Walking in the Customer's Shoes

Peter Fisk, author of best-selling Customer Genius, describes the essential 10 steps to developing and delivering a great customer experience ...

Every business is attempting to attract and serve its customers, whilst many companies are also appreciating the value in retaining and building relationships with existing customers.

They do this by developing better products and delivering better service. They have probably embraced customer first programmes, market research, new products, process re-engineering and measuring customer satisfaction. They might have developed loyalty schemes, databases, built call centres, improved service levels, and introduced balanced scorecards.

However, most businesses are still not approaching their customers in a particularly focused or integrated manner. They typically seek to maximise the numbers of customers, rather than being selective in which customers to work with. They typically develop solutions which attempt to satisfy everybody, but delight nobody. They typically work separately in their functional silos, rather than working together for customers. They typically deliver inconsistent levels of service, rather than together delivering a seamless customer experience.

So what makes a great customer experience?

The exceptional customer experience is one which is great for customers, and great for the business. It must deliver

- superior value to customers, meaning that the experience and its benefits must be clearly differentiated, personalised and relevant.

- superior value to the business, meaning that the experience and its delivery must also be profitable, efficient, and generate significant loyalty.

Customer loyalty typically emerges by consistently delivering superior value to the customer. Managed appropriately, it is the source of sustainable future profitability for the business, and therefore a key driver of shareholder value. This need for mutual value creation requires customer experiences to have a relationship, rather than transactional focus. This may sound obvious, but it is rarely heeded.