The Ideal Customer Experience is No Experience

Yeah, I know, I know. That’s just one more provocative headline, designed to get you to click on this post, right?

But hear me out, because there’s actually a great deal of truth to this idea, at least for the vast majority of businesses wrestling with the problem of designing and managing their customer experience.

The point is that unless your name is Disney, your customers almost certainly aren’t coming to you for an experience at all. They’re coming to you because they want to solve some problem or meet some need, and they think your company has a product or service that will help them do that – whether it’s feeding the family a meal, or fixing their car, or maybe communicating with a friend.

And here’s the thing: If they could solve their problem or meet their need without ever having to deal with your company (or any company) at all, don’t you think they would do that?

What this means is that the ideal customer experience should be designed to be as frictionless as possible. The ideal experience would require no extra effort on the customer’s part. It would not require the customer to repeat anything they’ve already said, and it wouldn’t pose any obstacles to meeting the customer’s need. The more that a customer’s “experience” with your product fades into the background, in fact, the faster and more conveniently the customer will be able to meet their need.

That's why my headline says that the ideal customer experience is no experience. In the ideal situation, the only thing the customer would “experience” would be the elimination of whatever need or problem drove them to you in the first place.

Marketing research supports this idea. Studies have consistently shown that customer loyalty is not very highly correlated with customer satisfaction scores, although customer disloyalty does have a high correlation with customer dissatisfaction. In other words, customers don’t necessarily stay because they’re satisfied, but they often leave because they’re not.

In one survey of nearly 100,000 US consumers, each of whom had recently participated in some online or over-the-phone interaction with a business, researchers Matt Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi found that “there is virtually no difference at all between the loyalty of those customers whose expectations are exceeded and those whose expectations are simply met…[and] virtually no statistical relationship between how a customer rates a company on a satisfaction survey and their future customer loyalty.”

In fact, the survey found an R-squared (coefficient of determination) of just 0.13 between satisfaction and loyalty, which is very close to saying no correlation at all. (R-squared values range from 0 to 1.0, and to put this particular score into perspective, the R-squared correlation between “getting good grades in school” and “achieving career success later in life” is 0.71.)

Across industry after industry, the key driver of customer disloyalty is dissatisfaction, driven by unresolved problems or service issues. From the customer’s perspective, this is friction. The same study reports that a customer service interaction is roughly four times more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. That's why, as I said in a previous post, a customer service icon like Amazon tracks its own customer service effectiveness in terms of NRR, or “non-resolution rate” of inbound service inquiries.

So when you start journey-mapping your customers, or trying to design a better customer experience for them, before coming up with ways to "surprise and delight" the customer or "wow" them or whatever, be sure to eliminate as much friction as possible, to make the experience easy, simple, and totally effortless.

(Illustration: iStock)