Customer experience master class

A clear customer experience strategy is critical for modern service businesses. Recently I ran a customer experience master class for Marketing Week as part of the Customer Retention conference, in which I shared my thoughts and some practical models with senior marketers.

Most organisations seem to struggle with the balance between mass customisation and commoditisation of services. Although over ten years old now, I used a concept of progressing economic value introduced by Pine & Gilmore in their book ‘Experience Economy’ to explain why customer experience strategies can help businesses differentiate. It deals with the evolution from commodities, to goods, to services and then experiences, with progressive differentiation, premium pricing and closer alignment with customers needs. The big challenge of course is getting from a service to an experience that is memorable for the right reasons – it is far easier to be remembered for delivering a poor service.

It was very interesting to hear guest speaker Guy Stephens, customer knowledge manager at The Carphone Warehouse, talk about some of the issues big companies are facing with social media. In one example a member of staff who used social media in their private lives had decided to use Twitter to help customers, only to be stopped by PR and legal teams. Other anecdotes highlighted further brand conflict and a lack of clarity about how process should be managed. Such problems are not helped by the fact that many senior managers are not from the ‘born digital’ generation, and are often poorly educated about social media. Nevertheless, customers are using social media sites in their millions and are commenting and debating their experiences (good and bad) with brands all over the world.

Of course social media is just one set of customer touch points brands must manage. We ran an exercise at the event to identify as many different touch points as we could to see if we could get anywhere near the 100 or more that one of our travel clients claims. We managed to get over 50 before turning our attention to user journey mapping and the connections between the various touch points at our disposal.

Finally we discussed measurement strategy and common errors companies make. It became clear that there is still little time in the day-to-day lives of marketers to address this key issue. I found that most organisations don’t have a clear measurement strategy and that few of our marketers had clear links between the measures and KPIs they used on a daily basis and their companies business plan.

Delivering a differentiated customer experience didn’t feature as a strategic goal of any of the companies we met during this event, yet during practical sessions more than one described their organisation’s strategy as being to differentiate from their competition. The individuals left the workshop believing differentiated customer experience to be important but I worry about their ability to make anything actually happen given the silos that exist within their organisations.

Perhaps a major competitive shift in the future will be the driving force for change, but as it stands I think incremental progress is more likely, given the scale of the task.

This article was written as part of our March newsletter