When we talk about customer experience in interaction with business, this experience is made of two factors
1) Senses of customers ( i.e. sight, sound, taste, touch, smell).
2) Emotions of customer.
To make sure that customer gets a brilliant experience which satisfies both of above parameters , following drivers need to be focussed.
1) Customer Expectation: What is the expectation of the customer while entering into the shop. It is interesting that most of the organizations will have standard operating procedures of hundreds of pages describing how customer should be treated but yet there is no practice to have documentation of what customer is actually expecting or what kind of experience customer desires.
2) People: Employees who are facing customers will directly impact customer experience. Specially in the industry where entire business depends upon customer facing , it is very important to have trained employees facing customers.
3) System: Today when technology drives business, systems being used impact highly on the customer experience, for example it was really embarrassing for customers to undergo the security scanner of handheld metal detectors, which used to take some time. Instead walking through those metal detector doors is a better option.
Similarly another important touch point for customers is POS, the smart your POS system will be the better customer experience will be. Another complain raised by customers is about IVR systems. Complicated answering systems in call centres make customer feel as if they are any transaction which is under processing.
4) Facility: In physical interaction with customer, this is the most obvious and a very strong touch point with customers. Today organizations (specially retail, hospitality chains) are very particular about the kind of experience they want to provide to customers in organization premise. Not only they are spending huge sums on making better, elite, sophisticated, easy to navigate facility outlets but they are also thinking out of box, Mid Columbia Medical center is one special hospital where patients are allowed to choose room interiors of their own choice. This clearly shows to what extent they care about human choice and experience, it is also very obvious in health care industry where if one is able to make patient feel happy then entire process can run smoothly.
5) Organization culture : Once George drapper Dayton ( founder of Target) noticed one of his employee is arguing with customer in what seems to be the customers mistake. He immediately resolved the issue and later on told the employee “ It is not important whether customer is right or not , what’s important is whether she thinks she is right” It will be difficult to view assume that this change was same for almost all the businesses , we will try to see 3 major industries which have been influenced heavily by technology to provide better and effective experience to their customers.
