A recent survey commissioned by Harris Interactive found that 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of one bad customer experience, up from 59% 4 years ago.

*Source: Harris Interactive:

Customer Experience Impact Report 2011

86%! And growing, this is clearly showing an increasing gap between customer expectations of their experience and what companies are delivering.

Why is this happening?

Rationally it does not make a lot of sense. One would think that switching costs and the time already invested by the customer in doing business would preclude them from changing suppliers.

However, the reality is that we are driven by EMOTIONS. Experiences that create powerful negative emotions tend to override any logic or rationale thinking.

Have you ever gone off the deep end? Think about the last time you responded emotionally to a situation that in hindsight seemed like an overreaction? We have all been there before.

What does this mean for companies?

Matthew Broderick is giving us a time-out during the Super Bowl, and for a middle-aged, recession-weary public, the timing couldn’t be better.

Broderick, if you haven’t heard, is reviving Ferris Bueller, the school-cutting, life-loving teen of the 1986 movie. It is for just a brief time, but it is the quality of the moment, not the length, which matters.

The effort comes in the form of a commercial for Honda. That’s right, instead of the wickedly gorgeous, cherry-red Ferrari 250GT California, Ferris ditches work and gets his kicks in a red CRV.

But it works, not surprisingly. With smart writing, an eclectic soundtrack and a terrific cast, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off introduced lines that are still being used 26 years later, from “Bueller? Bueller?” to (more resonantly) “If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?”

To our delight, many of these lines (as well as the Yello song “Oh Yeah”) are used in the ad, no doubt designed to get viewers of a certain age to nudge each other conspiratorially. Remember that? Wasn’t that great?

By uniting with Ferris, Honda is aligning itself with the free-spirited, adventurous youth who still lives, somewhere, in all of us. It is extending our loyalty from the principles of Ferris to the principles of Honda.

This is the second of a four part interview with Rob Siefker, the Director of the Customer Loyatly Team at Zappos. In this part of the interview, Rob talks more about the service metrics that Zappos tracks, how the company empowers its Customer Loyalty Team Members (and has avoided bureaucracy), how escalations to managers work at the company, how the Zappos compensates its employees, and the extensive continuing education programs employees have access to at Zappos and how they work.

You can read part one of the interview here and part two here. To read this part, click “read more.”

My household after work is probably not a lot different from yours.  Assuming everyone is home for the evening meal, there is the requisite “what do you want for dinner?” question followed almost religiously by the “I don’t know…you pick” response, which invariably leads to an uninspired selection based on how quickly and easily it can be put on the table.  After dinner and at times during dinner if I’m being completely honest, we sit down to watch a comedy because it’s something the three of us usually agree on and it sets a positive tone for the night.

Once the meal is over, however, all nighttime viewing bets are off.  My husband, son, and I have a running debate about what we watch on TV.  Their interests lean toward sports, sports commentary, sports news, shoot-em-up movies, anime, and The Three Stooges (I’ll never get that last one).  Me, I’m happy with a prime time comedy, a few quick passes through the shopping channels, and any DIY or home improvement show that catches my attention.

In response to my last two posts, an “Open Letter to Buyers” and an “Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations”, I have tried to articulate the evolution in the conversations I’ve had about why social is disruptive to business as we know it, why a buyer-centric approach is so critical to the long-term viability of your business, and why your team needs to pay attention now.

In its simplicity, buyer-centric means “it’s not about you, it’s about them.”  Buyers are tuning out self-serving messaging. They crave context and the ability to compare. But perhaps, it would make more sense if we look at our evolution which has now brought us to buyer-centric.

In our infancy, as a sales-centric organization, we were very reactive to the market.  Our initial belief was that the market was craving a strategic forum for social.  If a buyer approached us within a specific need that we could fill, we wanted to centralize it for them.  We quickly realized that all things social meant that you could not satisfy everyone. We advocated for thought leadership, but early interactions were vendor driven conversations.

Take a look at your business through SD Logic

If you use the Service Dominant Logic lens (as opposed to a good dominant logic) it opens up a new way of looking at the interaction/interface between your business and the Customer.  The key aspects of the Services Dominant Logic (for me) are:

• the Customer approaches your business because he/she has a job (something to do) and an outcome (the desired end state) in mind;
• the products and/or solutions you sell are better thought of as services your provide to help the Customer get the job done and achieve her desired end state.

SDLogic gives rise to the question: how useful am I to the Customer?

If you look more deeply into this you are likely to see that a key question arises: how USEFUL are you and your products/services/solutions to the customer in terms of the job he has in mind and the outcome/s she wants?   It seems to me that many are attracted to all manner of ‘toys’ and yet few are focussed in excelling at being USEFUL to the customer across the customer journey.  I would go further and say that what I find most stunning given the whole thing around customer-centricity, customer focus, customer obsession is the lack of conversation around the following questions:

Here’s a reality check. Your business, as well as mine, is going to make mistakes – lots of them. Assuredly we are trying to limit those breakdowns; however, some of our customers wont be raving and may even be raging about a subset of experiences with us. If there is a light at the end of this dark tunnel, its the comfort that comes from from knowing that our competition is invariably also failing customers and that we have a chance to distinguish ourselves by our commitment to make things great when things go wrong.

So here’s a challenge, can you create a culture where your shortcomings are actually the source of your business’ greatest strength? Rafe Needleman writing for CNET shares his perception of striking difference in the service mindset between Dell and Apple. According to Rafe, when he encountered a problem with a Dell PC tower, Dell’s outsourced repairmen inconvenienced his schedule by requiring in-home maintenance and then the repairman failed to show up for the appointment all together. After several frustrating interactions via phone, e-mail, and even Twitter, Rafe purportedly received a refund but vowed never to purchase from Dell again.

My initial interest for this podcast was the perspective of Design from an Architect’s viewpoint. How does it differ from an industrial engineer or even an industrial designer, or other Design fields such as marketing? What makes an architect thought process different? I was surprised not in the answers that I received from my guest, Zachary Evans, an architect and partner at Kelty Tappy Design, Inc. What did surprise me is the lens that they looked at things. In musical terms, they were not the composer of magnificent musical piece but rather the orchestra leader that enable a variety of talents to perform at their best for the audience (the customer).

As I grabbed my cup of coffee and began to leave, the Starbucks clerk smiled and said, "Have a super day!" I smiled, chuckled a bit and said, "Absolutely! You too!"

There was more to this short conversation than what it appears.

I live in Indianapolis where the Super Bowl was just played. Thousands of volunteers were recruited to assist visitors at the airport, in hotels, and on the downtown streets. They were all encouraged to complete each conversation by saying, "Have a super day!"

Not surprisingly, it caught on. People in Indianapolis started hearing, "Have a super day," wherever they went. So when this Starbucks employee said this, it wasn't just a typical expression. What she was really saying was, "Hey, enjoy that coffee, but also remember that the Super Bowl is right here in our city this weekend where there is a fantastic energy so enjoy every minute of it!" At least that's what I heard.

It was a nice touch. And nice touches make customers feel good about giving a company their business.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP

P.S. Every company should have nice touches. A while back I posted a blog on this topic and here is a link to a book dedicated to helping companies differentiate through G.L.U.E. - giving little unexpected extras.

Customer experience management (CEM) programs involve the collection, analysis and dissemination of customer feedback. These customer feedback data are extremely valuable to businesses. Customer feedback data are used to help senior executives identify and improve key drivers of customer loyalty. They help call center staff immediately address specific customer issues.  They help managers understand how their business unit compares with other business units. Finally, customer feedback data can help your marketing and research departments uncover deep customer insights through more sophisticated analyses of the data and linking customer feedback data to other sources of enterprise data (e.g., employee data, operational data, financial data).