Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

February’s Harvard Business Review features its first article on understanding customer experience, offering an overview on the definition of CE, the main causes of CE failures in organizations, and methods to obtain actionable customer insights.

Defining Customer Experience

Authors Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager define customer experience as the “internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company.” Direct contact is consumer initiated, occurring as customers purchase, consume, and service an offering. Indirect contact refers to unplanned encounters with a product, service, or brand, and can take place through word of mouth, product recommendations, and advertising.  The distinction between direct and indirect contact is an important one to consider, as we often get too caught up in designing and monitoring direct customer touch points, rather than planning how to influence indirect interactions.

What’s the secret to creating a good customer experience? “[It] isn’t the multiplicity of features on offer … A successful brand shapes customers’ experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in offerings’ every feature.”

Organizational Challenges

Creating engaging customer experiences is still a challenge for most organizations, as recently evidenced by some of the biggest experience-focused brands (Starbucks, Home Depot, and up in the Great White North, Loblaws). So where does the problem lie? The authors have identified three factors:

• Overspending on CRM data that captures what a company already knows about their customers. In contrast, CE data looks at capturing a customer’s immediate response to an interaction.
• Lack of top-management empathy towards customers needs. Executives rising from finance or technology backgrounds still regard customer experience management as the responsibility of sales, marketing, and customer service departments.
• Fear of qualitative customer experience insights. Organizations are still driven by quantitative data. By combining CRM and CE insights, organizations can not only identify new trends taking place (the “what”), but understand how internal forces and subjective factors are driving these changes (the “why” and “how”). 

Audrey Carr