Customer Experience

The purpose of this presentation is to learn about customers’ ways of purchasing and their experiences during this process.

Plan:
- The most critical elements of the customer experience: customer choices
- Who's experience is it anyway?
- Customer experience frame work and steps
- Why customer experience is important
- What makes an experience  outstanding?
- Customer experience and the 'element of surprise'
- How to deliver customer experience ... across touch points
- Customer experience while waiting
- Services with no human contact
- Customer experience in banks, electronics, furniture retailers.
- Example: Starbucks:  Take Home an Experience
- Questions to ponder

The most critical elements of the customer experience: customer choices

Level 1 - Recognition-Based Decisions:

Quick and largely automatic, unconscious, or habitual decisions, people make every day In which the persons do not pay much attention to attractiveness. They simply "know" from earlier experience what decision to make in a particular situation.

Level 2 - Simple Attractiveness Based Decisions:

few attractiveness attributes favoring the chosen alternative. The solution is obvious to the customer. These decisions may still be driven by habit or affect (feeling). They also may be made as quickly as Level 1 decisions.

Level 3 - Alternative-Based Decisions: 

Involve choices between alternatives with goal conflicts. Attributes favor one or more alternatives. Repeated decisions at Level 3 may become transformed to Level 2 or even Level 1.

Level 4 - Innovative Problem Solving Decisions:

Alternatives are not fixed. At this level, creative problem solving is an important  sub-process that leads to the generation of alternatives to be considered.

Who's experience is it anyway?

An experience is: the way a person's mind perceives, interprets, and evaluates what they do and the things that happen to them.
- Customer's experience:

Disconnection between the customers' perspective on their goals and a provider's beliefs about the customers' goals : The provider should understand how customers conceive what they're trying to accomplish and what's important to them.

The customers experience doesn't just happen at the provider.  It navigates a wide range of activities to satisfy his needs.

- Its all about feelings:

The customer experience is "how the customer thinks and feels" as he navigates, in an attempt to address his goals.

"People buy emotionally and justify with logic."

- Designing experience:

You can't design the customers' experience.  You can only design what you do in a positive and highly effective way so that the customer's experiences emerge.

Customer experience frame work

Expectations
- What do users think about you?
- What do they want to do?
- How do they expect to be treated?
- What are users' intentions?
- What do users do?
- What are they thinking?
- Do they succeed

Customer Experience
- Engaged?
- Frustrated?
- Confused?
- Why?

Customer experience steps
1- Select
2- Buy
3- Recieve
4- Use
5- Assist
6- Maintain
7- Resolve
8- Return

Why customer experience is important

Direct impact on business:
- Product/service differentiation
- Valuable competitive advantage
- Improved brand perception
- Increased market share

Retains customers:
It retains customers, improves their profitability and satisfaction over time.

Organizations with more complex b-to-b relationship often have the most to gain by making improvements in their customers' experience.

Improvements:

Based on research, companies that have made meaningful improvements in their customer experience have realized improvements of 10-25% as a result of increased retention, additional sales, reduced customer acquisition costs, and improved price realization.

What makes an experience outstanding?

Start by knowing your customer:
Who are the customers?  What are their priorities and underlying needs?  What are they trying to accomplish?  What is the natural path they follow to accomplish those things?  What influences their emotional and rational reactions?

What makes the experience outstanding?

- Identity: Outstanding experiences allow a person to reinforce and express a positive self-image
- Challenge:  Outstanding experiences allow a person to work at the edge of their capabilities.
- Learning:  Outstanding experiences generate learning; a person comes out of these experiences smarter, more capable, and more confident than they were when they started.
- Engaging: Outstanding experiences tend to be absorbing and, in many cases, a person may lose track of time

Customer experience and the 'element of surprise'

It is not easy to make a customer talk about his experience. One of the most important drivers of both positive and negative word of mouth is the element of surprise.

- The element of surprise: It might be something small, like a salesperson that is friendlier than expected. Or something more significant, like Delta Airlines knowing clients' birthdays and giving them a bottle of Champagne as an unexpected surprise.

Creating a drumbeat of small positive non programmatic surprises is important. There are always going to be times when the customer has a negative surprise but having a balance of positive surprises should offset this.

How to deliver customer experience

- Time
- Fun and entertaining

Accross touch points
- Sales and stores
- Product
- On-line
- Customer service

If your service requires waiting, you should consider:
- Reducing the Actual waiting Time
- Designing a Better Waiting Experience
- Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.
Provide news or entertainment to customers while waiting
- Anxiety makes waits feel longer.  
Customers are anxious when they don't know whether they've been forgotten, whether they've chosen the right line. Effective experience designs find ways to proactively remove what customers are worried about.  
- The more valuable a service is, the longer the time people are willing to wait.
Customers are generally more tolerant of waiting for high-demand or high-value products and services


Services with no human contact

When contacting a company or organizations, consumers are:
- 68% frustrated when they cannot reach a live human being
- 56% find waiting on hold, listening to bad music or repetitive messages frustrating
- 33% are frustrated because of unanswered emails and phone messages

 Aggressive customers
After a negative experience with a company or organization:
- 80% decide to never go back to that company
- 74% register a complaint or tell others
- 47% swear and shout
- 29% have headaches
- 13% post a negative online review or blog entry

Customer experience in Banks 



Customer experience in banks can be improved by:
1- Channel renewal
Channels can be more than points of transaction convenience. Channels can also become point of sales

So banks should :
- Focus on new ways to interact with customers and understand their financial needs to better serve them and sell more products
- Widen customer reach and service
- Offer banking services to increasingly mobile customers
- Consistent customer experience across the delivery channels

2- Branch Transformation
- Bank customers will continue to crave the human interaction with the institution to which they have entrusted their financial well being.
- Banks must recognize that this interaction is one of their best opportunities to enhance the customer experience.
- The branch must evolve from simply a transaction oriented channel to one geared towards a full fledged relationship management channel

Customer experience in electronics:


General Electric example:General Electric has invented the 5S strategy to enhance its customer experience:

1. Sort - Eliminate unneeded items
2. Simplify - A place for everything
3. Shine or Sweep - Keep the workplace clean
4. Standardize - Identify work standards
5. Sustain or Self Discipline - Keep it going!

AWARENESS
We become aware and we learn about a product, service, or brand

COMMITMENT
We choose and we buy specific goods, knowledge, or services

USAGE
We use, enjoy, repurchase, and share our experiences with others



Customer experience in furniture retailers:

- On the showroom floor with friendly salespeople
- Salespeople who know in an instant which pieces, fabrics, colors and finishes are in stock
- Real time inventory accuracy and visibility
- Accuracy in special services, such as fabric coating or assembly
- Fast, accurate home delivery (same day or next day delivery)
- Avoid having warehouse workers waste time running around looking for products, or worse yet, claim they are out of stock when in fact the items are just "hidden away" in the warehouse somewhere.

What if...
...you had 100% accurate visibility to every item in your warehouse, virtually eliminating the need to do physical inventories?
... you could systematically direct every task in the warehouse, including put-away, picking and special services?
... you could optimize route planning and truck loading for home delivery?... you coulde handle return efficeintly, never unknowingly mixing returned goods with new products?



Example: Starbucks Take home an experience

Mission statement "Live Coffee"
The Starbucks Value Proposition

- To create an "experience" around the consumption of coffee, an experience that people would weave into their lives
-To create an uplifting experience in " Customer intimacy "
- To create an " ambience " based on human spirit, sense of community, and the need for people to come together

Having coffee became a necessity
- Customized drinks
- Hand crafted drinks
- Wireless internet service"feeling at home " experience

5 principles for turning Ordinary to Extraordinary
1- Make it your own
2- Everything matters
3- Surprise and delight
4- Embrace resistant
5- Leave your mark

The 5 ways of being
1- Be welcoming
2- Be genuine
3- Be considerate
4- Be knowledgeable
5- Be involved