A customer experience model can be used to improve the customer experience management strategy. Over the duration of their relationship with a supplier, the customer has a sum of experiences that can include attraction, discovery, awareness, purchase, interaction, cultivation, use, and advocacy. The customer experience can also be analyzed just for an individual experience over one single transaction.
However, customer experience is a personal and subjective matter that is somehow difficult to model. Supplier companies of services and goods can just create a distinct economic offer that should be different from the services delivered and goods sold by their competitors. They should focus on brand differentiation in order to create specific customer experience expectations, particular only to their services and products. A company should strive to find the best ways of creating ‘service excellence’.
For this purpose is of crucial importance to well manage the customer’s experience. Loyalty to a brand and an increase amount of consumer spending can be achieved by company’s ability to deliver a customer experience that sets it apart. Today, loyalty to a brand is driven primarily by how well a company delivers to the consumers’ wants and needs and by the proper interaction of the company with its customers.
Price differentiation is no longer sustainable today with products becoming increasingly commoditized. Nowadays customers are demanding more and the service provider companies, particularly those activating in the field of communications service such as wireless, landline, cable, broadband, or satellite, need to focus on delivering excellent customer experiences. Only companies with increased investment in customer experience management can achieve higher customer satisfaction and higher customer referral rates.
However, customer experience is not essential only in the communication services field. Today, for companies across all industries, the customer experience is the most important aspect in achieving success. For example, Starbucks’ popularity is based on the excellent customer experience and that makes its customers to recommend their store to family and friends.
Customer Experience Management
A customer experience model is based on strategies that focus on the processes and operations of a business around the wants and needs of their individual customers. More and more companies all over the world have started to focus on the crucial importance of their customers’ experience. Today companies are realizing that creating the best customer experiences is a complex enterprise, involving brand management, innovation, creativity, technology integration, commitment, strategy, and designing good business models.
Customer experience management strategy uses methodology to comprehensively manage a customer’s transaction and interaction with the company, service, product or brand. Customer experience management takes into account customer’s cross-channel exposure to the company’s brand, products and services.
Statistics show that only around 8 percent of customers consider that they had a good customer experience, while 80 percent of companies believe that they offer excellent customer experience. With such large disparities contrasting between what the business actually deliver and how their performance is perceived by their customers, it is certain that most of the companies need to improve their customer experience management strategies. In order to do that, businesses must focus on the following aspects:
- Designing the correct incentive for their consumer, provided in an enticing environment
- Delivery of the purposed customer experience by focusing the entire team across various functions
- Developing consistency in execution of the designed customer experience management strategy
A company has to constantly train its team in order to keep up with the demands of providing the best possible experience to its customers. In order to have long term success, a company also needs to define and understand all dimensions and aspects of the customer experience. There are enterprises that segment the customer experience into human interactions and technical interactions with the customer.
Human interactions involve the use of face-to-face retail service or over-the-phone customer service as the customer experience. Technical interactions involve the use of the tablet, Smartphone or web. In our modern global economy, bricks-and-mortar business and technology often compete or interact for the customer base. In this context it is important to recognize that all these aspects of human interactions and technical interactions are having an impact on the customer experience. Customer experience is provided by every business but it is more likely to provide a positive experience if the business is more aware of what type of experience they want to provide. For this reason, designing a customer experience management strategy is an important factor of success.
However, despite designing the best customer experience model, certain aspects of the experience cannot be controlled fully. Individual behaviors, emotions, and perceptions can influence and alter the customer experience. Bad experiences with a product can also deteriorate the overall customer experience. A piece of equipment that does not meet durability expectations or consistently fails to function reliably, will generate complaints and negatively affect customer experience.
These complaints can propagate online or through word of mouth, can be found in negative reviews and testimonies about the product. For these reasons, good product design and engineering cannot be replaced by customer experience management. An unreliable product cannot be compensated by customer experience management, which cannot be a substitute for providing good services and products at a reasonable price.
Customer Experience Model for Management Strategy
A model for customer experience management strategy should focus on certain goals such as pursuing loyalty, customer retention, customer experience differentiation, and service excellence.
Through a model for customer experience model strategy can be achieved the best customer experience business results. Revenue comes from customers and better customer experience means increased sales and revenue. It is through these customer experience building blocks that customer loyalty and sustainable retention can be achieved.
A model for customer experience management strategy should focus its coordinated efforts in optimizing the customer experience. Its aim should be a growth of business profit and revenue. The strategy should be customer centered. This way the customer experience efforts can make a strategic impact and deliver ongoing business results. The essential building blocks of a customer experience strategy are:
- Internal branding
- Branding
- Customer experience innovation and improvement
- Lifetime value and customer intelligence
- Customer voice
- Customer-centricity roadmap
These building blocks for a customer experience model can help the company to achieve sustainable business growth.
