Customer Experience as the differentiator

"In a world where products and services are becoming more and more commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator." -Annette Franz

Continuing the theme of reflections on Customer Experience quotes and where I've found them to be true in practice, a recent observation comes to mind from the above quote.

Throughout the years I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of wonderful people. People that are far smarter than I am, people that have tenacity I can only aspire to and in a few special cases people who seem to be the human embodiment of empathy. Scott Swanson is one of those people, he has many great qualities but his empathy and care for customers is one that jumps out at me in this context. I would be hard pressed to think of anyone I've worked with who cares more about the customer and providing them with the best possible experience than Scott.

This care and empathy for customers has manifested itself repeatedly in the last few years I've been working with Scott and we routinely see customers sing his praises. One recent event resonates with me and the aforementioned quote. We had a customer churn recently due to their being acquired and the acquiring company having an in place competing product. After this happened we received the following email message.

"Out of habit I went to the Carousel login this morning and was met with a deactivated account :( Thanks for all of your help over the years, Scott. It was great working with you, and yes, maybe we will meet again in the future!"

You might be asking yourself "why does this matter, the customer still churned?". For me, it matters because this person became a promoter. The connection with Scott was strong enough that they felt compelled to reach out after they were no longer using the product to thank him and to acknowledge their hope that they may interact again in the future. To me this signals that if there is any opportunity for this person to influence their current organization's future buying decisions or perhaps a future employer's buying decision we are going to be the first company at the top of their mind. I've seen customers boomerang enough times to know that this sort of connection creates positive long term results.