Loyalty

The problem with Customer Experience is the Designers

Is the engineering / six sigma way of thinking and approaching the business world the right one for designing and orchestrating customer experiences?  Walk into many business, take a look at who is involved in Customer Experience efforts and the way that they are going about it and the answer is YES.  I am not in agreement with this view, this approach. 

Editor's Note: Customer loyalty. Always a trending topic. Lots of expert opinions, and a lot of guesswork. I started to tease out the reasons I have for personal loyalty to companies—both retail and e-commerce. Here's my list of reasons for remaining loyal, along with the story of why I abandoned a favorite brand.

The focus of all modern management thinking, and strategic business practice, has to be the customer. Keep your customers happy and your sales will continue to soar - neglect them, or take them for granted, and your bottom line will suffer accordingly. To respond to a customer who has a legitimate complaint you must, in my opinion, keep these six rules firmly in mind. Rule One

These are my favorite ten – no doubt you can think of plenty of others! • Pass the customer around – whatever you do, make it virtually impossible for the customer to get what they want when they call you. Make them work by asking them to repeat themselves. Then, to add that extra bit, get someone who doesn’t know how to transfer a call to accidentally cut the customer off! • Buy a system, then fit your strategy around it – do like many companies do and buy a wonderful system for recording customers’ details, that does not make it easy from your own perspective.

If I am in the buy cycle, companies tend to be quite responsive. But if I’m not, it’s another story, and that story encompasses research, problems and just plain old dopey questions. (Dopey, I might add, is in the eye of the beholder.) Although I am the customer of many companies, I approach my non-sales interactions expecting to be treated poorly and I am rarely disappointed. My research leads me to believe that this is the norm. My experience tells me that corporate America is missing the boat, because our definition of a customer relationship is at odds with the customers’.