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What we’ve definitely noticed over the last two decades is that in every industry, experience is becoming more important. So I often ask this question: the last time you went and had a really great meal at a restaurant, if the service was terrible, would you go back? If the food was good and the experience and the service was spectacular, would you go back? We make decisions as consumers every single day based on the experience we have with companies – the airlines we fly, the hotels we stay at, the cars we drive, the restaurants we eat at. There is a layer of that experience that’s woven into everything we do every single day.
Customer experience (CX)
It was maybe about 15 years ago, customer experience became this opportunity for companies to find ways to compete differently, not just on the products and services that they sell, but how they do it, and more importantly, how their customers feel when they engage with their companies. So whether it be the people who might answer the phones or sell them something or show up to service something for theirs, or even the products and services that are getting developed and delivered to the customer. It was about that layer of experience, and we believed that experience was going to become this next battleground that companies would compete with each other against, so that it didn’t become a race to the lowest price, that it really was more about value and experience for the customers that we’re using and leveraging the products and services being sold. That required us to rethink what it means to deliver a compelling and meaningful experience at each and every touchpoint that we have with a customer. From how clean our office is, to how clean our restrooms are, to how pleasant our parking attendants are, or those, you know, bellmen at a hotel. Everybody plays a part.
So if you’re in an industry where it’s a one-time sale, you have to think about the influence that that customer may have on those around them to use you. If you were my realtor and gave me a completely amazing experience when I bought my house and my friends were going to buy a house, I’d tell them, “You know what? You have to use my realtor. They showed up. They went the extra mile. They did all this due diligence for me, like, I couldn’t imagine if I was ever going to buy another house that I’d use someone else.” That experience sticks with people. How you make them feel has meaning to what you’re able to do with them. If you’re in a business that is recurring revenue, let’s say, a gym membership, charges you every single month, if you don’t treat that customer well, or the facility isn’t clean, or the machines are always broken, guess what happens? Your customers don’t want to come back, so they leave you. Now all of a sudden, that recurring revenue stream stops. If you can get into the mindset of, “We are doing things for them,” I think you have a much better shot at having it be really meaningful, and not only that, memorable, and when you deliver memorable experiences, people want to come back.
Measure customer sentiment
The tracking and measuring of customer sentiment is fairly mature. It’s been decades now. We have had this hyper focus on customer. There are more metrics, if you will, that are a little more mature than others. But at its first blush is: are we able to attract and keep a customer?
If you’re in a one-time-purchase kind of business, it’s hard to figure out, well, what is that metric to track that customer? So it might be something like a net promoter score or a customer satisfaction score, or a customer effort score. If you’re in a recurring-revenue business, like that gym or even a subscription online for your favorite streaming service, they will call it the churn rate. How often are customers churning? The smaller the number, the better job you’re doing. The larger that number gets, you know that there’s a problem.
So there are metrics out there around customer experience that are fairly common, fairly consistent, and very mature. If you’re not tracking customer experience right now, you should be. If you are tracking customer experience now, are you tracking it enough, meaning do you have more than just one metric? So there are ways to get a much better picture in a holistic way as it relates to customer experience. But the first thing I’d say is you have to be tracking it regardless.
Decontruct your metrics
So once you have a metric around customer experience, the trick now is to do something with it. This is where you have an opportunity to uncover or deconstruct what are the drivers of that customer experience going up or down? Some of it may be related to the products and services you’re developing. Did the quality of the product you used to sell change because of a supply chain issue? So you had to swap out a piece or a part or an ingredient in whatever it is you’re selling, and all of a sudden, you saw the customer satisfaction scores decline or your net promoter scores decline. It may be something in the product.
What else could it be? Maybe your employees aren’t so happy right now. So that’s another angle by which you have to make sure what is the driver of that decline in customer experience. So it could be products, it could be people.
Last, and certainly not least, it could be you’re not paying attention at all, and so your customer experience has gotten really terrible, but no one’s paying attention, which means your customers are fleeing at this rapid rate and all of a sudden three months goes by or six months goes by or a year goes by, and you’re at the other side of it and you go, “Where did all of our customers go?” So we want to make sure that not just you have a metric and you track a metric, but really understanding what is the driver behind that metric going up or that metric going down?