Love and Hate Drivers—Multiple Touch-Point Experience

What drives us love or hate a particular touch-point experience?

Recently we've conducted two customer experience surveys on two key touch-points--Inbound Call and Online Experiences. The call center customer experience survey was jointly conducted by Australia-based CallCentres.net and GCCRM in March 2007, and the online customer experience survey was jointly conducted by US-based Web Analytics Association and GCCRM in December 2006, with 2,013 and 2,010 valid responses respectively.

One of the interesting findings is the Love and Hate Drivers. We define Love Drivers as the reasons for customers to love a particular touch-point experience, and Hate Drivers as the reasons for customers to hate a particular touch-point experience. The love and hate drivers are shown at below diagrams.

Love and Hate Drivers--Call Center

Love and Hate Drivers--eCommerce

Consumers may love and hate for different reasons. For example, when we asked the survey respondents why they 'hated' any inbound calling experience, the top driver is hard to get through (29 percent), but when we asked them why they 'loved' any inbound call, only less than one-tenth cited wait time in the queue (8 percent), attitude became the top hate driver (27 percent).

Similarly, when we asked the survey respondents why they 'loved' any e-commerce web site, more than half cited convenience (29 percent) and product variety (26 percent), but when we asked them why they 'hated' any site, only one-fifth cited convenience (8 percent) and product variety (12 percent). Here product price (18 percent) and web site design (18 percent) determined the negative emotion.

Different decisive factors dictate why consumers stay loyal or stay away, but these findings are not the primiary reason for us to conduct these surveys--we want to identify the Effective Pleasure and Pain Peaks. In order to determine whether the sub-processes within a touch-point experience are effective (memorable) positive and negative peaks, we have to verify with the love and hate drivers, as the truly pleasure and pain peaks should reflect, to a large extent, the corresponding key love drivers and key hate drivers.

Only when we've identified the pleasure and pain peaks, we are able to assess (partailly) the effectiveness of an experience--it lays the foundation to optimize single touch-point and synergize multiple touch-points. (I've elaborated the survey findings into two articles on Online Experience and Call Center Experience. The survey reports are also available for free download)