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Customer Experience: More Than the Latest Buzz Words
A while back one of my friends in the industry, Rob Hilsen of Genesys, send me a link to a terrific blog post by Bruce Temkin, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research whose focus—or should I say, mission?—is customer experience. Temkin’s “quest” is to evangelize the benefits of delivering a compelling customer experience.
His opinion is that a great customer experience is free. Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. So Temkin offers seven areas to consider, including such requirements as process and culture changes—and my personal favorite: everybody owns it. No passing the buck, no thinking, “well, I don’t talk to the customer, so my job has no impact on their experience”; instead, everyone in an organization pitching in to create an experience that builds loyalty, incremental business, word of mouth, and all the great stuff that goes along with these things, like increased profitability.
What do you think? Is a great customer experience really free?
Dan,
This is a great example of a lack of interest in the customer experience. I don't know what Boston Market's customer strategy is, but based on your comments and on my personal experience, great service doesn't seem to be high on the list. Yes, their food is good, but given a choice (of which I have many being in NYC), I'd rather go somewhere with good food and friendly (and in the case of fast food, expeditious) service.
Retailer Ann Taylor is a great example of a company that has customer experience at the heart of its business. The staff at every store I've been in (NY, NJ, CA, Vegas, etc.) is courteous and helpful without being intrusive or pushy. I would go back there and recommend them time and again.
Enterprise Rent-a-Car is the same. You walk in and the associate looks you in the eye and shakes your hand. Where else does that happen outside B2B sales? Then they offer you water and actually help you load your luggage into the car.
I love a kiosk as much as the next person (National has a good one), but I can get a great rate and super-friendly service at Enterprise, so why would I ever want to go anywhere else? And that, my friend, is the true value of customer experience.
Cool Blog theme Ginger - where are you coming up with these !
As for "being free" - I hear this constantly from vendors offering their software services, for a trial. Their interpretation of "free" = you don't pay them $$ for the trial and has nothing to do with the amount of energy expanded ( ie human capital and oppty cost ) needed to try what they are offering for "free". And the energy is usually far greater than the fee waived !
I believe Customer Experience can be thought of it in an analogous way - it is a significant investment in culture and practice, that is free when it is already in place ( ie incremental cost is near zero ) and might be free in an ROI sense, but does have stand alone cost. In fact the ROI argument could support that it is actually better than free - as you can get more return than invested ... as long as you are good at implementing.
I had an experience over the holidays which highlights some of the themes you discussed ( especially the 'no passing the buck' and 'total ownership' ). I was working through Dec 24th and wanted to pick up a few meals from Boston Market for Christmas Day. I called them on the weekend, to ask what their operating hours. I was told until 7:00 pm on Christmas Eve. So I arrived at 6:00 pm - only to be told by the manager, on the other side of the glass doors, that they closed at 5:00. Of course, I offered that I had called for their hours earlier and was told 7:00 pm. His 'response' was to point his thumb down at me ( the universal SOL sign ), turn has back and walk away. This frustrated me enough that I had to offer feedback of this event through Boston Market's on-line Customer Experience Channel when I got home. Below is their automated response:
Boston Market Guest -
Thank you for submitting your feedback to our Boston Market Guest Contact Center. We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. We have forwarded your information to the appropriate people at Boston Market. You will be hearing back from someone in 5-7 business days.
Boston Market Guest Contact Center
Now, Boston Market could have easily placated the situation, just by being sympathetic. Given the manager's behavior and that I have not received a response from Corporate ( it has been 11 days ), my current hypothesis is that they do not have a culture/incentive/reward system in place to do this - ie handle customer feedback, experience or as you say, total ownership. Putting this in place would be an investment in time and capital ( human and systems ), which is not free. Whether they have done the work to see these costs are exceeded by the returns of doing so would be interesting to know.
Dan