Inside the Customer Experience

Presented to: ASQ Spring SeminarMarch 31, 2011

By Susan Abbott

Where we are going

Ways to understand the experienceModel of customer experienceRate your value chainA fast tour of behavioral scienceOnboarding, service recovery and response timeThe (most) fun part

Ways to understand the customer experience

Get the numbers

Observe it

Experience it yourself

Ask people

The successful strategists of the future will have a holistic empathetic understanding of customers and be able to convert somewhat murky insights into a

creative business model that they can prototype and revise in real time.

To do all that, they’ll have to be good communicators, comfortable with ambiguity and

ready to abandon the quest for certain, single-point answers.

Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman SchoolHBR March 2011

Highly customized hard to standardize Almost always involves personal contact Usually multiple individuals involved on both sides Both sides have risks The transaction is usually not the end goal

B2B is different than B2C

But we are still dealing with human beings

Filled with emotions

And wired for survival

Four biggest mistakes:

Assuming that functional considerations matter most

Assuming decisions are primarily rational Mistaking positive interpersonal for

added-value relationship Thinking that the customer thinks the way

you think

We are mostly loss-averse

The Peak-End Rule

Why “delighting the customer” is so difficult

Fast response to online queries = results

Less than one hour is 60 times as effective as 24 hours or more

Effective onboarding improves retention and revenue

60% of cross-sales happen within the first month.

In the self-serve era, we solve the majority of our problems ourselves

The Before + After Tool

Our Experience Today Our Experience in the Future

Susan AbbottAbbott Research + Consultingsusan@abbottresearch.comwww.abbottresearch.comwww.customercrossroads.comTwitter @susanabbott