Creating sensational customer experiences

    The author - Chris Daffy, the founder of The Academy of Service Excellence, spoke in Warsaw on 14 September 2005 at a one day workshop organised by Bigram S.A. and Golden Mark. 
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e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Everyone’s talking about customer experiences. It’s difficult to pick up a business magazine, a new book about customer service or even an annual report nowadays without some mention of it. But if you ask the questions, “When does a product or service become an experience?” or “How are customer experiences measured?” most people don’t seem to have a simple answer. Or at least the ones I’ve asked didn’t.

    The concept is definitely right. I’m convinced that we should be finding ever more and better ways to manage and deliver sensational customer experiences. But you can’t manage something if you don’t know precisely what it is. And if you then want to control it you must be able to measure it. What I have heard is lots of complicated theories about the subject that usually relate back to something with the letters CRM. But I, and the customers I work with, like things simple, so as no one seemed able to offer answers that anyone could understand I thought I’d better have a go at providing them.

    To understand any subject properly I think you need to go back to the basics. And the basics of this subject are in the book The Experience Economy, written in 1999 by Pine and Gilmore. This was the book that really kicked off interest in customer experiences and suggested how they might be used to create differentiation, competitive advantage and higher margins.

    The following 2 diagrams, taken from this book, help to outline the basics.

    Diagram 1 indicates how experiences are created and how they are positioned somewhere above goods and services. The key point is that they are not the same as goods or services. They require something different and extra to happen before they may be classed as experiences. This Diagram also shows how it is customisation that moves things up this experience value chain and commoditisation that will move them down.

    We are surrounded by examples of this; I think a good one is Starbucks. There was a time when I considered Starbucks to be an experience. That was when the concept was new, fresh and different. But it’s not any more, at least it’s not for me. Now it’s just another of the many places where you have to queue (which I hate doing) to get a decent cup of coffee. It’s one of those great concepts that was different at first, but that’s been copied and so commoditised by competitors. Starbucks haven’t continued to renew and refresh the experience so it’s now pretty much the same as all the rest; and to me, no longer worth a premium.

    In comparison there is Hayley Conference Centres, who operate the UK’s premier meeting and conference locations. They’re full of sensational experiences that are always changing. Every time you visit there’s something added that triggers new sensations. They’re never happy with how things are and are always looking for ways to improve everything, all the time. Every new Centre they open contains fresh ideas and every time you visit existing Centres there’s something new to enhance your learning experience, improve the service or tantalise your taste buds. As a result they’re way out at the front of their market and unlikely to be caught by any competitor.

    Diagram 2 lists the key elements that divide experiences from the other economic offerings. I think the words in that right hand column are the key to experiences and warrant a great deal of thinking about.


Experiences are staged.
Experiences are personal.
Experiences are revealed over a duration.
Experiences are memorable.
Experiences trigger sensations.

    Try to think of the last time a supplier hit all those buttons for you. I doubt whether you’ll have many such recollections……if any! There really aren’t very many organisations focussed on delivering truly exceptional customer experiences.
 
    Philip Kotler, the world famous Marketing Guru made this point in a recent presentation. He said, “Positioning customer experience is a relatively new concept and most organisations don’t understand how to do it; how to stand out in their customers’ minds with a unique experience."

    I guess that means the path is clear for those that want to – and are able to create an organisation with systems and people that can.

    As always, Tom Peters, the Business Guru, has a phrase that encapsulates the essence of this –

    "The whole experience thing is not about tactics…… it's about soul!"

But how do you build what Tom calls soul into a business offering?

    Kjell Nordstrom, who co-wrote the book Funky Business, has a great phrase to encapsulate this. It is that most of the things that created success in the past are now ‘Necessary but Not Sufficient’ to create success in the future. He suggests that until recently most businesses have been able to base their success strategies on the Darwin theory of ‘The Survival of the Fittest’. But the techniques that were used to support those strategies, like, TQM, BPR, CRM, and all the many other three-letter business improvement techniques, are now rapidly falling into the category of ‘Necessary but Not Sufficient’. What must now be added are equal doses of strategies based on a theory that Kjell suggests could be called ‘The Survival of the Sexiest’. We must find new ways to become the most attractive to customers by appealing to their emotions as well as (but not instead of) their logic. We must ‘feel’ better or more appealing to do business with.

    So how do we do that? Well I’m convinced that the clues lie back in Diagram 2. Experiences are based on ‘memorable sensations’. And what creates memorable sensations? The following diagram will help me explain how I think it works.

  In Diagram 3, the horizontal axis represents how good or awful an experience is. Awful or OUCH on the left and fantastic or WOW on the right. In the middle is OK. That means the experience was merely what the customer expected it to be.