1. What role does a attitudinal loyalty play in customer experience?
Research shows that attitudinal loyalty plays the biggest role in customer loyalty. If customers have a positive emotional outlook towards the customer experience, especially when measured against a competitor, they are more likely to buy from you and become loyal (repeat purchases).
2. Define offer customers justice?
Lot of time employees need to get on the same wavelength as customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer's mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.
3. Tell me what role should employees play regarding customer experience?
Employee emotions are as important as customer emotions in the customer experience. Employees and managers who feel unable to do their jobs as they perceive they should be done and feel powerless to change the situation become unhappy and less able and willing to put out the effort it takes to keep customers happy. Rather than speak up about problems, they simply focus on doing what they are told, what research company For rester calls a "culture of compliance."
4. How much would you try to replace the human customer experience with a digital one?
There is clear evidence that digital contributes a lot to making the experience easy and fast, especially in transactional types of relationships such as buying a book, which customers like. Digital is also great for information-intensive experiences, such as complex products and services that require customers to do a lot of research before buying and of course, digital experiences are much cheaper for companies, though most surveys show that companies do a poor job of managing them especially when it comes to coordinating across digital and human channels.
Companies that invest in delighting the customer without first making sure they are at least meeting the expectations of the vast majority of customers are probably wasting their money. Getting a free gift card for a restaurant is meaningless if the food and service are not so hot to begin with. The first priorities should be to drive down customer effort and sacrifice.
6. Tell me how would you determine how much should spend to improve customer experience?
If, through competitive analysis and surveys of customers, it is clear that your customer experience lags behind your competitors then improving customer experience should be considered part of the cost of doing business. Customers can research you and your competitors much more easily now through the web and social media. The holes in your experience will be revealed, causing negative emotion and an exodus to competitors.
7. Define the phrase treat customers with empathy?
This means hearing customers out and treating them with dignity and respect at every point in the interaction and acting to defuse emotional tension without having to put on false emotions such as a painted on smile.
8. What things should a company focus on training employees?
Companies should focus on training employees to offer two things:
★ Treat customers with empathy
★ Offer customers justice
9. How would you train employees during the customer experience?
Even the best employees can burn out if they are forced to adopt what researchers call "surface acting," in which employees have to put on the proverbial smile and feign emotions that they are not feeling during an encounter with customers. Part of the stress is that customers can sometimes detect the falseness of employee's emotions, which research says causes customers to react negatively.
10. Should you be looking for a person to fill roles in the customer experience?
For those who interact directly with customers, yes. Research says that extroverts do better in customer experience roles because they are more naturally inclined to want to interact with others. But these extroverts should also have the ability to do three things:
★ Regulate inner emotions
★ Tolerate ambiguity
★ Enjoy helping others
In combination, these factors give employees extra endurance when it comes to dealing with people and more ability to suppress inappropriate behavior (even when customers deserve it).
11. Tell me what is emotional labor?
Most people who work directly with customers these days have been trained to suffer. Researchers have even developed a term for it, emotional labor. Studies have shown that employees expend a lot of mental energy in the customer experience, such as having to express happiness when they do not feel it and having to suppress anger and other inappropriate behaviors when customers treat them abusively.
12. How do the people fill the experience potholes and pay the price?
Companies use people to try to ameliorate the long hold times and the call transfers that stem from having to navigate among different archaic systems and process workarounds. It is an extremely difficult job and it is why call center turnover rates are so high.
13. How will new technologies help regarding customer experience?
The good news is that technology has finally caught up with the customer experience problem. Cloud technologies make application integration easier and in-memory databases have the power to hold massive amounts of information from multiple systems together in real time, that would have seemed like science fiction to mainframe developers of the sixties and seventies.
14. Has the customization created a nightmare in customer experience?
To make matters worse, companies have layered customization on top of customization over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases and the internet. They have made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.
15. Please tell us what is the reason to be held still regarding customer experience?
It is one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it is quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually because the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration - and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it, simply did not exist.
16. Tell me about the role of digital in improving the customer experience?
Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centers, for example, are as old as a graying dad even a few grandfathers.
17. Tell me how would you identify where the problems are in the customer experience?
Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and out sources. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.
18. Tell me where would you start to improve the customer experience from?
Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research found that moving customers from rating the experience "below expectations" to "meets expectations" gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.
19. Tell me how much should my customer be improved?
In any relationship with a company, customers expect or at least hope that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.
20. Do you know about the personalization in customer experience?
Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalizing the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.
21. Tell me what is low effort and sacrifice in customer experience?
Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort. Another issue is the trade off between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing.
22. Tell me why does a customer experience matter?
Some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions:
★ What do your customers think about you?
★ What do your customers do based on their perception of you?
23. Please tell me what is customer experience?
Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company.
24. Tell me about the positive emotion in customer experience?
Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.
This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers do not feel that they can trust the interaction points or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase. Research says that trust consists of two main components:
Confidence:
Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service.
Benevolence:
Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customer's self-interest above their own.
26. Tell me about the most important elements of customer experience?
Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:
★ Trust
★ Low effort and sacrifice
★ Positive emotion
★ Personalization
27. Tell me how much your products and services factor in customer experience?
Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill, product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalization have made it much easier for competitors to crank out "good enough" substitutes.
But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.
Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.
29. How would you know that your customer experience needs to be improved?
You can not necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online), they will simply go to a competitor or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:
★ Is our market share slipping?
★ Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
★ Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
★ Are we getting fewer recommendations and favorable reviews online and in social media?
★ How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)?
Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.
30. Tell me what goals should be for improving customer experience?
You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.
31. Final thoughts? Shameless plugs? What should every reader remember about this interview?
I'll just plug the three things that might help WebWord readers the most: first, our free e-mail newsletter, the CG Update, explores the customer experience every two weeks
Our advantages are our vision (no one else focuses on the customer experience), our team (no one else has such selective hiring), and our culture (one of openness, listening, and partnership). We're trying to build a solid company that actually creates good online.
33. What is your role at Creative Good, and how did the company get started?
I'm the president of Creative Good. I founded CG in January 1997. For the first year I slogged it out alone in my suburban New York apartment, conducting a guerilla marketing campaign to raise awareness of Web ease-of-use. During the second year I conducted my first few consulting engagements and wrote my first Good Report, "In Search of E-Commerce," with Robert Seidman. My campaign, consulting, and report brought about significant improvements on several top e-commerce sites; this prompted InfoWorld magazine to award me Netrepreneur of the Year 1998 for "doing more than any other individual to make Web commerce sites easier to use."
In February 1999 I hired an awesome CEO, Phil Terry, who came from McKinsey and Harvard Business School. We've been growing Creative Good together ever since. Now I have the pleasure of working side by side with some of the most talented, passionate people in the industry. I can say this with confidence because our hiring is extremely, extremely selective. We're 15 people big, and growing fast. All bootstrapped.
Creative Good has a four-phase method: strategy, qualitative assessment, usability tests, and after site launch, ongoing maintenance. Essentially we start at the most strategic level and work our way into the tactics. At each step we base our work on what we established the preceding phase. To anyone interested in the customer experience, I'd definitely suggest starting at the strategic level. Don't just jump straight into usability work.
Overall, probably our most effective "technique" (if you can call it that) is our absolute commitment to creating a good site for the customer. We do whatever it takes to show our clients their customers' perspective.
We don't ask customers what they want; we watch what they *do*. There's a big difference
