Customer Experience Excellence: Why, What and How

Yesterday, at the SCORE 2009 conference, I had the good fortune to hear Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research present "The Path to Customer Experience Excellence: Why, What and How". I regularly read his blog, Customer Experience Matters, so I was familiar with much of the material, but where the blog provides bite-size snack, Bruce's presentation was dinner and a show. (Complete with corny-enough jokes that I immediately reused one later in the day!)

Bruce began by walking the audience through a customer interaction that a Forrester analyst Adele had with a consumer-electronics retailer. His framing analogy was that too many organizations make customers roll a rock up the hill, like Sisyphus, only to have the rock roll back down. Adele used the site, but didn't get what she needed. The rock rolls back down the hill. Adele called customer service, but didn't get what she needed. The rock rolls back down the hill. Adele called technical support, but didn't get what she needed. The rock rolls back down the hill. Adele went back to the site and sent an email, but the responding email didn't give her what she needed. The rock rolls back down the hill. 

As a guy who once named his company after a Greek demigod, I appreciated Bruce's take on this story. The two lessons he quoted:

1. "Making customers push rocks up hills does not build loyalty."
2. "Don't mess around with Zeus."

Here is my quick recap of the "Why, What and How" to customer experience excellence, with links to related blog posts from Bruce:

• Why? You could have safely ignored customer-experience management three years ago, but not now. Customer experience is growing up; it's been important to firms for long enough that your competitors are differentiating themselves on customer experience. The recession is strengthening the correlation between customer experience and customer loyalty, across all 12 B2C industries Forrester studied. Perhaps as a result, most businesses will cut other areas disproportionately more than they will cut areas that affect customer experience.
• What? One of the top firms in Forrester's customer experience rankings is CostCo, which tied for #3 after Barnes & Noble and USAA. "Great customer experience is not about Rainforest Café with a dazzling impression: it's about consistently meeting the needs and beating the expectations of customers. Unlike when going to a 7-11, you don't even expect to be able to park near the building at CostCo. But you do expect a broad selection at a great price." [quote from my notes; not verbatim]
• How? To build great customer experiences, your organization needs to follow the three principals of Experience-Based Differentiation:
1. Obsess about customer needs, not product features.
2. Reinforce brands with every interaction, not just communications.
3. Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.

Bruce wrapped up by pointing attendees to his free booklet, The 6 Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers. Bruce is one of the leading authorities researching CE today; you'd have to have rocks in your head not to review his findings and work to make life easier for your customers.