Situational Dependency of Customer Experience Expectation & Results

So, you know about customer experience?... Well, we all do at some level, since we've all purchased products, used services, and interacted with others. We can apply logic and reach a certain level of proficiency in cultivating great customer experiences, but something funny happens when we apply customer experiences outside the purview of their given situational contexts. It's important to look beyond the immediate context of the given situation to understand and improve the results your team experiences on a regular basis.

First, look at these two examples:

Scenario 1: Your new car start making an odd noise. You go back to the dealership and pull into the service lane, where you explain the problem. They're pretty busy, the service writer tells you, but they'll try to take a look yet today - Then they hand you a clipboard where you're required to complete a dozen pages of information about yourself, how to get ahold of you, who pays your bills, and regarding the car you got from this same building last month. The required forms include authorizations for your signature indicating you'll agree to pay whatever they later decide to charge you, for whatever is wrong with your new car, without complaining. You grudgingly sign them, because you need your car to be right. Then you sit and wait several hours for them to take your car back and look at it. Once they finally take the car back, they tell you it looks serious and you'll need to see an engine specialist. Then you get bills from the service writer, the girl who drove your car back to the technician, a fee for using their service bay, and a $300 charge for the floor mat covers they used to keep the dirt from their shoes from getting your car dirty. You go to the specialist recommended by the dealer and he says he can fix your engine, but he doesn't work with your car's warranty company so you'll have to pay whatever he decides to later charge you out of your pocket. You ask him how much an engine costs - he says it'll be between $35 and $63,250, depending on who you work for, and he can't quote you a price.  You agree and he takes the car back. After a few days, you get the car back. It still is making the noise, but there's a 4' air freshener hanging from the mirror and they've replaced the air cleaner and put tape on the spark plug wires. They thank you and help you get in the car. Over the next six months, you get 14 bills from the engine specialist, the shop he worked in, the parts vendors, and half a dozen other businesses you've never heard of or spoken with. In response to your complaints, everyone now either tells you the noise is normal or that you'll have to call another automated number with your VIN number and warranty pre-authorization code before they can speak with you.

It sounds ridiculous when you describe this scenario as a problem with your new car, but if you say this experience happened in dealing with a health problem most of us would shrug our shoulders and blow it off as 100% normal.

Scenario 2: Your new car starts making an odd noise. You go back to the dealership, where you're met as soon as you pull onto the lot by a smiling employee who asks how she can help. You describe the concern in a few sentences. She inputs your concerns for you and quickly directs you back to a group of "geniuses" who know everything about cars like yours. One of them greets you and politely starts working on your car while explaining what he's doing and why. Within a few minutes he's root caused the problem, which IS major, and brought you an identical replacement car. He helps you put all your stuff in the new car and transfers your warranty and lease info to the new car in a few quick keystrokes. As fast as you walked in, you're walking out with a new replacement car that works perfect and even has the seats and rear view mirrors adjusted to your preferences. There's no charge, but they did give you paperwork to document the transaction in case you later have any questions or concerns.

It again sounds ridiculous when you describe this situation as being with a car, rather than an iPhone, but in the context of expensive digital products we'd expect nothing less.

Context matters. We carry our understanding of good and bad customer service with us, and those judgments are impacted not just by this experience but by EVERY experience that weighs on our busy minds. It encompasses both those experiential elements directly relating to YOUR experience with that customer and those peripheral elements which impact their subconscious evaluation of that experience you're working so hard to provide. It's driven by your brand promise before they ever meet you, clouded by those external factors impacting their attitudes surrounding the timing of your experience with them, weighed against other experiences they (rightfully or otherwise) deem similar, and heightened by their emotional state at the time of the particular experience.

As a business leader, you begin defining your customer satisfaction score before you ever meet your customer, with that customer's first introduction to your brand and brand promise via your marketing, social media, news outlets, even the social causes and public events to which your brand is intentionally or unintentionally tied. Prospective customers see targeted digital marketing and begin to feel like your brand "gets" them. They see you supporting causes that they also support, and that connection deepens. A disgruntled former employee's tweet from two months ago about how they skimped on cleaning the restrooms goes viral - Suddenly the prospective customer's perception is tainted and, before you've even met your new customer, they're already skeptical of your sanitation procedures and employee attitudes. Maybe a celebrity athlete who endorses your product is caught up in some doping scandal that makes the national news. Perhaps several of your employees leave a company teambuilding event and, still in their matching company t-shirts, are photographed walking across the street in the midst of a KKK rally - And now you've lost that customer before they ever had their first actual experience with your product.  In your mind, they were never a customer. In their minds, they probably considered themselves "once moderately brand-loyal, but then your brand totally let me down." Even if they do give you that first opportunity, they're coming in with a whole host of preconceived notions about the product and promises they believe the brand has made to them.

Not only are customers influenced by your brand's actions and promises, but by a whole host of external drivers which impact their emotions and perceptions. Take, for example, the check-in experience for an arriving timeshare customer: They've just traveled six or twelve or twenty hours to get there. 3 AM wake-up alarms. Flight delays. Crowds. Lost baggage. Rental car lines. Traffic. Getting lost in road construction delays. Finally, hungry, hot and tired, they get to the resort at 5 PM on Saturday night only to find 200 other families who all are arriving for the same seven day and who all just want the same upgraded room from the same overwhelmed front desk staff.  All of these factors are impactful on their subconscious evaluation of your product or service.

In their mind, they don't care that this hour of this day is the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week, they just know that when this happened last week at Walmart they opened up eight extra checkout lanes and all 16 self-checkout lanes to resolve things. (That might work here too, except the sales team insists that the check-in process include reconfirming timing for that Update Presentation Tuesday afternoon and the retraining included four additional steps and three new pieces of collateral that some moron at corporate things are important for reasons he or she hasn't bothered to communicate to anyone onsite.) If you offer an app or kiosk to check in, you've now further aligned your experience with that of Apple or Amazon, and are further held to those same standards of speed, accuracy, and ease of use. Customer experience, then, is entirely contextual.

So, what we said before they arrives matters, and so does what happened before they got here, and also what other similar apps and services they use elsewhere in their daily lives, but why then is my quarterly bonus dependent on that score so much??? The short answer is that a well-trained and empowered front desk staff with the right attitudes has the power to change the world and rewrite history. It's not all rational, but we already knew that. Doubletree has known they could erase a lot of pretty bad days almost instantly with a single warm, chocolate chip cookie.  Process controls have the power to reduce wait times and improve accuracy, but the human element can't be underestimated. Technology can bridge huge gaps, but failure to integrate it with other human processes and corporate policies expose your own failures to plan as a business, which is entirely unacceptable in today's transparent culture and business environment. Omni-channel strategies need to encompass people, processes, and technologies, with an awareness of diversity and inclusion to allow for variability in both customer and team aspects of each engagement. Teamwork is absolutely critical to the success of large organizations, and so much of that comes down to first hiring for attitude, then providing every front line employee the tools and training to do the job, empowering that front line to satisfy diverse customer needs, setting SMART goals in partnership with your teams, tracking KPIs with clear transparency, and then consistently holding those teams accountable for their own successes and failures. 

There is much to be aware of in planning and executing an effective customer experience strategy, but with proper awareness of the internal and external drivers you can consistently improve and predictably deliver world-class satisfaction even across dynamic customer settings and expectation sets.