Your goal is simple: a customer who has an enjoyable Experience that differentiates him or her from your competitors is likely to become a loyal customer, or even an ambassador for your brand. Customer Journey, as the path taken by all stakeholders, Customer Experience, your brand's distinctive travel experience.
How do you achieve this goal? To answer this question, let's compare the different types of Experience that you can define and deliver to your customers and their impact on your customers' experience.
The Ultimate Customer Experience
To begin with, let's discover the simplified model (inspired by the one we propose in our exclusive CX Dynamics© method) of an a priori"ideal" customer journey.
Your entire customer journey is located in the enchantment zone. You really take care of them and keep surprising them at every interaction point.
Ah! the sweet dream of all Customer Experience Managers...!
Unfortunately, this Experience is very difficult to maintain in the long term: on your company's side,the efforts made to achieve this level of service are likely to generate costs that will potentially erode your margin. Or else you will have to charge a high price for all these services... Which, on the customer's side, may produce a perverse effect: they will quickly be convinced that they are paying for this level of service and that the Experience offered is not exceptional, but normal from this point of view! Their perception will therefore gradually fall into the "neutral" zone as your interactions progress.
So, if this business strategy is not the Holy Grail, what Customer Experience should we aim for?
Before going any further, it is necessary to make an aside about the difference between Lived Experience and Memorised Experience. To illustrate this, it is interesting to look at a 1996 psychological study which looked at the perception of pain (scored from 0 to 10) by different patients.
Here is an extract from the study:
Pain levels as described by 2 patients during surgery.
Any normal person would prefer to experience what Patient A has experienced rather than what Patient B has experienced: an operation that generates the same pain (peak to 8), but lasts much less time...
Except that when patients were asked to say after the procedure what their average pain level was, it had nothing to do with an average of the different peaks.
Instead, the average described by each patient was the highest peak and the last moment of the operation.
Thus, even if Patient B's operation was longer and therefore certainly less pleasant than Patient A's, Patient B has a less "violent" memory of this operation (we would not go so far as to say more pleasant...)
This phenomenon, highlighted by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, is called the "pic-end rule": the memorization of an experience by individuals is linked to the strongest moment of this experience and to the end of it. This aside gives a new perspective on what the Customer Experience should be in order to make it the best remembered (and therefore the one that will lead the customer to be loyal to you and become your ambassador).
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The dangers of the Neutral Experience
In the light of this study, one might think that a 'neutral' experience would be sufficient to ensure a good level of customer loyalty. However, this is not the case, as we shall see, for several reasons.
The neutral Customer Experience is often the one that most customers experience. It does not build loyalty and at the first opportunity from the competition, they will happily go elsewhere.
Moreover, if an obstacle occurs during the course, they will keep a vivid image of this obstacle and you will most likely have lost them permanently.
Targeting important moments to delight the customer
As you can see, it is particularly important to ensure 1 (or even 2 or 3) key moments throughout the journey where you will delight your customers.
On the one hand, to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and on the other hand, to prevent the slightest problem from causing you to lose your customers permanently.
In this example, the customer is likely to overlook a fairly disastrous buying experience and congratulate themselves on having bought the product that gives them satisfaction every day.
The importance of after-sales service
The "peak-end rule" also explains why it is very important to have an efficient after-sales service. It is potentially the last step in their journey, which will greatly influence their perception of the overall quality of the Customer Experience you have provided.
In fact, when we conduct workshops on this topic and ask people in the room to give us real-life examples of positive Customer Experience, 80% of customers tell an anecdote with a problem that was brilliantly (or even surprisingly) solved by the customer service department.
And you know why?
Because it always makes a good story to tell.
The Storytelling of the Customer Experience
All the stories we are used to seeing and hearing since we were children include a hero who starts from a rather flat initial situation (neutral), goes through a moment of great difficulty (disenchantment) but ends with a happy ending (moment of enchantment).
The story is often even more successful if a mini moment of enchantment precedes the great disenchantment.
To ensure that your customers remember the Experience you gave them and that they tell their friends and family about it, it is therefore useful to design your journey according to this scenario.
Of course, we are not talking about creating moments of disenchantment on the journey, but about identifying the main stages where a Disappointing Experience can occur to counter it as quickly and in the best way possible so that your customers have a nice story to tell. : )
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This article uses (in a simplified version) the modelling from KESTIO's exclusive CX Dynamics© methodology to measure the quality of the Customer Experience throughout the customer journey.
It was inspired by an article from Smashing Magazine.
