The emotive price of “Wow!!” vs “What??”

Low headline prices.  It’s a familiar scenario in many industries, forced on companies trying to prise open the gap between revenue and costs by generating greater volume and more loyalty than their competitive peers.  At the same time, there is a relentless pursuit of bringing innovative products, differentiated propositions and “Wow!” moments to market.

But looking at the reasons why customers say “I’ll never, EVER use them again” – and advise others to do the same – is rarely because of the price or perceived value, but almost always about service.  Or rather, the lack of it and the consequences for how that made them feel.

Looking at consumer reviews recently as part of a research assignment, it’s clear the extent to which a lacklustre experience is a destroyer of value, much more so than a low price creates it.

As ever with research, there are caveats.  Telecoms, airlines, banks, utility companies – and no doubt many others – all have their good guys and bad guys.  And in self-generated reviews online, the tendency is to get polarised opinions.

Recently I studied a random sample of 200 reviews across a variety of industries where the customers were not only scoring zero, 1 or 2 on a satisfaction or advocacy scale but they were adamant that their relationship was over.  Of those 200, the future behaviour of 189 (94%) was directly attributable to the service they had.  94%!

Often it’s about causes of frustration – “You what??” – and the lack of (expected) basics rather than the absence of a “Wow!!” moment.  It’s an emotional thing and it’s easy to see why.  However, for the business, the root causes would not cost a fortune to do in a more constructive way or avoid completely.  For example, the reasons cited by these customers included:

“It was only a 2-hour flight but there were relentless announcements and pressure selling of scratch cards and ‘Win a trip to Las Vegas’ competitions.  Not relaxing at all.  Very unpleasant”.

“All the staff looked tired and as if they didn’t want to be there”.

“They don’t get back to you when they say they would and when they eventually do, you get a different answer each time.  Honestly, how hard can it be?” 

With the small exception of a handful of reviews, each articulated at least one negative emotion.  I know that getting metric-driven operations teams or a target-focused sales force to make changes based on how they make customers feel is a huge cultural challenge, but it can be done.  The brand is, very much, what the brand does and how it makes customers feel.

Brand loyalty?  Getting harder all the time.  After all, customers are primarily loyal to their wallets and to their own well-being.  If the same focus and resource that was put on pricing and yield management was given to the customer experience, businesses – at relatively little cost – will be able to increase revenue and reduce costs by getting customers to come back simply because of how they are treated rather than how much the widget costs.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consultant
 
+44 (0) 7917 718 072
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
 
Twitter – @IdealExperience
LinkedIn – http://uk.linkedin.com/in/improvecustomerexperiences
 

Q: The difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience? A: Emotion-driven behaviour.

We’ve all seen “Customer Service” and “Customer Experience” labels freely interchangeable in role descriptions, job titles and team functions.  They are seen as one and the same thing.

Does it matter? After all, it’s about “putting the customer at the heart of everything we do” (whatever that means in practice).  I’d argue it matters a lot;  they are very different disciplines with potential for a very different impact on the bottom line.

I’d suggest there are one or two crucial differences that may help.  For me, Customer Service is what we do for our customers and clients;  Customer Experience meanwhile is what that service really looks like to be on the receiving end of it.

And then there’s the difference in outcomes – Customer Service is generally tracked retrospectively by internal performance metrics while Customer Experience – functionally and emotionally – affects the way customers feel, think and behave next time.

A recent example brings the differences to life.

Buying a rail ticket online should be a straightforward transaction.  Indeed, they have a comprehensive website, a booking engine that caters for all needs, navigation that is (for the most part) intuitive and a helpline in case there are any questions or problems.  Lots of Customer Service boxes ticked then.

So, feeling reassured and confident, I book a short day-return journey.  I’m then asked for my seat preferences.  Great.  Easy to do business with.   On to the payment page though and I notice a couple of personalised messages:  I must travel off-peak and there are no seats available.  Uh-oh.  Confidence turns to anxiety and confusion.

I know I selected to travel off-peak, so why are they making an issue of it here?  Worse, there is no information about exactly what times are peak or off-peak.  And they are happy for me to pay yet there are no seats and no alternatives offered.  What’s that about?

Maybe I was too fussy in my choice so I start over (there’s no option to amend what I’ve done so far).  Same result.  After the third time, confusion morphs into frustration so I call the helpline.  What do I get?  Charged a handsome rate, back to the beginning and a voice-activated question and answer system. After 20 minutes battling with the computer I’m finally told I’m being put through to someone who can take my payment.  But then, not only is it such a bad line I can’t hear what they’re saying but the price has suddenly gone up.  Once again we get into seat availability and unclear cost options.  Honestly, how hard can it be?

Frustration becomes exasperation becomes anger.  But that quickly evaporates when I hatch a cunning plan, wrestle back control and smile smugly as I hang up and go back online to book a bus.

The Customer Service was in place, with all good intentions and yet the reality was that it produced a range of emotions and took too much effort for me to become a customer, let alone a frequent traveller or an advocate.

The brand is what the brand does, as they say and experiences don’t always mirror what the Customer Service manual says should happen.

So if we’re not confident we know what today’s customers will say about their experience over dinner tonight, we should at the very least not assume that Customer Service and Customer Experience are one and the same thing.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consultant
 
+44 (0) 7917 718 072
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
 
Twitter – @IdealExperience
LinkedIn – http://uk.linkedin.com/in/improvecustomerexperiences
 
 
 

Four (and a half) rules to measure Customer and Client Experiences

The good news is, there’s not much we can’t measure these days, whether it’s the mood of the nation or how fast the Universe is expanding.  And so when it comes to measuring Customer and Client experiences we’ve never had it so good.  Measure Customer Experiences - information at our fingertipsSo much information, right at our fingertips.

But the bad news is that it becomes very easy to over-complicate things.  Without a disciplined focus on measuring customer experiences, we’ll fix the wrong processes and remain blissfully unaware of what’s really important.  In the meantime, our competitors are turning the right experiences into better business while we’re left wondering why, despite an increase in scores, our Customer Experience Management programme isn’t working for the bottom line.

To avoid falling into this trap, there is no shortage of do’s and dont’s.  However, to make things a little easier, I stick to four (and a half) key rules that keep things on the right track.

Rule number one:  Measure the right things.  Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to make an assumption that the answers lie within the wealth of information that already exists.   Satisfaction scores, sentiment values, sales data, complaints analysis, operational metrics, channel performance, customer lifetime value and product margins all play a part and indeed will provide some useful information.  However, it’s real insight we’re after so we need to use tools like forensic customer journey mapping to ask customers the right questions at the right time.

Operational data may be applauded for reducing average call times, but if that touchpoint is the most important thing to your customer base, making them feel rushed and unimportant won’t be helping to create a better business.

Rule number two:  Be prepared to act on the insight. With the right analysis, good qualitative and quantitative information, overlaid with the priorities of the Customer Strategy, will show what to do next.  Rich and perceptive insight into what it’s really like to be a customer is invaluable.  Measurement though, is not the end-game, it is a means to an end.  There must be an appetite, framework and culture that ensures the right information is passed to the right people to make the right changes;  the right governance will then monitor, measure and report on the impact.

Rule number three:  Don’t let measurement drive the wrong behaviours.  That customer experiences are being measured is great news but beware the unintended consequences.  We need to know, for example, how the very mechanics of collecting feedback influence the scores.

Business units salivate at getting their next set of scores but the motivating factor can be more about hitting targets in Balanced Scorecards than improving customer experiences.  True, an increase in advocacy and satisfaction scores is a worthy aspiration.  But, if the interactions being measured and incentivised are just the ones that provide audits of what the operations manual says should happen, employees’ focus will be in the wrong place.

Track the right information to get where you want to

Track the right information to get where you want to

Rule number four:  Understand why the score is what it is.  A score is but a score, whether it’s advocacy, satisfaction or emotionally-based.  Spreadsheets of data, even ones showing improvements, don’t tell the full story.  Ask “Why?”.  Then “Why?” again until you can’t delve any further.

The real gold is in understanding the links between the qualitative feedback from customers and employees to the quantitative results and how they sit in the Customer Strategy.  The answers then give clear direction about what to do next in a way that works both for customers and the business.

Which brings me to the last (half) rule; it’s not a full rule because it’s simply my unbreakable mantra to stop organisations obsessing about the numbers.  It’s this:  Get the experience right first, and the scores will look after themselves.

Here’s to productive measuring!

Jerry Angrave

Jerry Angrave is a Customer Experience Specialist & Consultant.  Jerry Angrave, Customer Experience SpecialistHe helps organisations to be in a better position to offer the right experiences for Customers and Clients that lead to better business.
 
Call:          +44 (0) 7917 718072
Email:      [email protected] 
Web:         www.customerexperience.uk.com
Follow:     http://twitter.com/jerryangrave
Connect:   http://uk.linkedin.com/in/improvecustomerexperiences
 

How sport shows us to be better at customer journey mapping

Ok, where do we start?  There’s no doubt that done properly, customer journey mapping provides rich insights into what it’s really like to have a customer or client experience and what we should do to make it better.  In the right hands, it’s an effective tool that’s being used more and more.  Personally, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been in a meeting and there’s a cry from the back of “We’ll need a customer journey for that!”.

It’s great that organisations are putting themselves in their customers’ shoes more so than ever before.  What’s not so great is that many of those “journeys” turn out to be existing linear process maps, operational flow-charts or decision-trees.

The problem there is that they will only start at the initial physical interaction, whether that’s walking into the store, arriving at the airport car-park, landing on the home-page or calling the help-line.

That approach is (questionably) better than nothing.  Start of the race but a long way from the start of the journeyBut to draw on the sporting analogy then, it would be like a coach trying to understand what drives the individuals in the team, what can be done to make them better, go faster and go further by drawing conclusions purely from an analysis that starts with the race-day itself.

Olympic and World champions take years, if not a lifetime of dedication, family support and sacrifice to be in a position to start the races we watch today.  A solo round-the-world sailor will only get to their start line after months and years of intense and meticulous preparation.  We can trace a climber’s route to the summit but the physical start of the journey from base-camp is also the end of another long journey of forensic planning.

So starting a customer journey map at that initial physical contact point risks missing the key triggers, emotions and events that a customer experiences when they feel a want or need to engage with the brand – events that we could shape and influence in a way that sets up a successful experience for customers and our business.

For example, if I’m flying away on holiday in a month’s time I might start thinking now about how I get to the parking spot I’ve reserved; how I get from there to the right entrance and from there to the check-in desk. And what can I expect at security and in Departures, how does all that work?  I’m anxious because it’s the first time I’ve flown and I’ll have an autistic relative with me who lives in the moment and is therefore totally reliant on knowing the certainty of what happens next.

So, an opportunity to recognise what’s most important to the customer as they begin the ‘journey’ from their perspective.  And, a great opportunity for brand loyalty and advocacy. But it’s also a missed opportunity for the journey map that jumps from the booking at the travel agent 200 miles away and 12 months ago to the car park system, check-in process, cafe locations, signage and so on.

Every sporting journey, every journey of any sort has a starting point.  The beauty and the beast of a map is that we can find a start-point anywhere.  That’s the skill of the customer journey map – to find the right starting point.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Specialist and Consultant
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Customer Experience needs to ask: “What’s the real impact of this change on our customers, now and long-term?”

The headline says “United Drops Early Boarding For Families”.

I’m happy to be corrected but, as Vivian, Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman said: “Big mistake.  BIG.  HUGE!  I have to go…”.

Who wins as a result of this change?  United say it’s to reduce the number of boarding phases.  In theory that should cut down on turnaround times and therefore costs.  I’m guessing there are operational and commercial benefits involved because it’s not clear to me who else will benefit.

Leaving aside the debate about whether those with premium or standard tickets should board first, frequent business travellers and those without kids may initially welcome the news.  After all, airlines get a bad rap from passengers who are not able to stake their claim to what space is rightly theirs in the overhead bins because it’s been stolen by an excess of toys, nappies, food, spare-clothes and car-seats.

The solution is, quite simply, to board together.  So if we were to carry out some high-level customer journey mapping (ie give it a bit of thought) what does that experience look like from a passenger’s perspective?  Hmm.

Even with well-behaved kids and a relatively smooth journey, by the time parents get to the gate they will have endured the packing, the journey to the airport (“Are we there yet?”), the car-park, the bags falling off trolleys, keeping the kids occupied at the check-in line, finding where to go next, making sure they’re fed and watered, waiting again to go through security, one of the kids needs the toilet and then finding somewhere to pitch up in Departures while keeping one eye on the kids and one eye on which gate to trek to.

And that’s before we consider what it’s then like as a single parent with kids who are totally out of routine and exhausted or for those who have varying forms of Special Needs.

At least actually getting settled into the seats was relatively straight-forward  Until now.  Will families really choose an airline that says to them they now need to scoop up all their things and kids and run the gauntlet with everyone else, hoping that the seat allocations are error-free and their toddler doesn’t get clouted on the head by a bag squeezing past.  Flying with kids is a challenge at the best of times so adding another layer of anxiety and uncertainty isn’t the most effective customer loyalty scheme I’ve seen.  On top of that, most parents I know are very aware that kids are not everyone’s favourite in confined spaces and will genuinely be concerned that by holding everything up as they walk slowly to the aircraft it only makes the situation worse.

For those without kids, it doesn’t get much better either.  To have young kids walking from the gate to aircraft while everyone is in more of a rush is bound to slow things up.  At best it’s frustrating, at worst dangerous.  In the process of sitting down, it naturally takes longer for a parent to sort out things for their children so not only is it likely that they will end up with less overhead space than they are entitled to but everyone will get tangled up and end up even more frustrated.

Going back to United and what’s in it for them.  They might raise revenue from those families and travellers who can and want to pay for pre-boarding or to have everyone sat together.  I understand why core and ancillary revenue is so vital but when those things are perceived to be freely available at the next check-in counter along the line, I’m still not sure it will offset the damage from lost customers long-term.  It’s certainly not strengthening the brand positioning to be “the airline customers want to fly”.

Meanwhile, their competitors must be quietly humming away the theme tune to Pretty Woman…

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consulting
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718 072

Customer Experience says: If I leave, don’t slam the door. Leave it open so I can come back.

Funny things, relationships.

For most organisations, that “relationship” has the same attributes, strengths and challenges as our own personal liaisons.   There is of course a mutual benefit, but put a customer’s hat on and while the basic requirements of trust, respect, empathy and support are still there, the relationship becomes more of a convenient association.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) accepts that from time-to-time, for whatever reason and for however long, we switch to try out what a competitor has to offer.  Any loyalty is to our wallets and our own agenda first.  Yet organisations easily mistake inertia for loyalty.

So if for some reason the relationship gets broken, the organisation is not going to help itself by reacting like a moody teenager who thinks they’ve been jilted for an alien slime-ball, shouting “Well, I never valued you anyway!”.  To mix metaphors, throwing dolls out of the pram will put the skids under the relationship quicker than a dog on wet lino.

But that’s what it can feel like as a customer.  A case in point, as experienced by your erstwhile correspondent very recently.  Mobile phone contract due for renewal in two months.  After 6 years with one supplier, the decision is to change.  Proof, if it was needed, that even those who give high customer satisfaction scores can switch.

The instructions on how to back out of a contract are hard to find (a coincidence?) but eventually it’s just a matter of giving 30 days’ notice.  Fine.  Email sent and confirmation of the PAC number comes back with final date.  Then the current supplier calls but because the smooth “Please don’t go, we really value you” patter doesn’t change things, the conversation turns sour.

It’s pointed out that the ‘how to leave’ section of the website was virtually undetectable.  “What did you expect?” comes the incredulous reply.  Ok, so now we know where we stand.  Any thought that I would happily consider them next time were fading fast.  And that was just the beginning.

They didn’t offer a reminder that the bank payment details need changing.  On the day the contract expired, they didn’t send an SMS giving me an hour’s notice that the connection will disappear. They didn’t say that the handset would be locked, preventing any other supplier’s SIM card working.  They therefore also kept hidden the fact that to unlock the handset needed someone in-store to send an email to someone at head office who would email the unlocking instructions – they couldn’t do it themselves – with an SLA of 48 hours.  “So, my phone is dead and you knew that would happen all along?”,  “Er, yeah”. (Arghh!).

And until then, it was all going so well.  But because they showed a complete lack of respect, empathy and support it will be of no surprise that whatever “relationship” we had is now over.  I know how important it is to stop customers leaving, I get that, but those unnecessarily high barriers, both emotional and physical, were just too much.

We’re an item no more – after that experience we never will be.  And that’s a shame.  It didn’t have to end that way.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consulting
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Customer Experience: in-house teams must lead by example

The first rule of Customer Experience?  Understand what it’s really like to be a customer. Really understand.

Not just “What is your score for customer satisfaction?” but more along the lines of “How did what we do make you feel and how will that affect what you do next time?” or “What will you say about your experience over dinner tonight?”.  All good – and the right – insight to create better results for everyone concerned.

But when was the last time the in-house Customer Experience team, or those who are taking CE under their wing, were mapping a journey of what it’s like to be one of their own, internal stakeholders?  After all, even with all the most perceptive insight in the world, if it’s going to be used to change things, it will take willing co-operation from all corners of the organisation.  And how well do those in the team keep up with latest trends, best practice and benchmarking of their own competencies?

The understandable day-to-day focus is on what’s happening out there on the front-line.  However, for in-house Customer Experience teams and customer “champions”, they need the confidence and leadership to follow their own advice – hold up that mirror and find out what it’s really like to work with them within the organisation;  how do they make stakeholders feel and therefore behave.  What’s their internal ‘brand’ reputation?  Are they credible in their own right or able to call the shots just because the CEO is on-side?  Can they prove the economic benefits or are they seen as a fluffy side of Marketing?

Charged with leading the agenda of what is a relatively new discipline they need the rest of the organisation to “get it”, to be enthused and motivated to change things that may not be in their own personal scorecard.

Internal stakeholders and suppliers are to the in-house team what customers are to the business.  One won’t work without the other.  Customers don’t want you to turn up late because you’d stopped on the way to pick up a coffee, nor do your internal customers.

Against a backdrop of a commercial world that is still largely governed by short-term sales targets, margin protection and cost reduction, the in-house teams need to have the right leadership skills to bring cross-functional teams – previously worlds apart – together.  They need to be able to navigate the politics of crashing other agendas, influencing investment decisions and resource allocation.  They need to dispel the myths around Customer Experience.  They need to get metric-driven organisations to start thinking about customer emotions; easier said than done for sure, but it can be done.

Most importantly, they need everyone on board.  Not just the Product, Marketing, Operational and Sales teams but Finance, IT and HR too.

As Albert Schweitzer once said: “Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing”.

Of all the ‘customer’ journeys to manage this is both one of the most important and, happily, one over which they have most design control.  Know how to lead by example and turn stakeholders into real advocates for Customer Experience.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consulting
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Oh No! What have we done? The unintentional barriers to building great Customer Experiences

Another episode this week from the soap-opera that could go by the title of “Customer Service – Yes;  Customer Experience – umm….”.

Think of the time and effort that companies invest in workshops, ‘ideation’ sessions and away-days to see how they can improve customer service.  “We want to build great Customer Experiences!” is the rallying cry.  The results must surely be inspirational and if everyone gets behind them, organic business growth will be sorted.

Several hours of flip-charts, ultra-strong coffee and spotting who’s trying to discretely tap away at their phone pass by.  Then the sticky notes get translated into a spreadsheet for people in the Product, Operations, Sales and Marketing teams to comment on and prioritise.  And the best ideas get evaluated, tweaked and implemented before you can say “What’s the impact on our customers?”.

So in my own personal soap-opera of life, I put before you Scene 1:  Boiler at home broke.  Called engineer.  Came next day.  Rang when he was half an hour away.  Very polite and efficient.  Fixed the problem.  Great, so far.  Engineer suggests I might like a call to see if switching supplier could save me money.  They’re one of the largest utility companies in the UK.  I say Ok.  Next day, have a chat with very polite lady and get a quote.  Actually, it sounds a better deal than the one I’m on.  And they’ve proven their service quality with the engineer.  I’m interested.

If we press the pause button for a moment, we can see that there’s been a great attention to customer service – all the boxes have been ticked and there must be some very proud people in head office who managed to link up the infrastructure between the engineer and the sales team.  Nice one.  Back to the call.

Yes, I’m interested in switching.  We discuss the logistics and it all sounds relatively easy.  The lady asks if I want to sign-up now.  Not just yet, I want to think about it for a day or so.  Don’t like rushing such things.  I’ll call you back.  That’s not an option, I’m told.  Eh?  I can either sign-up now or have another call in a few days where we’ll run through everything again and get a new quote.  Do you have an option for the customer to call you back, I ask.  No, there are no in-bound lines for customers.  Cue the closing credits.

Working together to build great customer experiences

Needless to say, I haven’t changed my energy supplier but only because I couldn’t contact them.   Quite unbelievable that they’d put in the hard yards to get a customer on-side and then have such a barrier in place.  Is the way I felt as a result really what those workshops set out to achieve?

There’s that famous quote about 80% of companies saying they offer superior service, yet only 8% of their customers agree and say they get superior service.  How true.  Another series of workshops please, this time with a starring role for the customer.

Now that’s one soap-opera I would watch.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consultant
www.customerexperience.uk.com
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Customer Experience: listen to the silence of the customer

If ever there was a statistic to make us sit up and take notice, for me this is that stat:  “96% of customers who are unhappy don’t complain“.  96%! Frightening.  And it gets worse.  “Of those, 90% will just walk away and not come back”.

When businesses set out to build a branded, differentiated customer experience they will often search for the silver bullet; that single, elusive crowning glory that will set them apart from everyone else for ever.  True, such aspirations are good at galvanizing an organisation behind a common goal but the reality is that the starting point needs to be a broad and strong foundation of many smaller experiences that just get the basics right.

Understandably, most of the information for what to get right comes from the root cause analysis of complaints and operational data.  Investment and resources are directed accordingly and all being well, the number of complaints starts falling.

But just fixing the underlying causes of complaints doesn’t have as big an impact on customer numbers and their value as it might.  That’s because, generally, the things that are complained about get prioritised.  If fixing complaints are the foundation blocks for a Customer Experience programme, then addressing this potentially destructive layer of niggles and frustrations is the bedrock on which those foundations should sit.

So, we have a rich seam of things that don’t go as customers would want, which are significant enough to make them try elsewhere next time but not so significant as to warrant putting fingers to keyboards and to complain.  It might be about phone calls to a service centre that doesn’t answer the phone.  It might be a shop assistant who doesn’t smile.  Surprise at the final cost.  Things that are easily fixed but that have a big emotional impact on customers.  That in turn drives their behaviour next time. The silent customers then, voting with their feet and loyal only to their wallet. Gone.

And yet those problems are unintentionally left to fester because people are complaining about other things.  What we need to know is what our customers from today say to each other when they sit down for dinner tonight.  When they tell the tale of what is was really like to be a customer, is that story the one we want and expect them to tell?

Customer insight about what it's really like to be on the receiving end of our service

Wanted: to know what our customers tell each other that they don’t tell us

Tracking down that level of qualitative information isn’t without challenge but it is well worth the effort.  Research that asks customers what they want will give the proposition teams ideas for bells and whistles.  But knowing what niggles customers will show where finite resources need to focus on in the short-term to improve experiences, loyalty and therefore revenue streams.

To complain takes effort and many feel companies don’t deserve to be helped if they can’t get such basics right.  In today’s world where the customer is in control, and whose bar of expectations is rising all the time, customers are rightly less tolerant to anyone who shows them a lack of respect by not “bothering” to reach a minimum standard.

They might be the small, sometimes “fluffy” things and not the single shiny silver bullet – that will come in time – but left unchecked these corrosive issues may as well be bullets being shot in the brand’s own feet.

Jerry Angrave

Customer Experience Consultant

+44 (0) 7917 718 072
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
 
 

Customer Experience: differentiate, yes, but don’t ignore the undifferentiated basics either

The big picture is important but here petrified wood shows the detail is just as emotive

Epic voyages start with a small step, so they say.  Not, as some believe, a giant leap for glory.  They also say that the best things in life are free and that from little acorns grow majestic oak trees.

Such maxims are true not only for life’s challenges but they apply just as much when it comes to improving Customer Experiences and protecting revenue streams.  The point being, that when business leaders invest in developing Customer Strategies and Customer Experience programmes, there is a real temptation to set out on a path that goes straight to the big “wow” signature actions;  the heroic ones that will capture the headlines and create branded differentiation at every touchpoint.

That’s admirable and shouldn’t be discouraged.  But in reality, some of the biggest positive impacts come at very little cost simply by paying attention to the smaller things, the ones that lurk in the detail.

The point was vividly illustrated to me a few years ago when I left the UK to live in New Zealand.  Shortly after arriving, and in the company of a few friends, we set out on a three-day mountain trek to complete a circuit that would take us way up beyond the tree-line and back down.  The guide-book said it would take eight hours to hike to the first camp site.  The locals, relaxed as always, agreed.

But I was fresh from the energy of the corporate and competitive UK.  I saw the eight hours as a target.  So without thinking I enthusiastically suggested that we should aim to do it in seven hours.  What a result that would be.

The looks I got were as cold as the rivers we were about to cross.  “Mate” said one with a grin, “you give yourself the hurry-up if you want.  If you know where you’re going  you’ll get there first. No worries.  You go on, get your head down and hoist the flag when you get there.”   Actually, I didn’t know the way.

My lesson continued.  “Us?  We won’t be far behind but we’ll be taking everything in.  It’s more rewarding, that’s why we’re here.  The rare lichen that helps perpetuate the natural environment;  the springs that finally cast daylight on water that’s travelled hundreds of miles underground;  the small birds with musical but deafening calls;  the sheer variety of trees;  crossing glacier-fed rivers …”  The list went on.  A salutary lesson.

It’s the small things that can be the most important, most evocative and most memorable part of the proverbial journey, not solely the destination.  It’s the same for Customer Experience too.

We’ve all been in a store where the point of sale material is a natural extension of the current TV or online campaign.  The investment in the brand and what it stands for is patently huge.  The customer service on offer seems to tick all the boxes.  And yet the gap between what the brand promises and what it actually delivers is often a chasm because the detail, which can be a piece of make-or-break functionality or something that can evoke the strongest emotions, has been overlooked.

Meet the basic expectations first…and learn from customer feedback

Examples are everywhere.  Not unreasonably, I want a welcoming smile rather than that “Oh no, it’s a customer, what do they want now?” expression especially from a major high-street retailer.  In a large way, digital media has created our fast-moving, in-the-moment lives so if an event on a website is being advertised but it actually happened last month I will feel insulted that they haven’t bothered to update it.  I recently went to a restaurant with an award-winning menu and we were fussed over while being seated and handed the menu.  Then we were forgotten about.  Why – and how – does that happen?  Spell my name right, I’ve been a customer for 10 years.  Do what you say you will and don’t say it just because that’s what you think I want to hear.   And so on and so on.

Of course, the rewards of creative and clear differentiation at the points that matter most are significant.  But rarely will that differentiation be rewarded if at the very least the little things, the things that everyone should get right and which customers expect as basic fundamentals, are not in place and working effectively.

Jerry Angrave

Customer Experience Consultant

www.customerexperience.uk.com