Chances are that today you have experienced frustrations in dealing with a product or a service that you were trying to transact or use. You were experiencing a gap between what you expected from the experience versus what you actually found when interacting with the service or product.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Co. the key to good customer experiences are two fold: 1) understanding and investing in key drivers of satisfaction 2) minimizing poor experiences and gaining better understanding of what the customer really values, supported by analytical data.
Customers demand consistency of service, constant availability, supplier transparency, effortless transactions, and immediate resolution of the issues they face. Customers’ expectations of transacting and using a service or product is constantly evolving and their loyalties are shifting based on the quality of the experience and have many options to choose from.
To effectively market, sell, and support their products and services and retain the customers at every stage of the trasnaction lifecycle, companies must deeply understand the customer experiences by listening to, and understanding, the customers’ relationship with the company’s products or services. Companies must understand the scenarios that form customer’s perceptions of quality and work diligently to close the gap between what they are delivering and match them against what they know or anticipate about the customers’ wants and desires.
In order to maximize the customers’ lifetime value, companies need satisfied, repeat customers. The customer needs and experience must be at the center of the product design and development decisions. New, innovative, deeper and more meaningful engagements with customers translate to revenue growth and higher returns on investment. Customers experiences must be designed and refined to be less complex and more effortless.
Customers can be segmented based on their needs and expectations, with experiences that are tailored, prioritized and rationalized to reduce unneeded customer efforts and minimize customers’ investment in time and resources.
This requires companies to build capabilities that extend across segments and are scalable to respond to varying customer demands. To deliver on brand promises, the company must build the necessary operational capabilities across segments to gain synergies, gain growth, and manage costs. Internally, companies must remove barriers to organizational sharing and reduce complexity to allow for seamless idea and best practice sharing during product design and development.