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).