What Kind of Customer Experience Are You Capable of Delivering?

In a previous post I discussed the four steps involved in setting up and managing customer relationships, or what Martha Rogers and I call the the I-D-I-C process:

• Identify customers,
• Differentiate them,
• Interact with them, and
• Customize for them.

The second two steps in this process, interact and customize, boil down to delivering the right “customer experience.” So in this post I’d like to help you think about the kind of customer experience your own business is most capable of delivering, based on your capabilities for interacting and customizing.

Start with the fact that different businesses have widely differing capabilities when it comes to both interacting and customizing. A company may be able to interact with individual customers via phone and chat, for instance, while it doesn’t do so well in social media. Or a firm might have the ability to deliver different types of products to different categories of customers, but it can’t really make specific changes to its product or service for particular customers.

So think of these two capabilities – interacting and customizing – as having a kind of scale, on which your business could be highly proficient or not so proficient. Your mix of capabilities when it comes to interacting with and customizing for your customers will actually define the kind of customer experience you’re capable of delivering.

Below is a “Customer Experience Capabilities Matrix” that outlines four different kinds of customer experience, based on your own company’s capabilities:

In Quadrant 1 a company relies primarily on advertising and promotion, and its product or service offering is standard for virtually all customers, delivering a “mass” customer experience designed to be pretty much the same for everyone. In the B2C space, think of Procter & Gamble selling Tide detergent to millions of customers with the same basic brand message. This kind of customer experience is less common in B2B selling, but it could describe the way some large enterprises sell into the small-and-medium business (SMB) market.

The “niche” customer experience delivered in Quadrant 2 is the result of a company that can alter its product in meaningful ways for different types of customers, but it isn’t capable of interacting with those customers richly enough to be able to fit specific products to specific customers. Instead, it will market to different niches, using niche-specific one-way messaging. An athletic shoe company might offer one kind of customer experience for sports enthusiasts, say, but a different kind of customer experience for fashion junkies.

In Quadrant 3 a company has the reverse problem: it isn’t capable of customizing or tailoring its product offering, but it does have the capability to interact on a real-time basis with individual customers. In this case, you could think of them as delivering a kind of “targeted” customer experience. That is, the customer knows that the firm is interacting and communicating individually, but the communication is not designed to elicit an individual customer’s needs so much as it is aimed at positioning and selling the product that the company has available. Loyalty programs fall into this quadrant, for the most part. Your typical airline loyalty program, for instance, will involve you in a great deal of interaction with the airline, and you might earn enough points to qualify for expedited check-in – but everyone qualifies in exactly the same way, and on the flight itself there's no mad scramble for particular seats or locations. (Airlines could increase their capability to customize if they begin remembering your meal or beverage preference from one flight to the next, or even if they just acknowledge your home city the next time they send you a "fare sale" email blast.)

It is in Quadrant 4 that a company is capable of delivering a genuinely “one to one” customer experience. If your business is capable not only of interacting efficiently with customers in real time, but also of tailoring your product-service offering for individual customers, then the relationship you have with a customer will be more meaningful for the customer and more profitable for you. When a customer interacts with you to tell you how they want to be served, and you tailor that customer’s product or service to meet that specification, the relationship is now “owned” by both of you.

In fact, when you deliver a truly one-to-one customer experience, you are predisposing the customer to want to be loyal, rather than switch to a competitor. Even if your competitor offers the same level of rich interaction and personal customization, in order for your customer to get back to the same level of convenience he now enjoys with you, he’d first have to spend time interacting with your competitor to “re-specify” what he’s already specified with you.

It is in Quadrant 4, with a one-to-one customer experience, that a business can realize the true benefits of managing relationships with customers.