This week Alex looks at the customer experience and how you, as an organisation, can manage it. What makes customers experience services the way they do? What factors influence their evaluation of a service? And, what tools and skills can you employ to manage their experience and make sure your customers are getting the most from your service.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• We evaluate services through our own individual experience of them, not from what the service provider believes they are providing. To improve the experience of your customers you must look at closing the gap between what they experience and what you provide.
• One great way an organisation can assess their services is by asking customers to complete a questionnaire where scores are graded numerically. This provides the organisation with a clear indication of where they are performing well and where they are performing badly.
• Customers often judge their experience based on responsiveness from the service provider. Therefore, it is advantageous to act fast on any customer feedback.
• Perception can also heavily influence the customer experience and, in turn, their feedback. If somebody is expecting a meal at a restaurant to be perfect, but it isn’t, this could influence their feedback to be lower than it would be if their expectations were not as high.

BEST MOMENTS

“If you disappoint customers by not meeting their expectations you can recover. But, if you disappoint them by not meeting their basic needs, you will lose them.”

“On average, happy customers will tell 6 people about their experience, but unhappy ones will tell 15 or more.”

“97% of potential customers are influenced by reviews.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

Alex’s Website: www.as-insights.com

Alex’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/alexvci

Alex’s Linkedin : www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrastacey

Alex’s email: info@as-insights.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Alexandra Stacey is fascinated about value and our perceptions of value. She undertook an MSC in Strategic Marketing and Customer Experience Management with the University of Buckingham’s Business School and her dissertation included how value is experienced. Her own life experience includes being a parent, marketer, teacher, project and events manager and musician. She is the founder of AS Insights. This is a business that helps organisations improve through uncovering their stakeholder’s experiences interpreting them through behavioural theories.

PODCAST DESCRIPTION

In today’s world businesses and organisations are able to deliver things much more quickly at the touch of a button than 15 years ago. And our competitors can too.

We are in danger of escalating journeys down the wrong track and be too far gone to retrieve them.

Wouldn’t it be so much better to do the right thing right first time instead of becoming very efficient at doing the wrong thing?

Well this is what this podcast is about. It is about optimising value in your customer or employee or stakeholder experience in different manifestations. You get to understand how we think and behave in different scenarios and can apply them to your own purchasing, sales, recruitment, team-building, customer retention and audience perception management.