Total CX

Seeing the World Through CX-Colored Glasses

I talk…a lot…about customer experience. Since working on Customers.com with Patty in the mid 1990s, the concept of providing a great customer experience has been a perceptual filter through which I evaluate almost all aspects of my life. For example:

• Massachusetts has terrible road signage. Although small side roads typically have a street sign at every corner, main roads often have no signs at all. So, when you come to a main road from a side road, well, good luck figuring out where you are. Bad customer experience!
• Continuing with the driving theme, when I’m on one of these side streets, stuck behind an oil truck that is filling a tank at someone’s house, it doesn’t matter that I don’t use oil from that vendor (at least not now). Bad customer experience!
• When I go to a restaurant to meet friends, and I can’t get a table until everyone in the party arrives, bad customer experience!
• When I’m watching one of my favorite TV shows (“Lost” anyone?) and a news anchor interrupts to tell me the breaking news that the police are still chasing a car they’ve been chasing for several hours, and that there is nothing new to report, bad customer experience!
• When I’m in a public bathroom, and the “Never Out” toilet paper dispenser needs a brand new roll started, and I can’t start the roll without shredding it into a million pieces, bad customer experience!
• I’m on an airplane using my laptop on the little tray table and the person in front of me reclines his seat (which always seems to recline more than mine), and pretty much closes the lid on my computer, bad customer experience!

Yes, these are common petty annoyances that everyone experiences, and comedians make their careers by pointing them out. But they stick with you. And they have consequences. When my condo association recently decided to change oil providers, one of the distributors contacted was Brenner Oil. My reaction was very negative because I have been stuck in my car behind Brenner’s green trucks far too often in my neighborhood of narrow roads. We went with a different company (okay, they offered a better deal, but if it had been a wash, I would have voted against Brenner).

Owning the Customer’s End-to-End Experience

In Customers.com, one of the critical success factors that I believe often gets downplayed in real life is “Own the Customer’s Total Experience.” This means that your job doesn’t start when customers come to your Web site and it doesn’t end when the sale is completed. From the moment the customer even considers acquiring the type of product or service that you offer through the last time in that person’s life that she will ever even think about that product/service, you need to provide a great customer experience.

You have to own the experience even when you aren’t the company providing it. All your providers and partners offer customer experience, and you have to be involved in making sure it meets the high quality standards that you want to offer customers. When you are looking at your supply chain and your demand chain to identify the partners you want to work with, make sure that your evaluation criteria includes a commitment to providing an excellent quality of customer experience, and a shared view of what that means.

Let me share one of my favorite real-life experiences. About 15 years ago, Patricia Seybold Group decided it was time for new lobby furniture for our office. We found a manufacturer’s catalog that had some furniture we really liked, and the distributor had it in stock and could arrange delivery within a few days. But then the customer experience hit the wall. The first time we expected the furniture to be delivered, the delivery people never showed up. The next time, the delivery driver showed up empty handed with a sheepish grin and said that he couldn’t deliver the furniture because he had “parked on a hill, and if I open the back of the truck, the furniture will fall out.” No, really, that’s what he said!