Management Today’s March 09 issue covers Customer Experience in their Master Class column. This is a regular feature that reviews the latest terminology and trends and at the bottom of the piece a ‘Fad Quotient’ is offered. I was disappointed to see that Customer Experience received a 7 out of 10 and so I decided to write to the editor to explain where I think they are misjudging the area.
Customer Experience Master Class
Your customer experience master class was accurate and informative right up to the final section on the direction it is going where I think you missed the point.
Whether consumers or customers are hard up or affluent is irrelevant. They will be interacting with organisations and brands and judging them either consciously or subconsciously based on the quality of those interactions and that in turn will impact their likelihood to recommend or return. Just because an organisation doesn’t embrace customer experience it doesn’t mean their customers won’t have an experience. This is the fundamental difference with CRM.
Customer experience strategy is not only about differentiation it is about consistency with brand perceptions. So taking your example of Travelodge – it is quite acceptable to be an economy brand provided the experience meets or exceeds those expectations. Ryan-air personify this with an awful experience but one that nobody is surprised about.
The reason the Internet accelerated the adoption of customer experience thinking is that to do it well you have to think holistically. Most organisations treated their web presence as a separate business and the level of autonomy that created meant that for the first time someone could genuinely impact most if not all of the contact points in the customer interactions. That knowledge is helping drive the benefits in to other, older channels.
The term ‘Customer Experience’ may warrant a 7/10 for FAD effect, but what it relates to clearly cannot.
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