CWA | The Customer Experience Company TORCHI March 20, 2003

Good evening – our agenda

Of course we know what • Define customer experience
customer experience is, or do we? • Look at the emotional element in business
• Create a customer experience statement for
Presented by Carolyn Watt
your organization
TORCHI March 20, 2003
• What strategies can you put in place to
support the statement?

Let’s look at customer experiences First to market

• What is the first good experience that • Is the drive to be first so powerful that
comes to mind? we forget who we are working for?
• What is the first bad experience that • Has technology taken control of our lives
comes to mind? so much that we forget that we are
• It’s usually easier to think of bad dealing with human beings?
experiences rather than good… • Technology is supposed to help us do
• Why is that? things…

People are emotional CWA says…

“Emotions set our highest level goals, including
how much and well we work and buy. By
creating the right emotions in employees and
customers, the phenomenon of emotional
engagement is the next economic force in the
highly competitive marketplace.”
• Your customers don’t remember what you
do for them.
• They only remember how you made them
feel the last time they dealt with your
company.

Beyond Philosophy - Curt Coffman, co-author “First Break All the Rules”

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CWA | The Customer Experience Company
Feelings are created…
• Through everything that your customer
sees, hears, feels, smells and touches.
• And that memory is the customer experience
What are moments of contact (truth)?
• Any time a customer:
• sees your logo
• receives a letter or a communication from you
(newsletter, an invoice, a statement)
• calls your company for something
• receives a call from your company
• receives a delivery from your company
• uses your software
• uses your user guide
How much of an experience is emotional?
• 69% of all consumers said the emotional
element of the customer experience
accounted for 50% or more of the
overall experience
• 44% of consumers describe the majority
of customer experiences they have as
‘bland and uneventful’…”
Research 2001-2 conducted by Beyond Philosophy
TORCHI March 20, 2003
The customer experience is…
…a blend of a company’s physical
performance and the emotion evoked,
intuitively measured against customer
expectations across all moments of
contact.
John Ivens and Colin Shaw – Beyond Philosphy
Think about it…
It’s the culmination of • seeing your ad
• visiting your website
all of a customer’s
• calling you
moments of contact • waiting for you to call back
(truth) or touch points • waiting to receive information
with you from you
• the amount of effort it takes
to read your material
• talking to others about you
• reading about you in the
newspaper etc.
Has the experience been planned?
• When asked… “What is the customer
experience you are trying to deliver?” nearly all
companies surveyed had no answer
• Although companies recognize that emotions
are a critical part of the customer experience
AND that they can provide a source of long-term
sustainable differentiation, only a few were
seriously undertaking activity in this area…
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CWA | The Customer Experience Company
The research shows…
• only 15% of companies were capturing their
customer’s emotional expectations
• only 10% were then trying to exceed those
emotional expectations
• only 5% were trying to evoke a specific emotion
• And yet, emotions drive all the buying decisions
your customers make.
But if you…
Make it hard for your customers to do
business with you, they’ll NEVER come
back…no matter how much advertising
you do
Michael Dell says…
“The Web challenges companies to
rethink the most basic relationship in
business: the one between you and
your customers.”
TORCHI March 20, 2003
When you…
• Make it easy for your customers to do
business with you and you’ll attract
customers
• Make the experience exceptional and
you’ll have customers for life
It’s all in a click…
• In today’s digital world, customers are only
a click away from a competitor
• An exceptional experience is a differentiator
Why is experience important?
• By the time a customer complains to you,
your brand and reputation are already
tarnished
• 92% of customers don’t complain –
to you that is…they simply take their
business elsewhere
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CWA | The Customer Experience Company
What are your customers saying?
• Good and bad
• Compliments and complaints
• Do you track them?
What’s even worse…
• Customers who have a bad experience will,
on average, tell about 10 other people…
they’ll even publicize it on the web!
• Satisfied customers only tell 1 person
Loss of trust results when you:
• detach or distance yourself from your
customers
• are perceived to be plagued with questionable
ethics in your business practices
• are difficult or confusing to deal with
• are prone to act primarily in self-interest
• don’t keep the promises you make
TORCHI March 20, 2003
Why don’t customers complain?
• They don’t think it will do any good
• They don’t know who to talk to
• They fear retribution
Trust…
• Trust is a key foundation of business. The
recent economic events have created a
crisis of confidence and trust.
• In fact, there is a public willingness to
believe bad information over good.
It’s expensive to attract customers
• The cost of acquiring new customers is
five times greater than the cost of
servicing your existing customers
• Creating an exceptional experience is a
customer retention strategy
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CWA | The Customer Experience Company
Good experiences
• Build brand loyalty
• Attract new customers
• Grow your profits
• Making loyal customers out of just 5%
more customers can lead to a rise in
profit per customer of between 25% and
100%.
Developing relationships
• With your company, your brand, with you
• Technology helps and hinders us
• The Internet…
• Bombarded with information
• Markets are blurring…
- companies are offering different products
- they are outsourcing activities
4-step process…
1. Define your vision
2. Create your positioning statement
3. Define your brand character
4. Create your customers experience
statement
TORCHI March 20, 2003
To the customer, that means…
• Being the brand that they expect you to be…
• That you are easy to do business with
• That you communicate clearly
• That they are treated consistently across all
customer touch points (moments of contact)
Customers need clarity…
• They need to understand the business
we’re in
• We’ve got to do something to help
customers remember us
Step 1 – Define the business you are in
• What is the goal of your business?
• What is vision statement?
• What are your values?
• Your mission statement is internal – it
rallies your troops to state the business
that you are in – it says what you are
going to do
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CWA | The Customer Experience Company
Step 2 – Create a positioning statement
• Your marketing group generally does this
• The 4 to 5 words that you will associate
with your product in the marketplace
• Your most distinguishing feature
• For example, ‘sexiest car on the road’ or
‘smart financial decisions’ would be a
primary positioning statement
Step 4 – Create an experience statement
• What type of experience do you want
your customers to have when they deal
with your company? With you?
• This is also an internal statement
That means…
There’s a physical and an emotional side
to everything that you do.
TORCHI March 20, 2003
Step 3 – Define your brand character
• What is the personality of your brand?
• What adjectives do you want people to
use to describe you?
• How do you see yourself?
Let’s review the definition…
A customer experience is a blend of a
company’s physical performance and the
emotion evoked, intuitively measured
against customer expectations across all
moments of contact.
John Ivens and Colin Shaw – Beyond Philosphy
The goal is then…
• to make the customer experience statement
something that you can act on
• to create something you can do, you can say,
some image you can present
• to write the statement in a way that can be
easily understood and inspire people into
action
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CWA | The Customer Experience Company TORCHI March 20, 2003

Sample customer experience statement Your strategies and tactics…

We want our customers to have a thoroughly …are based on the experience that you want
enjoyable experience on their holiday. We will your customers to have.
achieve this through providing a very friendly
and accessible customer experience that they
trust. Everything we do will be delivered in a For example – “fun”, how would you reflect
timely and reliable manner that will be second that in: your website, your staff attitude?
to none. The result of this is that our customer What specific things what you do?
will become loyal and will say “I would never
dream of going anywhere else.“

Thank you for the invitation to speak

www.carolynwatt.com
Carolyn Watt