If your organization is committed to delivering remarkable customer experiences then simply serving your customers is not enough. It is essential to go the extra mile and use each interaction with customers as an opportunity to "wow" them. "Wow" moments are hard to explain but everyone has experienced these moments when one is just blown away by the efforts retail staff takes to ensure customer satisfaction.

The best indicator that you – as a customer – just had a "Wow" experience is that you feel a strong desire to talk about this remarkable experience with your friends. And this is exactly what companies have to aim for: not just serve their customer but to wow them so that customers start to talk about your products, services and brand.

The Elements of Wow Experiences

Wharton School of Business has teamed up with the Retail Council of Canada to identify the elements that constitute a Wow experience and have identified five major areas:

• Engagement: being polite, genuinely caring and interested in helping, acknowledging and listening.
• Executional excellence: patiently explaining and advising, checking stock, helping to find products, having product knowledge and providing unexpected product quality.
• Brand Experience: exciting store design and atmosphere, consistently great product quality, making customers feel they’re special and that they always get a deal.
• Expediting: being sensitive to customers’ time on long check-out lines, being proactive in helping speed the shopping process.
• Problem Recovery: helping resolve and compensate for problems, upgrading quality and ensuring complete satisfaction.

The article also stresses the importance of selecting the right staff that is able to take basic information about shopper preferences and convert that knowledge to customized service. This is in my perspective the essential aspect for delivering remarkable customer experiences.

Delivering Wow is hard, but it can be done

When reflecting on these elements it is obvious that it is not “rocket science” that is required to deliver remarkable customer experiences. On the contrary, it is not  the most sophisticated strategy that will bring success but the discipline and committed of the organization and its employees to deliver “Wow” every day to every customer.

A "Culture of Wow", a commitment that is lived in the organization where every retail employee understands that it is necessary to Wow and not just to serve, is requires for organizations to achieve this.

References

• Getting to ‘Wow’: Consumers Describe What Makes a Great Shopping Experience
• Discovering ‘WOW’ — A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North America

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Have you ever wondered why GMs top-management never understood why their customers are not buying their cars? Because they have fooled themselves (or have been fooled) and never experienced the real customer experience. Management got lost in a disconnected reality that was based on staged product demonstrations with customized products that were build for one reason: to make top management believe that GM is producing great cars.

One of the best indicators of a customer experience focused organization is the commitment from top-management not only to deliver ordinary products and services but to go the extra mile and surprise and delight customers with a company’s offerings. If top management wants to show real commitment, it has to experience the real customer experience in order to ensure that decision are made based on reality and not on a“virtual reality” based on product demonstrations in the boardroom.

Product Demonstrations vs. Experiencing the Customers’ Experience

In an article from “The Truth About Cars” I have found an interesting statement that described how top-management at General Motors experienced their products:

As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models. The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

For a number of reasons, middle-management at General Motors decided that it might be better to deliver a staged customer experience to top-management instead of showing them the real customer experience of driving a GM car. Of course this behavior was probably induced by top-management itself. But for now the cause is not import, the impact this has had is much more important.

If this would have happened in the accounting departments, auditors might have discovered this lack of transparency and there would have been investigations about false accounting practices and false reporting. But in product development the only signs for misinterpretation through staged customer experiences are lackluster sales as well as a management board which is unable to explain them since they have only experienced the greatest products.

Experience is the best Teacher

It is essential for top management to experience the “real” customer experience first-hand. If you are not doing that it is just like looking at your balance sheet that is not audited but merely created to give an impression that everything is fine.

If you are working in a truly customer-oriented company, your CEO will spend time right where the company’s customers are. Without assistants, without a secretary and without his direct reports who ensure that everything is working perfectly. If your CEO is not doing that, you don’t truly have a focus on the customer and one might end up in a situation just like GM – wondering why nobody is buying your amazing products that have been presented in the corporate boardroom.

Read the full article: Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved

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The way we talk not only represents who we are but also influences what we might turn into. This is not just true for individuals but also for organizations. The vocabulary that is used within an organization is a mirror of the organizations culture.

How would the focus in your organization change, if your corporate vocabulary is dominated by words and associations from either competitors, shareholder value or customers? If you talk about your customers all the time, your focus tends to shift on customers and through this you could take a big step in getting closer to your customers.

With this in mind it is interesting to see a blog post by Ian Sefferman, a former Amazon employee, about the use of the word customer experience at Amazon.

Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company.

Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?

I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.

The implications for your business

Reflecting on your corporate vocabulary and how it is used could provide valuable insights about the real focus in your organization. Is your organization focused on itself and communication is mostly about your organization, its products, management and processes or do you focus on the customer and actually mirror this in your language? Is your organization’s vocabulary focused on preserving the status quo or on shaping the future? If you want to change your corporate culture, how would you need to change the language that is used in your organization?

Research Potential

I think it would be very interesting to do a analysis of documents, emails and other communication in an organization to identify the degree of customer orientation and customer focus. Doing this with a longitudinal analysis one might get an interesting measurement tool about change within an organization.

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Increasingly companies that have originally been focused solely on products are shifting their focus towards services and the combination of their products with services in order to countervail the commoditization of their products. In this process of “servitization of products” businesses see themselves confronted with the challenge of scaling their service operations to maintain growth and profitability.

IBM is a great example of a corporation that has successfully shifted from a hardware business that was faced with price erosion and increased competition towards a service business. In 2007 revenues from service business represented more than 55% of IBMs revenues compared to 32% in 1997, in the same time-span hardware revenue declined from 47% to 21% (see Annual Report 1997 and Annual Report 2007).

This shift was not without problems as the Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services” shows.

At the same time, Big Blue was facing a problem experienced by many services businesses that rely on a heavy element of direct interaction with customers. The more that sales increased, the more people it had to recruit, in a linear progression that would ultimately have been unsustainable.

In order to overcome these challenges, IBM approached this from three perspectives:

Standardization

In effect, IBM set out to standardize the way it “manufactures” services, so that exactly the same processes determined how an as­signment was carried out in Egypt as in the Philippines. “The real scale comes out of doing the work in a codified way,” says Mr Daniels. “The key breakthrough was to ask ‘How do you do the work at the lowest-level components?’”

Technology

The technology IBM has applied to services comes in two parts. One involves raising productivity by automating some repetitious work. Turning repeatable processes into software that can be used widely in similar assignments has played to an IBM strength, since it is the world’s second biggest software company, after Microsoft.

The second technology development holds the greatest promise for the future, says Mr Daniels. It involves inventing new ways to solve customers’ problems, by applying the sort of deep computing skills that have long lain at the heart of IBM’s business.

Anthropology

[…] the services research arm employs anthropologists and other social scientists to investigate how to make services engagements more effective.

Overall, in spite of the increasing use of technology, Mr Morris says of services: “It is fundamentally a human enterprise.”

How does this impact your customer experience?

Designing a service that provides a remarkable experience is one thing, consistently delivering this service with the expected quality is even more important. Businesses that ignore the service delivery aspect will see themselves confronted with the problem that their services – as remarkable as they might have been on a small scale – simply don’t hold up when they need to be rolled out on a larger scale.

And if you cannot consistently deliver a service, all your efforts to create interactions that lead to remarkable experience will have been to no avail.

Read the full Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services”.

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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”.

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