Why does customer experience matter?
Most recently there have been more and more news about traditional companies, software companies and consulting companies doing more in customer experience. It’s an important topic, but actually nothing new to me. This has been time to time on my lips when I’ve been seeing bad service management and participated in an event with poor guidance to people in front of customers. As I work with telecoms at the moment, I have clear insights to how network quality can affect to CAPEX and OPEX as well. You may waste your money to wrong areas or do changes with may look good in a plan, but will not affect to overall performance.
The classic example for good, better and best services is airlines. The basic product is really, really same: changing customers from location A to location B. The product itself have many layers and components that can fail, most likely not even visible to customers when everything goes well. What customers see are often the poor food quality, long queues, delays, bad entertainment selection on board, rude flight attendants, etc. It’s more often a case of your own mood when experience some of the bad behaviors or qualities. It can actually be a surprise when some local airlines are offering local specialties for meal service (Vietnam airlines) or have a habit to takeoff before scheduled time (Lion air). For sure premium airlines like Cathay pacific, Emirates and Singapore airlines will make less often failures in their core service and even surprise you very often. For example I have been often upgraded by Cathay pacific to business, and when I lived in Finland Finnair upgraded me only once even I had at least once a month flight in Europe and three to four times a year to Asia. This is part of the company culture.
More recently I’ve been happily surprised about fast food restaurants; especially McDonald’s who started a table service in Taiwan. They already had delivery service when I moved here (not in Finland available), but now they even compete with traditional more expensive restaurants with service. This is such a nice thing to do, you can use order-in kiosk, make changes to your order (like adding extra sauce, patties, etc.) and it will arrive to your table. Personally I prefer this convenience and also select them more often due to this. Only problem is finding a table; many Taiwanese like to hangout in McDonald’s, study or even have business meetings between small owners.
What you learn from these experiences and take them part of your own habits? I suggest you think about these three things:
- Originality: if you can’t be better than competitors, be more local and personal, have proud of your origins
- Surprise: there are many ways to satisfy customers by surprising them, something small which happens unexpected or more convenient way to manage failure certainly adds extra
- Radical change: just like McDonald’s has change the way they do their business (table service) they can acquire more profits and actually to cost is minimal for them.
I have an opinion also about service providers or companies offering products to manage customer experience. The way you treat your own customers, tells a lot about your product. This is actually very simply to do by building company culture which respects both employees and customers and later will show that good things start to happen to good companies. We very often only think about core product, maybe something intangible or even the hard part (visual product). We may not think about all products have also very visible part, people, who will sell it and deliver it. If your company hasn’t adapted same way to manage and respect employees as superstars, it’s time to start it now. Make a short survey for each and every team; listen to what’s good and what’s the overall feeling. Ask for advice from each employee and listen to their experiences and mood. This is the only way you can achieve the target and become a superstar.
