Many people are talking about customer experiences. It’s difficult to pick up a business magazine, a new book about customer service or even some annual reports nowadays without some mention of it. But if you ask the question, “When does a product or service become an experience?”  most people don’t seem to have a simple answer. But you can’t manage something if you can’t measure it, and you can’t measure it if you don’t know precisely what it is. So I hope the simple and practical ideas in this article will help you to know what experiences are and then how to manage them.

What are Customer Experiences?

To understand any subject properly I think you should at the beginning, and for Customer Experience I think the starting point was the book The Experience Economy, written in 1999 by Pine and Gilmore. This book kicked off great interest in customer experiences and suggested how they may be used to create differentiation, competitive advantage and higher margins. Pine and Gilmore explained the differences between simple product or service delivery and experience creation, which they suggested are –

·        Services are delivered to customers but experiences are staged for customers. This means that a degree of ‘performance’ is involved in experiences.

·        Services may be customised but experiences are made personal. This means that experiences should be ‘person to person’, not ‘company to customer’.

·        Services may be supplied on demand but experiences are revealed over time. This means experiences need to be developing and improving all the time so there’s always something new or better for customers to experience.

·        Services may be focussed on benefits but experiences should trigger sensations. To do this emotion and/or empathy needs to be a key component of any experiences.

·        Services are usually intangible but experiences are always memorable. And the very best experiences will become unforgettable.

I’ve found that how memorable something is, is the key. The more memorable it is the more it can be called an experience.

This leads to the question ‘how do you go about creating memorable customer experiences?’ I’m convinced the answer is through what I call WOWs, OUCHes, and RECOVERY.

WOWs

WOWs occur when something happens which is beyond expectation. A simple equation for this is –

WOW = OK + 1

The goal is to deliver what the customer expected, which will result in an OK reaction, and then to add something extra (the +1) which will trigger a WOW experience.

This something extra need not cost much. In fact the best ones usually cost little or nothing. They’re more to do with things we do for customers rather than things we give to them.

Here are a few WOW experience examples from different industries –

Hospitality – WOW, Crocodiles on the bed

I was told of the following experience by someone who had been on a Nile cruise. Each evening when the guests returned to their cabin, they found that the cabin staff had not only cleaned and prepared the room for them, but they had also created interesting or amusing sculptures from the towels. They ranged from a crocodile on the bed to a cobra in the bathroom. They never knew what would be waiting for them each night in the room, but they were always keen to find out and even photographed them to show friends and family when they returned home.

Motor Dealers – WOW, They got my ashtray

Tom Jones is an American customer loyalty expert and former faculty member at the Harvard Business School. He was also a loyal BMW driver and profitable customer. He always took his car to his local BMW dealer for servicing, having them detail (the American term for valet) the vehicle each time.

One day, however, after driving home, Tom discovered that the garage still had his ashtray. So he called the BMW dealer, who replied, "Oh yes it’s here, sorry. You can swing by and pick it up any time." "Swing by?" Tom asked, "But, I'm busy." "So are we," huffed the dealer. "It'll be here waiting for you, when you call."

Tom thought. “I should get better service than that. I’ve been a loyal and profitable customer. I wonder how other manufacturers would handle the same situation.” So he decided to call other dealers to find out. The first call was to his local Lexus dealer where he posed the hypothetical question about how they would have handled the same situation Tom had encountered at BMW?

"I really don't know," the Lexus dealer said. "Why not?" Tom asked. "Well," answered the dealer, "at our dealership we have a 'pick-up, drop-off, and loan car program so customers don't have to bother bringing their cars back and forth. And we'd never forget to put back the ashtray because we use a check list system to prevent it. So, we’d simply never encounter something like that. But listen: tell us where that BMW dealer is and we’ll go get your ashtray and bring it around to you right away."

“WOW” thought Tom, “If that’s the service they offer when you’re not even a customer, what must it be like when you are!”

Theme Parks – WOW, Disney’s ‘Present for a Princess’

One of my customers took his daughter on holiday to Disney. She was especially excited because she was a big fan of the Disney Princesses. On arrival their first visit therefore had to be the shop where she was fully kitted out with a complete Princess outfit.

As his daughter stood in her new clothes, looking at herself in the mirror, one of the Disney staff appeared from behind the scenes and said “The Princess has asked me to give you this”. On the box was written ‘From one Princess to another’ and in it was a Princess pin.

The box and the pin are now her most treasured possessions. 

OUCHes

OUCH is obvious. It happens when what the customer experiences is in some way less than they were promised or expected. The equation for this is –

OUCH = OK - 1

These too can be very memorable and often unforgettable (often more so than WOWs) and they will result in lost customers so the goal must be to find all causes of OUCHes and remove or reduce them.

RECOVERY

No matter how hard we try to remove all customer OUCH experiences, there will always be some that happen. But as Richard Branson explained it in his guiding principles for Virgin Atlantic staff -

“Mistakes are inevitable. Dissatisfied customers are not.”

His point is that we need to establish ways to turn OUCHes into WOWs. Disney call this ‘Turning the Tragic into the Magic’. Academics call it RECOVERY and again there is a simple equation –

RECOVERY = FIX + WOW

The Fix part of the RECOVERY, where we put right what has gone wrong, is the equivalent of the OK part in a WOW and does not create a positive experience. All it does is remove a negative experience and provide a neutral one. But if we then go on to add a WOW (a positive experience) after the Fix then a RECOVERY experience is created. It’s the extra, unexpected bit at the end that creates the memorable or ideally unforgettable experience. Research has shown that RECOVERY is one of the most powerful positive experiences customer can have and often results in increased loyalty and referrals.

Here are a few RECOVERY examples from different industries -

Hospitality -The honeymoon bed of roses

As a wedding gift, one of my friends paid for his daughter’s Honeymoon. He wanted it to be memorable so he booked an excellent hotel in a fabulous location. But when his daughter and her new husband arrived they were greeted with the disappointing news that the hotel had double booked the honeymoon suite for the first night of their stay.

The staff were extremely apologetic about this error and did everything they could think of to compensate for it. They arranged the best alternative suite they had available, they provided flowers and a bottle of champagne in the room, and they gave a complimentary meal in the restaurant that night. They also offered to move all their belongings over to the honeymoon suite the next day, while they were out. She was therefore placated but not completely happy about the situation.

The next day they went for a drive and as promised, when they returned they were given the key to the honeymoon suite. When they entered the room they were both surprised and delighted to see that on the bed the staff had written the word SORRY in rose petals. At that point, she forgave them for the problems of the previous night.

The point to note is that is was not the expensive compensatory gifts, but the emotional touch that made the difference in the end.

Groceries - Tesco’s not so super ‘Superplonk’.

David usually has a box of Tesco’s own brand wine (called Superplonk) at home available for whenever someone fancies a slurp. One day he opened a new box and found that it tasted foul so he telephoned Tesco to inform them of his dissatisfaction. They apologised and asked him to return it. He decided he would do so straight away and drove round.

At Tesco the woman in charge of the wine department tasted the wine and agreed that it was definitely off. She therefore offered him a new box of wine, plus his money back. David thought that was good but she then also gave him a bottle of ‘fine’ wine for the inconvenience he had been put to in returning the poor wine.

David was delighted, and recovered, and Tesco had another customer for life.

Tailoring - Service with style at Slaters Menswear

I bought a dinner suit from Slaters Menswear in Manchester. They have an in-house department for alterations so they can usually do it at the time of purchase.  However it was on a Saturday, near Christmas, so that day they were really busy in their alterations department and I agreed to collect it later in the week. As my wife was going to Manchester later that week she volunteered collected it for me.

When I saw the suit I was disappointed to find that they had not sewn in the tapes that I like around the inside bottom of the trousers. I therefore took it back the next morning and explained my disappointment. They immediately took the trousers into the alterations department for correction and then invited me to choose any silk tie in the store, with their compliments and apologies for the inconvenience. I then spent an enjoyable time choosing my free tie. Then an equally enjoyable time choosing and buying a shirt to wear it with.

I was a happy, recovered customer who had immediately started purchasing again at the store.

Conclusions

So by creating as many WOW experiences as possible, trying to remove all OUCH experiences and making sure that if and when they do occur you practice RECOVERY, I think you will be using customer experience to build loyalty.

As a final thought, I’m convinced there are ‘Experience Accounts’ that all customers hold for their suppliers. Perhaps they could also be called ‘Loyalty Accounts’. You might therefore consider what deposits your organisation is making into these accounts through WOW and RECOVERY experiences and what withdrawals are being made through OUCH experiences. Would the majority of your Customer Experience (or Loyalty) Accounts be in credit or debit? And if you’re not happy with your conclusions, what are you going to do about it?