Customer Experience

We don't ask customers what they want; we watch what they *do*. There's a big difference

First and foremost, the customer experience is a strategic issue. To succeed online, a company *must* make the customer experience the cornerstone of its Web strategy. Without a good customer experience, no amount of advertising, "brand-building," or high-tech gadgetry will save the company from failure. If it's not good for customers, they're going to leave forever. Period, end of story. It's not that complicated.

Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:

★ Trust

★ Low effort and sacrifice

★ Positive emotion

★ Personalization

You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.

Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.

I'll just plug the three things that might help WebWord readers the most: first, our free e-mail newsletter, the CG Update, explores the customer experience every two weeks

Our advantages are our vision (no one else focuses on the customer experience), our team (no one else has such selective hiring), and our culture (one of openness, listening, and partnership). We're trying to build a solid company that actually creates good online.

This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers do not feel that they can trust the interaction points or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase. Research says that trust consists of two main components:

Confidence:

Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service.

Benevolence:

Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customer's self-interest above their own.

Creative Good has a four-phase method: strategy, qualitative assessment, usability tests, and after site launch, ongoing maintenance. Essentially we start at the most strategic level and work our way into the tactics. At each step we base our work on what we established the preceding phase. To anyone interested in the customer experience, I'd definitely suggest starting at the strategic level. Don't just jump straight into usability work.

Overall, probably our most effective "technique" (if you can call it that) is our absolute commitment to creating a good site for the customer. We do whatever it takes to show our clients their customers' perspective.

Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.

Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill, product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalization have made it much easier for competitors to crank out "good enough" substitutes.

But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.

Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company.

Some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions:

★ What do your customers think about you?

★ What do your customers do based on their perception of you?

Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort. Another issue is the trade off between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing.

In any relationship with a company, customers expect or at least hope that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.

Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalizing the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.