Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Your Best Intentions Don't Matter to the Customer

I've known CEOs and other business people who make a personal, even emotional commitment to their customers. It's heartening, but it doesn't translate into a personal or emotional experience for the customer. Good intentions do not equal a positive customer experience, or ultimately a positive customer perception. And without a positive customer perception, you cannot expect positive customer behavior, like retention, cross-sales, or referrals.

Here's why your intentions don't matter: the only thing that the customer can perceive is the experience. It's the layout of your store, or the tone of the person answering the phone, or the clarity of your billing statements, or the usability of your website that creates a customer perception -- positive or negative. What the customer doesn't see (and frankly, doesn't care about) is the idealistic picture in your head of well-intentioned products, service and interactions.

And here's the problem: If you're like most business owners, you are making dangerous assumptions. You are assuming that your customer experience is a reflection of your best intentions. Chances are it's not. In fact, the person at the top of the pyramid (I'm talking to you, CEO, Chairman, Owner) often has the worst view of the actual customer experience. Not only is she usually the furthest away from the frontlines, she also can be receiving skewed (I won't say false) information as it's filtered and filtered again on the way through the organization up to the big office.

For a Better Customer Experience, Get Real

So what's the solution? To create that ideal experience, you must first get a better grasp on your actual customer experience. It's the only way to begin to incrementally improve the customer perception in order to better match that utopian picture in your head -- not what you want it to be (since that has no relation to reality), but what it is. Of course there are a number of ways to begin, but I'd suggest starting within the company. Get a limited number of folks in a room from different areas of the business that have something to do with the customer experience (everything from reception, to website programming, to billing). Then, using an outside facilitator, create a process flow that incorporates every actual step in a designated portion of the customer experience.

What I guarantee you'll find (as I've personally seen) is that no one person in the room has a complete, objective picture of what the customer confronts when interacting with your business. There will be gaps and opportunities within the experience that you can address in ways that will get you closer to creating that caring relationship with the customer that looks so good in your head.

If you can understand and then transform your experience, you'll create a customer perception that will "deliver happiness" to everybody.

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About the Author: William J. Cusick is CEO and founder of Vox Inc., and is the author of All Customers Are Irrational: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back (AMACOM 2010).