Apr 2, 2009
defining the customer experience
“That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is”,
- Bill Clinton
For the record, the definition of IS doesn’t have a lot to do with what then President Bill Clinton was trying to avoid talking about. Similarly, I hear the phrase “customer experience” discussed, debated and referenced a lot. But what IS it? Sometimes customer experience is a set of principles. Sometimes it is a metric. What’s your definition?
Last fall my firm Aveus did a large study on this topic. We asked leaders who said “yes, there IS a definition of customer experience that is well understood throughout our organization” to tell us in a sentence, what is it? Hundreds of free form answers later I saw some themes but not a lot of consistency. I wondered, if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know if you get there?
Here’s how I define customer experience. It starts with a customer who is triggered to solve a need or problem. Their experience is what happens and how they feel as they:
- realize a need,
- learn about you,
- try you out,
- buy,
- use your product or service to solve their problem, and
- evolve to another need over time.
What’s your definition of customer experience?
Hi Linda.
A Good Customer Experience is when the customer feels that particular interaction happened as or better than they expected it to.
In my experience earning trust and ensuring a good customer experience is about making it easy for people to buy from you and easy for them to get support or engage. When they want to.
Enjoying reading your blog and I have the RSS.
Cheers
True indeed. Another important ingredient of a great customer experience is that it – on the whole – actually helps the customer solve the problem or ned that triggered them to act. Whether I’m a CIO buying enterprise software to make my company more secure or a high school student downloading my first track from iTunes to make my bus ride enjoyable – every customer experience must solve a need. Appreciate you stopping by Justin – great point. LCI
Customer experience is every single interaction a customer has with your brand. Most companies I’ve worked with have never actually mapped the customer experience (especially not from the customers’ POV) which is essential for strategically managing the experience and creating the desired “on brand” outcome.
Hi Linda,
I fully agree on the lack of clarity by organizations in this matter.
In our constant search for the best approaches in this field, we have found a reflection of American Stephen P. Anderson about experience design, brilliant in its simplicity: “It’s about people, their activities and the context of those activities”
From Xupera we add to this definition: The fulfillment of the brand promise of the organizations to their target customers through efficient processes with people involved in the project (internally & externally) in a consistent manner in any context (stage relationship , contact channel …).
The What, the goal remains the same, making money. The How makes the difference.
Enjoying reading your blog and twitts
Jorge Garcia del Arco
XUPERA Xperiencing Customers
CEO
http://bit.ly/ak0Rip
In my view, there are two sides to this definition
1. A business whose interest is in profitable
revenue growth and
2. The customer whose interest is in finding
someone that can be trusted for making their
life better
So, for a customer, customer experience represents an evidence that a particular brand is worth trusting and respecting.
For the business, it is about thinking around a customer’s life and creating an evidence that a customer can trust them or in some cases respect them
This evidence is usually in the form of a product and/or a series of interactions.