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!
Although my mind was screaming, THEN MOVE THE TRUCK!!!, what we actually did was send him on his way, cancel the order, find another manufacturer with similar furniture who had a distributor who had the stock available and partnered with a delivery company that delivered the right furniture in good condition on-time, the first time. Although the original manufacturer and distributor had made it easy to do business with them during the commerce activities they controlled, they didn’t own the customer’s total experience, and they lost our business—then, and for any future purchases.
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