In my talks and seminars I often ask the audience to recall a particularly negative customer experiences they have encountered. The audiences are typically business people who are interested in customer relationships. My first agenda is to get them to relive the emotions they feel when they encounter a bad experience. They do recall the experiences and they do relive the negative emotional experience, in fact, some have a little difficulty letting go. I do this so they have a personal frame of reference about negative customer experience and to imprint the powerful negative impact.
As an interesting aside, two business entities almost always dominated the negative experience list—call centers and cellular phone companies.
My next exercise is to get them to describe a notable customer experience. In this case the companies involved are more varied but there is a common thread. The experience almost always involves a situation where someone listened to them, empathized with them and did something to directly enhance THEIR unique experience. Once again, the participants become emotional; in this case the emotions are positive and usually lead to unabashedly advocating the company to others in the group. I am still surprised by the fact that while everyone can remember a negative customer experience, there are some who have to work hard at remembering a great one.
This sets the stage for discussing the psychological principles underlying compelling customer experience and the business strategies to put them into action. If the participants don’t have these anchors to reflect back on, their efforts to engineer a better customer experience for their customers are too clinical or sterile. They don’t focus on the essence of customer experiences—which are emotional.
By John I. Todor, Perfect CEM
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