From Peter Brügmann
From Customer Experience to Total Customer Experience - the marketing industry has discovered the customer and has started to call for a completely new orientation of companies and processes. We focus on large amounts of data, mobile or social or content, and all aspects of the business - from strategies and processes to organizational structure and culture - are converted to a customer-oriented framework. There are metrics for everything and everyone, and customer satisfaction can be controlled from the dashboard so to say.
Some thoughts on this:
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Let's not forget to continue listening to our customers. Ultimately,
business success depends on how we treat our customers, how we look at them and how we listen to them. And not what answers they write in our feedback forms. The images created by
satisfaction surveys and aggregation of data can be wrong. We know from studies that customers do not always behave logically in CSI surveys. Example: A customer is annoyed that all customer
parking spaces were occupied by employees, but instead complains about the performance quality of the service operation in the feedback form.
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This makes the real customer experience the key to success - from the
digital journey to the sales ambience and personal support at the POS and in after-sales. But it's not just a series of individual experiences that counts here, but a consistent, coherent
chain of experiences that fits the brand. For example, many Apple customers stay with the brand, although the products are significantly more expensive than other comparable products. That's
because Apple has created a consistent, coherent customer experience, from the digital experience to the Product Genius.
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Despite or precisely because of digitization - people are becoming more
important in customer journeys. Because the weakest link in the experience chain is the human being, their qualification, their motivation, their attitude. More must be invested if we want to
create holistic and consistently positive experience chains. Studies have found that it takes 10 positive experiences to repair the unresolved negative damage caused by a single
one.
- In many companies, customer experience strategies end with the act of buying. This hides the fact that the complaint process in particular is one of the most important touch points at which customer loyalty is either sustainably strengthened or irreversibly destroyed. The danger is that bad experiences spread quickly. A good complaint experience is usually shared with five other people, but a bad experience reaches more than ten people, causing a lot of damage.
The bottom line is that strategies which are focussed on Customer Experience are really a key to success and the future of marketing. But only if pure data faith does not dominate watching, listening, analysing and thinking.