What is the “Customer Experience”?

Basically, it’s any and every interaction that you have with your customers – directly and indirectly.

It’s the phone conversations, emails, invoices, service department, sales department, parts department, is the parking lot clean, is there clutter everywhere, did you make them go “wow”, did you make them become the expert in your services or product or did you teach them, experience – it is everything about the customer!

You are judged on each and every thing that affects the customer, from the way that you answer the phone to the email that you send to how your service or product is delivered.  Your competition is no longer just businesses in your vertical.  It is every business everywhere – why?  How fast is your service –  can you have to me as quickly as I can get a pizza or a package from Amazon?  What kind of guarantee do I get with that – Is it as good as Zappos gives? Simply put, we are all connected via social media and the world – even here in little ole’ Central Illinois.

10 years ago, if you had a bad experience with a business, you didn’t jump online in their parking lot and talk about how bad the service was or how horrible the food tasted or that the business owner was rude.  No, instead you told your family and friends and it may have been forgotten by most.  The sphere of influence was what, maybe 10-20 people?  Now, we jump on Yelp, Twitter, Google reviews, or Facebook to tell the world how bad or great our customer experience was – and it is forever with a HUGE audience!

Customer experience is one of the least thought of but most needed areas of improvements with most businesses.  From top to bottom, every person in an organization needs to know why they do what they do and who they do it for, and most importantly – want to do it!  It comes from 3 areas – life experiences, past work experiences and current work experiences.

Unless you are in a niche market, your products and services and maybe even prices, are being duplicated by several competitors.  In the end, it will be the experience that your customers remember, enjoy and scream about that will keep them coming back or not…

Make every customer experience the best that you can…and then make it better the next time!