Customer Experience Defined
Posted by Vovici Blog on Tue, Mar 15, 2011
“Customer experience” is not just the hot new buzzword for press releases, though it certainly is that. Even Adobe now has a “customer experience” platform.
Customer experience is the sum of interactions your customer has with you over their lifetime as a prospect and customer.
If your organization is like most, your customer experience is an emergent property, what Jeffrey Goldstein of Adelphi University calls “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” That is, your customer experience is the sum of, for the most part, ad hoc interactions with your product, service, staff and partners.
A formal Customer Experience Management program is an attempt to design and script the type of experiences your customers have.
The ambition of this is huge. Think of all the experiences that your customers have at every stage of their relationship with your company and at each point in their use of your products and services. Now imagine designing them all.
One company with ambitions that large is Apple. Years ago they got tired of sales clerks in their distribution channel failing to accurately demonstrate and explain their products. As a result, they started their own line of retail stores so that they could create the shopping experience they wanted for their prospects and customers. Their products, of course, are obsessively designed and tightly controlled – you can’t use Flash on an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad, because Apple doesn’t think the experience is a positive one on a handheld device. Want to buy an application for one of these devices? They tightly control which applications are accepted, while Google, on the other hand, will add almost anything to its app store. Need service? If you live near an Apple retail store, you can bring your device in for service rather than needing to mail it in, as with most of Apple’s competitors. How ambitious is Apple when it comes to customer experience? They actually design and fabricate their own microprocessors for their handheld devices, to their specifications. Their biggest competition today is the opposite of a controlled experience: various microprocessors in handsets from dozens of vendors running an operating system from Google, available in just about every store that sells phones.
Of course, Apple can sometimes fail miserably at executing the customer experience it designed, as Seth Godin relates in a recent rant: Cascade of Broken Promises. And at that point “customer experience” just becomes empty words.
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