The Anatomy of a Great Customer Experience HOW OUR MEMORY SHAPES THE WAY WE VIEW OUR EXPERIENCES

Transcription

1 The Anatomy of a Great Customer Experience HOW OUR MEMORY SHAPES THE WAY WE VIEW OUR EXPERIENCES

2 2 HOW OUR MEMORY SHAPES THE WAY WE VIEW OUR EXPERIENCES If you look at the Mission Statements and About Us pages for most companies, they re almost certainly going to include something about great customer service, exceeding expectations or delivering excellence. This probably isn t a surprise to you. After all, more companies than ever before are claiming to be customer focused - according to Bain & Company, 95% of management teams say they are customer focused. But there is a mismatch between companies and customers. While 80% of companies reported that they believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8% of customers agree. How did this mismatch happen? Here s the deal, we ve fallen on tough times. They re tough because everything is shifting. What was once the standard for great customer experience is now only the price of entry. Power is moving towards your customers and they know it. When big changes are happening, it s easy to see them with hindsight, but not necessarily at the time. The problem is that we use our old ways of explaining, measuring and capturing customer feedback, but we re facing new ways of doing business (and the expectations that come along with this). In short, our customers expect more from us than ever before we have to meet their new expectations or risk the consequences.

3 3 One Touchpoint Can Undermine a Whole Experience Here s a story to help illustrate the danger of not meeting expectations. It s a week before your son s 8th birthday and you want to do something special. You want to go to your family s favourite restaurant, where they do a cake that your son really likes. So you phone up the restaurant in advance, to see if they can bake you a whole cake, instead of just serving it by the slice. The person on the phone replies: Sure, we can do that. Not a problem. They take your name, confirm your reservation and promise to bring out the cake after you ve finished your main meal. This all sounds perfect. On the day of his birthday, you head to the restaurant. You have a lovely main meal, the service is great and you re looking forward to the cake. But forty minutes later, there s still no sign of it. You start to get concerned and find a manager. The manager is very confused. She doesn t have any record of your request. She apologises, but says there is nothing that she can do at such short notice. They simply don t have a whole cake in stock for you to use. In fact, she s very surprised that someone promised you a whole cake over the phone, as it s not something that they would normally do. And, to make matters worse, they ve sold out of individual slices of the cake. She does offer you a free dessert to try and make amends. But you ve been waiting for so long now that everyone is fed up and just wants to go home. It has ruined the whole experience of the evening. In fact, it has ruined all the previous good experiences you ve had at the restaurant. Instead of being your favourite place, the place you always go to for special occasions, it becomes the place you warn your friends and family to avoid. If making a whole cake wasn t possible, it would have been better to say no right from the start, rather than raise unrealistic expectations and ruin the moment. If you look at customer experience as a whole journey, are you going to remember the anticipation when you phoned the restaurant or the disappointment when you didn t receive it? This example might sound trivial; it s just cake. But it emphasises the growing importance of customer expectations and the importance of meeting these expectations at each and every touchpoint. Right up to the point the cake failed to appear, the customer thought everything was going well and to plan. Then, in a single emotional moment, all the goodwill towards the restaurant was suddenly reversed.

4 4 Experience vs. Memory of Experience Let s look at this issue a bit deeper. In 1996, Daniel Kahneman led a team, which conducted a well-known study on patient experiences of uncomfortable colonoscopies. The team had someone sit next to the patient throughout the whole procedure. They would ask the patient every 60 seconds to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10. From this, the team had a complete pain profile for the whole procedure. They also knew how long it lasted. In theory this should have been enough information to determine which patients experienced the most pain throughout the procedure. But, it turned out not to be so simple. After the procedure had finished, the team asked each patient about their memory of the colonoscopy. It turned out that the way the patient remembered the experience was dependent on two factors. First, there was the moment that the pain was at its highest (the peak) and second, there was the final level of pain (the end). So the amount of time it took for the procedure to take place actually had little impact on the memory of the experience. Then, in a second study, these findings were developed further. Patients were split into two groups. The first underwent a standard colonoscopy. The second underwent a procedure where the scope was left in (without being moved) for an extra three minutes. This meant that the second group experienced additional discomfort, but not necessarily more pain. The results uncovered that the patients who had the longer procedure found the experience more positive, because the pain at the end was less pronounced. On top of this, the patients who had the longer procedure were more likely to return for subsequent treatment. These findings led Kahneman to conclude that we all have two selves: the Experiencing Self, who lived through the colonoscopy, and the Remembering Self, the one who tells the story of the experience.

5 5 What Defines a Customer Experience Story? The full story of a customer s experience is in flux. It changes. Significant moments shape the way we perceive our experience, but endings are very important. In fact, it s often the ending that will dominate. As Kahneman explains, the Remembering Self is actually a storyteller. It is the one who decides what we get to keep from our experiences and the emotional memory that we have of them. It s the customer s Remembering Self that companies are approaching when asking for feedback after the event has happened. The Remembering Self is the one we talk to when we send out our survey, at the end of the customer journey. The Experiencing Self lives its life continuously at single moments of experience. For the most part, these single moments are lost forever, completely ignored by the Remembering Self. So, as customer experience professionals, we have to ask ourselves: how can we capture the insight and emotion from the Experiencing Self? The closest we can get is by asking for feedback at the Moment of Truth. Once a customer has engaged with your company (it could be a visit to your website, calling into your contact centre or even talking to a friend about an experience they had), they are going to have a view about you. It could be good or bad. Either way, it s a Moment of Truth. Allowing customers to give feedback in the Moment of Truth, as they are having their experience, means that you get closer to their true thoughts and feelings. Plus, according to Gartner, it s 40% more accurate than feedback collected just 24 hours later. This is a real positive for customer experience professionals. Essentially it offers hope. If things don t go to plan first time around, but you can do something to make it better, then you can turn an unpleasant experience into a more positive memory. In short, you can make things right for your customer. What we experience does not equal what we remember. And our loyalty is based on what we remember. In fact, customer experience does not drive loyalty. Customer memories of their experience drive loyalty. BRUCE TEMKIN, TEMKIN GROUP

6 6 HOUSTON AIRPORT - HOW TWEAKING THE END CAN IMPROVE THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE A few years ago, Houston Airport was inundated with complaints about waiting times at the baggage claim. Executives at the airport were concerned, so they hired more staff to bring the wait times down. Waiting times reduced to less than eight minutes, but the complaints kept on coming. Delving further into the situation, executives discovered that it took, on average, one minute for a person to walk to the baggage claim area. They then had to spend seven minutes standing around. This waiting time was the root of customer frustration. So executives decided to try a different tack. Instead of hiring even more people, they re-routed the walkway from the arrival gate to baggage claim. Arrivals now had to walk seven minutes to get to the reclaim area. The result? Complaints dramatically fell. When walking to the baggage claim, people felt busy and purposeful. It improved their perception of the overall experience. While the time spent between disembarking the plane and getting their bag was the same, in their memory, they only had to wait around for one minute. [Source: New York Times] What we can take from this story is clear: build customer experiences with memories in mind and think about the emotional state of your customers at each stage of their journey.

7 7 Three Tactics to Build Customer Experiences with Memories in Mind If we agree that customers expect more than ever, and the way they evaluate their experience with a company is based on their memory of that experience, what does this mean for companies? What steps should you be taking to capitalise on this and access more insight? Here are three practical tactics to get you started. 1. RECONSIDER YOUR APPROACH TO SURVEYS Surveys can give you a snapshot of what a customer thinks. But they re limited. If you re only taking feedback at the end of a customer journey then it s going to be very difficult to pinpoint the moments where you get things right and wrong along the way. If the way people view their whole experience is based on the peak and the end points of their whole journey, then feedback strategies relying on surveys are going to restrict the insight you can access. And, without this depth, it s going to be much harder to make any significant improvements. We know that people want the opportunity to give feedback in the moment; sharing whether they re happy or unhappy with the experience they re having. This isn t something that surveys can offer; they re just too far after the event. Mobile, on the other hand, gives customers and companies the ability to react fast. Customers can give their feedback in real-time, in their own words and companies can respond immediately. Mobile allows consumers to act at the point of impulse. The fastest way anyone can react to any call to action is to put their hand in their pocket and text a single keyword to a 5-digit shortcode. PAUL BERNEY, CEO, MCORDIS

8 8 2. ASK FOR FEEDBACK AT THE MOST IMPORTANT TOUCHPOINTS It s hard to know exactly when your customers will want to give you feedback. Different customers are going to want to share their thoughts and feelings at different points of their journey. While you might be tempted to ask for feedback at each and every touchpoint, this can lead to feedback fatigue. Instead, work to identify the most important touchpoints and use these as the moments to proactively ask for feedback. Then, provide Listening Posts to allow customers to share their thoughts as and when they choose to. This means that even if you re not actively seeking their feedback, they can still let you know what they re thinking and feeling at any given moment. 3. MEASURE YOURSELF ON REVENUE This one might sound strange to start with. After all, how can you measure something as complex as customer experience with revenue? In terms of the day-to-day, there s a wide range of metrics you can use for measuring customer experience (we wrote a whole ebook on it. You can download The CX Rebels Guide to Measuring Customer Experience here). But revenue gives you much more of a long-term view of your success at serving customers. Revenue knows (and shows) who is doing well. Revenue is a pure and simple way of measuring long-term customer success. It s the number of people that your company serves. It s the number of people who keep coming back to you because you get it right, time and time again. You don t make money from Facebook likes. You don t make money from retweets. You don t make money from the number of people who complete your surveys. These things all indirectly help your revenue, but they re not the moment when someone decides to open their wallet and do business with you. Your job is revenue. Business is about revenue at its base. This isn t evil. It s the LEGO pieces of fulfilling a mission. CHRIS BROGAN, CEO, OWNER MEDIA GROUP

9 9 Conclusion We started this guide by stating that customers are now the ones with the power. They know social media and mobile has given them a forum to share their stories (remember the disappointment with the cake at the restaurant). They re using this power to try and make brands listen to them because they want brands to care. Customer expectations are higher and customers do want instant, personalised engagements. But, most of all, they want brands to treat and respect them as people. What it comes down to is this: your customers want to get to the end of their journey thinking (and feeling), Yes, that was a great experience.

10 10 Webinar: How real-time emotion can lead to real-time results Find out why Sky, Europe s leading entertainment company, has partnered with customer engagement specialists, Rant & Rave, to better capture and understand the voice of its customers. Using a combination of text messages and , Sky regularly invites customers from the UK and Republic of Ireland to express their views following a contact centre interaction, a visit from an engineer or a purchase from a retail outlet. Featuring Sky s Insight & Decision Science Director, Daragh Kelly, this Webinar will inform you: How to emotionally engage your audience How to leverage the voice of your customers How insight can be used to drive employee engagement Sign up now Want to know how Rant & Rave can help? We re always on the lookout for brands with the same ethos as us - those who aren t afraid to think outside the box and do things differently. So whether that s already you or you re looking for some inspiration, we d love to be a part of your plans. Call us on or us at hello@rantandrave.com We re proud to be working with...

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