Poor customer experience... a choice or a taboo?
Georgios Kolovos
Global Partnerships at OpenTable | UK Accelerator Managing Director
Today at the Customer Experience Forum it was obvious that organisations of all sizes, structures, ownership and industries are obsessed with providing the best customer experience, using the latest technologies, tools and data. Most of the speakers gave examples of poor customer experience: being slow, being outdated, being inconvenient, being "plastic" or not being personal.
And this get me thinking is poor customer experience... a choice or a taboo? While I was internally debating this question on the way back home, I passed by a bakery.
I love bread, there is something special in entering a bakery being welcomed by this lovely smell of a just taken out of the oven bread and seeing all these lovely creations, with the crust ready to be broken and enjoyed covered with butter. I am very particular what bread I buy and over the years have limited my choice to two small bakeries, which have only one thing in common, they both sell a fantastic bread. But the experience you get when you visit them couldn't be more different:
One of them is close to where I live, it is in a very run down place and it takes me at least 30 minutes to purchase my bread. But never the less I go there again and again. The other bakery is just on my way back from work, it's modern, very efficient and offers wide variety of breads.
So different, but their owners had made a choice. My local bakery is as popular as it is because it brings the community together, I go there as it is very personal to me. Maria, the lady that runs the shop, knows my name, knows my kids names, knows their birthdays, knows what sports they play and every time I go, I can meet neighbours, so I don't mind at a lot the 30 minutes waiting and just the opposite, I enjoy it.
On the other hand if the latter bakery tries to do the same and become more personal, I won't be happy. At the end of a busy day, all I want is anonymous and efficient service.
And going back to the initial question, I see poor experience as a choice. Made in the context of the overall customer interaction and the objective of the particular organisation, it can position the business for success.
Success Psychologist | International Mindset Coach | Author | Speaker | NLP Master | Leadership & Business Strategy Consultant | Founder - 'Elevate: Leadership Academy for Women'
9 年Thanks George. I think a lot of companies are pursuing Customer Experience ‘excellence’, but what this really means is different to many different people. What ‘good’ looks like to me, might be different to what ‘good’ looks like to you, or to my mother, or to a multimillionaire. I believe that customer service should meet a certain level of proficiency and acceptability – for example, I can’t think of many situations in which being impolite would be an acceptable experience. Beyond that though, a company must know precisely what it stands for and than map this out to what it means for its experiences. If I stand for friendliness, ‘localness’ and personal service, a slower transaction where we chat away at the counter is perfectly acceptable. My customers will come to understand this. Customers who want efficiency and pace will go elsewhere. I believe the problems arise when a company does not know what it stands for and creates confusion and inconsistency in its experience. This can create disjoints between expectation versus experience which can cause major issues for brands. I wrote a post exploring these issues here https://ow.ly/NhodI
Co-Founder & Director @ skymineUAV | Drone Technology and AI for industry trailblazers
9 年Here is one way to look at customer experience from AMV BBDO https://bit.ly/1L76ymP
Consultant (Process Improvement) at State of Florida
9 年Georgios Kolovos of course it’s by choice. Look at Target’s recent launch of Lily Pulitzer. It was an "epic fiasco." While the spin now is that it was a "huge marketing success" it should be deemed a failure since launch after launch, they knowingly and willingly unlearn how to prevent site crash, running out run out of product and take no pro-active steps to ensure some positive minimal customer experience or improvement. This has been repeatedly reported with Missoni line in launch of 2011 -->https://www.smh.com.au/business/missoni-impossible-targets-designer-label-stampede-blows-up-in-its-face-20110922-1knw8.html -->the Jason-Wu for Target in 2012 were even an article's then was titled -->There Is More Jason Wu for Target on eBay Than in Target* -->https://www.elle.com/fashion/news/a8275/there-is-more-jason-wu-for-target-on-ebay-than-in-target-36776/ and most recently with the Lily Pulitzer for Target Launch -->https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/targets-lilly-pulitzer-collection-generates-buzz-frustration-n345036 .
Founder and CEO @ Freedman International | International Campaign Experts
9 年If you want to understand how to get an organisation to really deliver great service I recommend reading Tony Hsieh's book on Zappos.
Finance Executive | Data & Analytics | APAC & International experience
9 年Good one Georgios - indeed, the level and type of customer experience needs to be tightly linked to the value prop, brand andotger aspects of the business. And, yes, many people would not be happy if every business out there knew private details such as kids' birthdays, names, etc.