Customer Experience is a broad and elaborate subject. Trying to manage something so complex can make you feel like Homer on a bad day at the office. Thankfully, a bad day for us won't cause a nuclear meltdown, but sometimes it feels like that.
My last post on the Value of Customer Experience attempted to explain the three large components of customer experience, but it was a lot to chew on.
Chistophe Van Bael commented,
Isn't perception largely determined by the alignment of performance and expectations? If so, shouldn't we primarily focus on setting honest expectations and meeting and/or exceeding them? A few (well, many) uncontrollable variables aside, one could argue that by focusing on these two fundamentals, we would already be managing the customer perception (and hence also the customer experience).
That is exactly what my post was supposed to convey, but I knew it was a little confusing from the start. In fact, the image I chose for the piece was less to do with the message and more to do with how I felt while writing it. I knew where all the puzzle pieces were; I just couldn't seem to put them all together to clearly communicate my point.
Perceived Value and Customer Experience
My comment back to Christophe had a short summary of my ramblings, which I have slightly revised and illustrated here:
- The messages we send to our customers must be authentic.
- We create expectations in our customers based on our messages and past performance.
- Our customers' expectations serve as the metric for which our future performance is measured. We need to perform extremely well in the core aspects of our business.
- The variance between expectations and performance creates some level of perceived value. Value can be expressed in terms of money, time, emotion, and/or reputation our customers invest with us.
- The Customer Experience will be judged largely on our customers' perceived value of their tangible and intangible investments.
Is customer experience more complex than this? Of course it is, but managing the value we provide to our customers is a great start to being the real leaders in customer experience.
* This was originally posted at DeliverBliss.com
