What is “the customer experience”? A lot of people wonder is meant with customer experience. The problem is that the term customer experience is used ambiguously and too often just to present old wine in new bottles.

Customer experience management is not the successor of CRM, it is not a better word for call center management and it is not about “staging” some interactions with customer services.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (shown in the picture above presenting the Kindle 2 ebook Reader), explains his understanding of customer experience in the BusinessWeek article “How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking”:

“Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience,” he says. “Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations.”

So a customer experiences includes all encounters and interactions that customers have with your product, services and brand. The core is to deliver customer value through each of these three areas and not just by doing “a little bit customer experience management in the call center”.

With such an understanding you also see that the biggest potential for remarkable customer experience lies in the core functionality and price of your offerings.  Only if you shift your attention to these areas, you can truly create a remarkable different customer experience.

Amazon and the Kindle:

Looking at Amazon from this perspective, it becomes clear why an online retailer would develop an eBook reader like the Kindle. This device would significantly improve what is most important for an online retailer: instant availability of books and cheaper prices of electronic editions while at the same time revolutionizing the book industry.

Read the full article “How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking”.