There
are various definitions of Customer Experience including
“ 'Customer Experience
Management' represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to
comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and
transaction with a company, product, brand or service.” (Bernd
Schmitt 2003)
Customer Experience is how customers perceive their interactions with
your company. (Forrester 2010)
Customer Experience is the customer’s perceptions and related
feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a
supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products. (Gartner 2013)
Customer Experience is the embodiment
of a brand, and of each and every interaction between an organisation and a
customer. (Cap Gemini 2013)
Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a
customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the
duration of their relationship with that supplier. (Wiki 2014)
We take exception with all these definitions.
They do go some of the way to describing an aspect of customer experience, however fall way short in terms of the everyday reality of our digital age. We need a broad view that encompasses all aspects of a customer experience, not just necessarily the encounters and feelings directly experienced by a customer.
They do go some of the way to describing an aspect of customer experience, however fall way short in terms of the everyday reality of our digital age. We need a broad view that encompasses all aspects of a customer experience, not just necessarily the encounters and feelings directly experienced by a customer.
In this way our newly engineered processes and the complete customer experience can operate at 70-80% lower cost, 50-60% improved customer service and 3-4 times revenue improvements. In our definition of Customer Experience this is referred to as winning the Triple Crown. The concurrent and sustained ability to reduce costs, improve service and grow revenues simultaneously.
Let’s paint a picture - a duck on the mill pond. What the customer sees
and feels is the duck on the surface, however a great deal of effort to move
the duck takes place out of view, below the surface if you like. That is a
fundamental part of the customer experience. So our definition encompasses
this idea - “Customer Experience is the collective energy and
effort that produces the engineered encounter to provide value
and substance to a customer” (Towers/Dodkins 2014). It is an
understanding of the complete duck if you like.
Through this definition we can indeed get scientific about the
customer experience. For instance to deliver the desired experience we must
clearly articulate the cause and effect of work. A simple observation is that
all work is ultimately the result of a customer interaction, somewhere,
sometime. Another is that of the Successful Customer Outcome (SCO).
We can
shape the experience and expectations of customers and formulate measures that
go way beyond the legacy production line mindsets. In fact we can better create
and modify technologies that support the delivery of the SCO.
Through this engineered understanding we can also contrast the
effort currently undertaken and assess its contribution to the SCO. If it
doesn’t contribute then potentially stop doing it. In this way our newly engineered processes and the complete customer experience can operate at 70-80% lower cost, 50-60% improved customer service and 3-4 times revenue improvements. In our definition of Customer Experience this is referred to as winning the Triple Crown. The concurrent and sustained ability to reduce costs, improve service and grow revenues simultaneously.
