Chapter 4: Customer Experiences

At the end of last year I was publishing chapters of the“10 foundations of business success”, an excellent very practical book by my friend and colleague Guy Hamilton.

If you missed any of the articles in the topic, see links below.

Series Intro – 10 Foundations of Business Success

Chapter 1: Market Segmentation Part 1

Chapter 1: Market Segmentation Part 2 – The Steps

Chapter 2: Customer Needs – You only have a business if a customer wants to buy your products.

Chapter 3: Value Propositions – What a customer perceives as good value is all that matters. A business view of value does not count.

Today, I bring to you, the 4th Chapter: Customer Experiences – When a customer really engages with a product or service they become a passionate advocate for it. This is at the heart of repeat or referred business.

You have now defined the market segment you wish to compete in and the target customers you wish to attract. You have engaged with your customers to better understand their needs, and worked out how you wish to differentiate your business by value rather than price. You have the foundations of a good marketing campaign in place, so it might be tempting at this stage to say, “Let’s get to it… enough planning: it is time for action!”

No! At this stage, you have three important questions to ask. Consider them carefully before launching a new or upgraded service.

1. Can you consistently deliver what you have promised to a high standard and cost-effectively?

Negative customer reactions result from broken promises or not fulfilling what the customer had been led to believe they would receive. Disappointed customers have a tendency to talk to other, potentially creating a problem that is much wider than just one person.

2. Is the process for applying, buying and taking delivery of a product or service as easy for the customer as you can make it?

If it is too difficult to buy a product, customers will give up and you will lose a potential sale. Is there any points of disconnection in the sales journey that run a real risk of losing customers?

3. Will the overall experience deliver the value promised? Has your business lived up to delivering the positive points of differentiation you aspire to?

One of the golden rules of business is to stand by the promises and commitments you make. Let’s look at marketing and brand promises and see if we can tease out some simple truths:

RULE 1. Do not create brand or value promises you cannot consistently deliver.

RULE 2. Building good experience is often simply getting the basics right.

RULE 3. Make it easy and engaging for customers to find what they want and buy it.

RULE 4. Make sure your core business values are felt across all channels.

RULE 5. Identify who has primary responsibility for delivering consistent, high-quality customer sales and servicing.

RULE 6. Regularly test whether you have enough skills and capacity to deliver what you aspire to.

The Steps

Actions that can be taken to start this journey are:

1. 1. Clarify and focus on the core sales and servicing customer activities for your business.
   2. Walk through your current processes for these top activities and identify where processes are cumbersome, or subject to delays and internal disconnections. Honestly examine the overall customer experience.
   3. Define what customer experiences should look like for your core activities. Define step-by-step and specifically how the customer should be handled.
   4. Focus equally on stopping legacy activities that create poor experiences and creating new steps and processes.
   5. Make sure customer journeys have clear and simple measures of success, which link to key points of differentiation.
   6. Link new business, cross-sales and repeat business from improved customer journeys to a revenue objective.
   7. For each step in these journeys make sure there is an accountable person who has measures by which the success of their part of the puzzle will be assessed.
   8. Develop a management culture and disciplines to regularly review customer journeys and what is or is not happening.
   9. As always: ask the customer, ask the customer and ask the customer again!

Building good customer experiences is not about creating a “happy factor” with your customer. Rather, it is about setting their expectations, then meeting and exceeding them, so you become a preferred supplier and they become committed customers.

The look of your retail outlets, the promises in your marketing brochures, your brand tag lines and other factors will create your customers’ expectations. If their actual experience with your business is very different from what they expected, you create a major point of disconnection, which can only negatively impact sales. Fulfilling their expectations, and making the whole process easy and seamless, on the other hand, will bring them back to you as repeat customers.