By John I. Todor, Ph.D., Author of Addicted Customers (www.AddictedCustomers.com)
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.
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