You can transform your customer experience or
You can transform your customer through their experience.
What’s the difference in approaches? The focal point!
What’s the difference in outcomes? Everything!
Transforming a customer experience focuses on making changes to the environment that the customer engages in during a transaction or interaction with your company. The intention is to delight the customer and earn their future business. When executed, this focus can achieve a certain level of success as measured in customer loyalty.
But there’s a rub.
Measurements focused on customer delight, like surveys, are often taken within a close proximity of the transaction that they are designed to measure. They lack the perspective of time and as a result can mislead companies into thinking that they have succeeded when the transactional “journey" is over. Yet, while the customer is satisfied in the moment, they may become disenchanted over time with the product or service provided.
A second problem with focusing on delight is based in the findings of neuroscience. The human brain is wired in such a way that what caused delight today becomes normal tomorrow and evoking the same level of delight in the future requires more novelty or greater emotional stimulation. This can become like an addiction for the customer who demands greater and greater reward for their brain in the form of delight without providing an equivalent financial gain for the company. In essence, the cost to entertain continues to rise while the price customers are willing to pay remains flat.
Another challenge is that when companies get too focused on delighting their customers they invest an enormous amount of time and energy into solving customer complaints because they believe solving problems will create delight. This may appear logical on the surface, but the truth is, leaders often fail to ask if these complaining customers are their core customers. Often these executives get so focused on improving their delight score that they move away from the values that made the company successful in the first place. They forget to ask, “what do our core customers love about us and what we do for them?” Doing more of what your core customers love is far more beneficial than doing less of what non-core customers dislike.
Transforming the customer THROUGH experiences takes a different focus. It acknowledges that the current needs and wants of a customer are part of a greater mosaic of their life. It recognizes that customers have five positive possible motivators, of which, delight is only part of one. The approach recognizes that while every step in the journey may not be delightful, they are created as part of an intricate system to support the customer who is “becoming someone more." And, the companies that focus on customer transformation through experiences help the customer understand and appreciate why there may be discomfort on their journey.
These companies think more like a coach who knows that his players need more than momentary delights during practice to achieve the lasting success and significance of becoming champions. As the customer’s coach, the company creates a plan to move the customer from where she is to where she truly wants to be. As a coach, the company puts a system in place to support the customer on this journey of becoming someone more. They guide the customer through experiences that evoke the change in the customer.
Over the last five years TBI has learned how to help startups to Fortune 1000 companies build transformative customer experiences supported by robust Voice of the Customer programs. Using the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and the science of emotions, we know how to unlock the hidden patterns in your customers’ behaviors and the language they use to communicate with you. These patterns can indicate what they are willing to purchase, when they are ready to purchase, if they are going to abandon your company and what tiny changes you can make that will dramatically shift their relationship with you. We can show you how to learn, leverage and lead with this new knowledge by applying it to your marketing campaigns, sales scripts, operations improvement and innovations, or even your capital raising efforts.
Our clients include prestigious award-winning customer experience giants like USAA, Gaylord Hotels and Ritz-Carlton. We have also worked with many start-ups and fast growing mid-sized companies in industries as diverse as technology, personal development, entertainment, telecom, and well-being. At the core, each of our clients wants to evoke a customer experience that improves their customers’ lives, sets them apart in their industry, and drives real financial improvement.