Wrapping up customer experience » for business

HBR’s February article on “Understanding Customer Experience” wraps up several thoughts on experience: how to define it, why it’s not being focused on in organizations, and how to obtain insights on experience that you can act on. Some of the interesting things authors Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager had to say:

A definition of customer experience
They also took a swing at defining experience: “Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use, and service and is usually initiated by the customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company’s products, services, or brands…”

I like the emphasis on direct and indirect, as it’s easy to get obsessed with only measuring the direct touchpoints you have with customers. But I enjoyed this clarification even more: “The secret to a good experience isn’t the multiplicity of features on offer… [new paragraph] A successful brand shapes customers’ experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in offerings’ every feature.”

Why customer experience is hard
The recognize that experience isn’t adequately appreciated within organizations due to these factors:

• Organizations have overspent on the collection of CRM data — data about objective customer interactions like purchases or requests.
• Organizations aren’t conditioned to finding and acting on customer needs — but it’s pointed out that organizational leaders who rise through customer-facing functions are much more attuned to customer experiences.
• Organizations are fearful of the squishiness of customer experience data — data about internal, subjective perceptions are much more difficult to decipher and make decisions based on.

How to obtain and act on customer experience data
They recommend an evidence-based approach like voice-of-the-customer to making customer experience decisions (i.e., collect data, find patterns, then make decisions). This is often a cumbersome process, and should be listed as yet another reason why organizations don’t pay attention to experience.

I like that the article carefully discusses how experience is a part of many organizational functions: marketing, service operations, product development, IT, and HR. When it gets localized, the touchpoints and “customer corridors” (their term for series of touchpoints the customer uses together to create their experience) conflict and fall to pieces.

The giant gap left by the article is how to act on customer experience data. There’s some interesting ideas on how to use the data to find the most valuable or at-risk customer segments, but no thoughts on how to adapt customer touchpoints to reflect what you’ve learned.