Customer Experience

How's the customer experience with your company? How easy is it for them to do business with you? How do you most want your customers to feel while doing business with you? Anxious, uncertain, annoyed, frustrated? We guess that’d be a no. Yet there are still so many businesses that continue to generate these feelings in their customers.

You’ve no doubt heard the expression ‘What gets measured gets done’, an adage which seems to hold true because the things we’re measured against typically drive our focus and behaviour. We’d like to offer a slight - but important - adaptation of this: what gets measured gets experienced. Bear with me on this: I’m not sure if it holds true all the time, and I’m sharing something here that’s still in its formative stages. However, as customer experience is becoming more and more of a differentiator amongst businesses I think it’s well worthwhile trying this modified mantra on for size.

Is it all gloom and doom in the retail sector? Sir Charlie Mayfield, chairman of the British Retail Consortium, warned last week that the retail sector is facing the loss of up to 900,000 jobs and thousands of shop closures in the coming decade. This in part due to the new apprenticeship levy and the rise in the National Living Wage. Over in Europe things aren’t much different, with Swiss retailers in particular feeling the pinch due to the strong franc and the ease of buying the same product in the Eurozone at much lower prices.

Changing small words can have a big impact on outcomes. Discover some of the helpful recent findings from the world of Conversational Analysis, particularly applicable in the worlds of customer experience, negotiating, sales and general consulations.

There’s a world of difference between a customer experience-focussed company and a customer service-focussed company: it’s a profound cultural difference, and to make the shift from one to the other isn’t necessarily easy, but it IS possible.

Recently a large organisation we work with launched a Dignity and Respect workshop for its staff. Why? Well customer feedback suggested that this was an area for improvement. The workshop took 90 minutes and underlined why it's so important for customers to be treated well, and the sorts of behaviours that are expected of the organisation's staff. The result? Fuming staff. Read on to find out why.

Do your customers experience variation in the quality of your service or product? In the age of the experience economy, and the need to focus on customer experience, not customer service, this is such an important area. How does your company stack up?