a positive customer experience. My recent visit to the pediatrician, for example, was made pleasant by the play area where my child could spend some cheerful moments while waiting for the consultation.
The biggest challenge marketers face today is to ensure a personalized customer experience despite minimizing causes for variation. It is important to prioritize core activities, staff, systems, processes, and infrastructure that influence experience directly or indirectly throughout the entire customer interaction. Redefining customer touchpoints to include not only direct interaction, but also indirect interaction with customers is vital.
Consider financial services as an example. Banks that maintain a great ambience and friendly front-office staff alone cannot deliver on customer experience unless the core banking services are customer centric. Tightly coupling the back-office operations with the front-office systems is crucial in meeting customer needs, as well as setting and meeting customer expectations.
Linking customer delight and loyalty only to front-office staff for superior customer experience is a myth. A rigorous effort to reengineer and streamline all activities in the value chain to be customer focused is essential to deliver the desired customer experience. A genuine customer-centric approach to services reveals opportunities to enhance delivered value to customers at every touchpoint.
This spans all B2C industries ranging from prompt and right diagnosis and treatment provided by a hospital to efficient onboarding of new customers at a bank. Front-office staff alone would not delight the customers in these cases. The aptitude, attitude, and supporting infrastructure of all the actors in the customer value-chain need to be strengthened.
Repeatability and predictability are key success factors to consolidate and reinforce the customer experience in a way that will lead to brand loyalty. Repeatability becomes a challenge when the parameters delivering customer experience are highly intangible, like the warmth of the flight attendant or the exclusivity delivered though a spa treatment. Converting these actions to detailed set of activities and standardizing the quality benchmarks bring in predictability.
Customers often perceive businesses services differently based on many factors not all related to the service (the person's mood, for example). This is another reason to strive for repeatability. Many restaurants and salons, for example, bring predictability by standardizing recipes or the cosmetics used while serving customers, bringing down variability or uncertainty in delivering the same experience to the customer that he last enjoyed with the brand. This approach helps to deliver a repeatable, predictable, and superior customer experience that ensures customer retention and builds brand loyalty.
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About the Author: Khanchana Navakiran is a lead consultant with the enterprise solutions unit at Infosys Technologies Ltd.