Customer Experience – Perception or Reality

Customer experience is the frontier where the battle for customer loyalty (and associated revenue) is being fought. Every industry and companies therein have started focusing on it. New ways and methods are being experimented regularly. Companies are trying to give a better customer experience than what they are offering today or what their competitors are offering. This is to create a unique differentiation and create a challenge to its competitors.  The game is to give customers something beyond their expectation in every transaction that happens between company and customer. Key is to understand the expectations, which do change based on the situation, and provide a right response at right time. 

Gartner has defined Customer Experience as the customer's perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's employees, systems, channels or products.  As per Forrester, Customer Experience is, how customers perceive their interactions with your company.

Note the word perception used in both the definitions. Perception, according to Cambridge dictionary, is a thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances. Which means customer experience is totally dependent on how a specific customer feels specifically about a specific thing during the interaction. It may not be reality and different customers will have different experiences for the same interaction and totally governed by the psyche of the customer at that moment. Theoretically the same customer can experience different experience for the exact same interactions at two different times. If Customer Experience is a perception, a few questions arise

·       Is there any Base line or Absolute reality or Empirical Gold standard for Customer Experience which can be used by companies?

·       Is there any way to measure perceptions?

·       Perceptions can change based on various extraneous factors on which company has no control: in that case, is this a valid measure or we need to find a better way to understand the perceptions quantitatively?

Customer experience is subjective and hence measured in generic terms like Bad-Good-Superlative or on the scale of 1-5, etc. i.e Customer experience is a result of interaction between the response a customer gets throughout the transaction to procure any product/service vis-à-vis the expectations he/she has, before starting the transaction. If the response matches the expectations, customer typically brands it as a “GOOD Experience”, if expectations are not met, the experience varies on the negative side and if customer gets something beyond what is expected, the experience gets labeled as SUPERLATIVE. This brings out another variable which impacts Customer Experience i.e. “expectation of the customer from the transaction”. This impacts the score given by customer. In the normal circumstances, current experience becomes baseline expectation for the next transaction and so on. The same level of interaction creates -ve impact on Customer Experience levels as the +ve gap between current experience and expectation is reduced and over a period of time, it becomes zero or -ve, turning the direction of Customer Experience in opposite direction.

Although Customer Experience is a perception of customer and it can be different for different customers, customers take their actions like buying more or shifting to competitor based on these perceptions. So, these perceptions become reality for the company, and they need to act as if they are absolute reality. Hence Customer experience could be defined as REALITY OF PERCEPTION

This subjectivity and variability create a significant challenge for companies. It is difficult to quantify the Customer Experience level for any specific transaction with customers thus posing further challenges in identifying the remedial measures as well as implementing them to improve the CX. This is one of the key reasons why companies are hesitant to implement new measures and unsure of their results. If we are able to remove the subjectivity from the Customer Experience measurement, the companies can heave a sigh of relief. I have an idea to achieve this and converting Customer Experience from Perception to Reality which can be quantified. The key is to use the available data in the system rather than asking feedback through a survey (which adds subjectivity). We can define success criteria for any transaction e.g. If we are organizing an event in the store, success criteria of the event could be increase in footfalls into specific zone in the store. If we are able to count footfalls at the event, footfalls at the target zone when the event is on and compare the same to the footfalls before the event was launched we can find if the event was effective and customers liked it or not without asking the customers. If the footfalls are more than the normal footfalls, the event is effective; if they are same then event has no impact and if they are reduced, then event has -ve impact. These measurements can be taken on continuous basis and company can tweak the event on continuous basis till they get the right result. The example given above is a simplistic example to get an understanding of concept of quantification of Customer Experience without asking customer. With new developments in AI/ML, several algorithms could be written to understand complex situation.

Once we are able to quantify the Customer Experience using available data (not using survey), it could be rationalized across multiple segments, zones, geographies, etc. and company can take appropriate actions. It is now no more Reality of Perception but Reality of Reality.