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To understand why ‘customer experiences’ have become so important, a good starting point is to consider you and your behaviours when you are a customer. Would you say that you are the same type of customer nowadays as you were say 5 to 10 years ago? My guess is that you will have changed, perhaps considerably, over the past few years. What used to impress you probably doesn’t now make the same impression. I’d bet that things you used to accept as OK are now less acceptable. I would expect that you now look out for things that before you maybe wouldn’t even have noticed. You’re also more likely nowadays to complain about things you’re not happy with. My point is that over the past few years, you have probably become more picky and difficult to please as a customer. (Research shows that most people have). And if you now have higher expectations, or are more demanding or your behaviour has changed, it’s likely that your own customers will have changed in the same way too!

What this means is that the things that used to work to make you and your customers loyal in the past, are not likely to work in the same way anymore. So if you want to make customers as loyal today as they were in the past you will have to find some new or additional ways to do it.

But this doesn’t mean that the proven, basic techniques you and others have always successfully used to serve customers in the past are now wrong or no longer important. They are just as right and important today as they always were and they will remain a key part of great service in the future.

But many of these routines or techniques will have now fallen into a category that is often called ‘necessary but not sufficient’. This means they are still needed (necessary) but research has shown that something more is needed to have the same impact and/or create the same results (not sufficient). And the something more, that many people and organisations have found does work and are now focussing on, is called positive (or addictive) customer experiences.

To deliver the right, positive customer experiences you need a new or different focus. You need to consider not only what you do for your customers (the competence part of your job), but also how you make them feel when you do it (the character part of your job).

Sources

Relative articles

• 1/4/2016:In Customer Loyalty Management... all jobs count!
• 9/8/2016:10 Key Service Principles
• 30/8/2016:Customer Experience Journey Mapping
• 6/9/2016:Implementing Organisational Service Excellence
• 26/7/2016:Make it Memorable – but for the Right Reasons
• 13/9/2016:Educating vs Training
• 20/7/2016:The Challenge of Service Recovery
• 2/8/2016:Building Customer Loyalty

Relative workshops

• 1st Master Class Workshop with Chris Daffy
• 1st Master Class Workshop with Chris Daffy