Who cares about customer experience? Not customers. They want good products and great service for the least possible cost—hold the hassle, please. They don’t generally ponder something as ineffable as their “experience.” Meanwhile, companies pay lip service to customer care, but they are mainly concerned about making a profit—anyway they can.
Which brings us to the two basic ways companies approach customer experience. The first kind of company believes that maintaining happy customers really does matter. Good profits pay off in the long run. (“Good” profits refer to profits generated by enthusiastic customers who not only buy your products, but also recommend them to their friends).
The other kind of company seems content to keep wracking up bad profits to meet short-term revenue goals, and leaving a trail of disgruntled customers in their wake. This kind of company doesn’t really care if you are satisfied, so long as you buy something. Their profits are “bad” because they are generated at the expense of customer satisfaction.
Believe it or not, there are arguments in favor of both approaches. Which one is correct?
To learn the answer, let’s look at a couple of examples. The first one is my local phone company. For a while, they seemed to finally have a real customer experience program in place. They answered the phone quickly, listened to my concerns, and seemed empowered to resolve my issues right away. They even asked me how they could provide “superior support.” I was shocked!
But then they merged with another company that didn’t bother with that fuzzy science called customer loyalty. It turns out they didn’t need to, for one simple reason: I’m trapped. Their competition is slim in this market, and I’m locked into a two-year service contract!
Let’s do the math here. I pay around $120 per month for combined communications services from this phone company, and I have been doing so for the last five years. If I continue in this vein for another five years, my 10-year value to the company will top $14,000. That’s big money, you would think, especially for a business that is so highly automated. Does that merit good service? Not any more. Now when I call, I am placed on hold forever. I get transferred around. I am sometimes disconnected, and in the end my problem is usually not resolved. Believe me when I say this: I am jumping ship the first chance I get (when my contract runs out, of course!). Unfortunately, now that I am trapped, they don’t need my loyalty, so they don’t bother to try.
This seems like a shoddy way to run a business, and for that it is going to cost them thousands in the long run. Because in the lifetime of a telecommunications relationship, a few years is peanuts. This company can survive on bad profits for a while—maybe for quite some time, since they are in a growth market. But is it good business?
Now let’s look at another experience. My boss is a big Apple fan—iPod this, Mac that, and constantly smug about it. “Look I’m running Windows and Mac OS X on my MacBook,” he tells me. “How cool is that!” And, “look, I’ve got 4,000 songs on this thing. How cool is that!”
“It’s just a fad,” I reply. “I’ve been using MP3 players since before anybody even heard of the iPod. And MS Windows is great—look at all the applications. Besides, those iPod commercials annoy me.”
And then one day my boss walks into the office with a new iPod Shuffle. It’s about the size of a postage stamp. It is elegant. And it is intuitive—it has a user interface that actually conforms to what you expect. “This is cool,” I think. “It’s what an MP3 player should be.”
So I buy one, and I’m hooked. A few weeks later I need a new laptop. Guess which one I buy?
What an eye opener! When I started up my new MacBook, it worked instantly. When I loaded up some songs, they played right away. And then I wanted to charge up the battery on the Shuffle, so I plugged it into the Mac. Next thing I know, the songs are synced between the two devices, and my iPod is loaded up with my entire iTunes library! I had to do nothing. It just worked. This has never been my experience with PCs.
Apple’s TV commercials turned out to be true: here is a company that truly delivers on its promises. For that I’m willing to pay a premium. It looks like more and more customers are starting to agree with me.
I am trying to understand why there aren’t more companies that see the value in focusing on the customer experience? Download the 10k doc from any big company. Undoubtedly you will read about strategic mergers and innovative products. These are statements made by executives evaluating market opportunities, but not necessarily focusing on customer needs.
Maybe focusing on the customer is hard. I don’t really know. Telecom companies seem to live on bad profits and would rather acquire each other then do the heavy lifting of building customer relationships. Apple has no choice – they have to compete with the PC behemoths. How are they doing it? By out-cooling them. And their coolness is not just a veneer. Underneath it all, Apple has superior products that validate the customer experience. I paid a premium for my Apple gear, and it was worth it.
Thus it comes as no surprise that in NetPromoter’s latest Net Promoter Industry Report 2006: Computers Apple had the highest Net Promoter score for computers. And have you paid attention to their profits lately?
So I think we can conclude that customer experience is indeed a bad idea—for shortsighted companies, anyway. Excuse me if I can’t hear your reply—my favorite Coldplay song just came on.
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