- Develop and manage an experience that ensures your outcomes align with customer expectations
I read a review about Nandos in Ghana recently on social media after the demise of a franchise and was intrigued by the sentiments customers expressed as they shared their disappointment that the Nandos at Osu was no more. This is what one customer shared, ‘Food is average. No Air conditioning last time I went for a takeaway. I hate them for taking away Nandos. Their nandos didn’t taste like Nandos, but I am sure they could have improved upon that rather than stopping the whole franchise altogether.’
Another had this to say, ‘Not a bad place to go to for snacks and drinks and meeting people. Service was always good and I had to charge my phone one day and there was not an issue about leaving it behind the counter. In the UK, your phone would probably disappear or they would not take it to recharge it – so thanks for this service. Tables cleaned quickly and waiting staff attentive and pleasant, as what you come to expect in Accra. Nice relaxing soundings and a good meeting point.’ Very encouraging sentiments about customer experience offered by the defunct Nandos franchise.
Simply put, a Nandos franchise that existed years ago at Osu and is now extinct (these posts were in 2012), has left very lasting memories in the hearts and minds of its patrons such that they were even positive about the fact that had the franchise stayed on they would have hit the mark and exceeded expectations. Their Customer Experience was unique and the customers who were privileged to enjoy their services have not found a comparable service level, and are openly expressing their disappointment.
Two lessons we can draw from this. First, Customer Experience is fast growing in relevance and is increasingly being adopted as a means to differentiate and compete in every industry globally. Second, Customer Experience principles and programmes are actively implemented in businesses, notably the private sector as well as government agencies and charities, and NGOs alike with demonstrably tangible outcomes that catch the attention of boardrooms. It has become a game-changer and therefore needs careful management to realize its benefits. This means as a business small, medium or large, or any organization for that matter the need to focus on your experience as a strategy is non-negotiable.
It begs the question, what is Customer Experience (CX), and how can it serve my organization? Three issues we must address as we reflect on CX in our organizations are; for us to understand the intended purpose of customer experience, define very clearly the purpose of our customer experience programme, and decide the approach for the CX programme.
Purpose of CX
Customer experience is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. Every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service, and receiving the product/service they bought from you results in the customer experience. Therefore, everything you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not. This implies that a great customer experience is a key to your success.
When you are deliberate about delivering a great customer experience you connect with your customers in ways that ensure that they respond to you by coming back again and again. They are quick to share their experience with your brand and are eager to return for more. The better experience customers have, the more repeat custom and positive reviews you are likely to receive, while simultaneously reducing the frequency and friction of customer complaints and returns.
Virgin Atlantic differentiates its service by delivering a live stream of concerts and the Father Christmas experience during flights. They go above and beyond to deliver a memorable customer experience either to one individual customer or a group of customers. Putting customers first is always good for business, by supporting this quest with data to prove it the customer experience initiative gains credibility, more importantly, your customer will be your greatest advocates. Their loyalty and genuine love for your brand will spur them on to tell positive stories about you and like the biblical story of the woman who met Jesus at the well in Samaria they will go shouting ‘look what happened to me when I went to ….’
One big development in CX is the Digital Transformation taking place today making CX a very important aspect of running any business successfully. Even before Covid-19, digital was already impacting how we all lived, shopped, worked, and played. The pandemic has upended things even more. Many of the consumer behavioral changes we are seeing today are likely to stay with us for a long time, possibly forever. Some have been in motion for years. Many have now been accelerated.
Type and Purpose of a Customer Experience programme
The goal of any customer experience programme is to influence change in the organization. Once the process begins, we must identify the sequence of events that will bring about the change needed and sustain this over an extended period to effect real change to the culture of the company. You will be pursuing several tiny changes with mechanisms to ensure that change is monitored, measured, and celebrated. There is a caveat here, the nature of CX is such that it does not neatly fit into a big programme plan box as doing so will rather limit success.
Your goal is to deploy a system of executions for customer experience management. You will be deploying processes and tools to improve the touchpoints and interactions customers have with your company and the resulting perceptions from those interactions. Your Customer Experience Management (CEM) programme will progress based on the scope you address at every point in time ensuring the coordination among different business processes and customer-focused activities. All these must develop the right synergies to enable you to achieve your organization-wide goals.
According to Tarvsan and Edem (2018), your customer experience encompasses such components as your brand experience, where you focus on sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli. According to researchers, brand experience is totally within the control of the company. The company can design the logo, colours, and uniforms for their salespeople for example. I recall my personal experience in Nandos in the UK where I met a client regularly as a consultant. It was an out-of-the-world experience.
As you enter a friendly waiter welcomes you gives you a tag and walks you to your table if there is one available. S/he takes your order and in 5 – 10 minutes you will be pounding away at your meal. I can never forget the friendly environment and the tasty meal. These are all carefully planned and executed to enrich your experience and guess what I am talking about it nearly a decade after benefitting from it. In some ways, I can identify with the disappointed patrons of the Osu Nandos.
Your planning will also encompass the product experience ensuring that customers encounter meaningful experiences with your product. Anything short of that will result in negative perceptions of the product and the company as well. There is also the shopping experience where customers look forward to exciting experiences during shopping. Having to duck from shelf loaders in supermarkets frequently while shopping is certainly not an interesting experience. There is also the user experience arising from virtual interactions between the customer and the offering. Your programme must specifically address different facets of the experience to manage customer expectations.
Decide the approach for the CX programme
Three distinct approaches are shared by Jeff Sheehan a CX consultant in his book, Customer Experience Management Field Manual. According to him, one approach is to chase customer expectations, another is to focus on operational efficiency and the third is an aligned outcomes approach to customer experience management. Focusing on the first one we can understand that many of the expectations customers have of your brand are influenced by their interactions with other brands.
For example, the differences between how Apple manages its lines during a new iPhone launch and the way a cinema or nightclub works their lines set some sort of broad, general standard over time that customers can use to elevate their expectations for that particular type of experience. The risk in this approach is that it can send you into a tailspin as you will ultimately find yourself striving to meet customer expectations of quality, friendly service, and personalization reactively. Unfortunately, this approach does not generate the innovation and transformation needed to lead in the industry.
An operational approach leans on an inside-out orientation where the design and delivery of products, services, and experiences to customers are based on policies and profits. Inside-out thinking means your focus is on your internal processes, systems, tools, and products that are designed and implemented based on internal thinking and intuition. The customer’s needs, jobs, and perspectives do not play a part in this type of thinking, they are not taken into consideration. Your decisions are based on what you think is best for the business, not for customers.
The aligned outcomes approach ensures that your customer experience management combines the setting and management of customer expectations through brand promises with a clarity of purpose on what the CX programme intends to do for the business. This way you avoid the laborious practice of chasing the diversionary trends of customer expectations set by so many other experiences. You also avoid the ‘navel-gazing’ tendency of focusing on your internal dynamics.
The following attributes are associated with the aligned outcomes approach;
- Understanding customer jobs-to-be-done with your offerings and why they buy.
- Focuses on how customer expectations were formed and delivering the outcome the customer wants.
- Invests in and improves the quality of the channels the customers use.
Approaching customer experience management as an aligned outcomes-based operation is the ideal approach for your customer journey and the resulting experience. We must intentionally align with and deliver on our organization’s business strategy and brand promise. A customer who experienced a glitch at a touchpoint in Nandos was offered as a gesture of goodwill, an invitation to the restaurant for a complimentary meal using a chicken cheque voucher attached to the letter they sent to the customer, and it was valid for six months with an option for it to be redeemed at any of Nando’s restaurants.
Unsurprisingly, customers here in Ghana are desirous of seeing Nandos back on our local turf and why not!.
| The Writer is a Management Consultant (Change and Customer Experience). He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/in/km-13b85717/ |
