Myer and Schwager in their Harvard Business Review article on Understanding customer experience (2007) talk about customer interactions. When core offering is a service, interactions matter more. According to Myer and Schwager touchpoints that advance customer to a subsequent and more valuable interaction (example Amazon´s 1-click ordering) matter more. In each touchpoint the gap between customer expectations and experience spells the difference between customer satisfaction and what is less.
And what makes service experience matter more? In a service experience, as a customer, you are greatly involved in the transaction. Due to the nature of your purchase (non physical good) your expectations may vary a great deal. Imagine a travel experience as an example.
I´ve earlier described my experiences in online shopping. Ordering goods was a positive and pleasant experience but returning and exchanging the same goods resulted in a huge disappointment. Same company was managing various customer processes. Some worked while others not. Result was my dissatisfaction and their loss.
In service environments, fundamental is service design - how you plan customer experience from first contact point to the last.
Planning service experience can be done understanding the customer opinion of the company throughout various touchpoints, rather just having customer data on the purchase history (mostly available through CRM approaches). Therefore planning a full scale customer experience is an extended step to managing customer relationship. In practice this could mean focus on customer needs and not fearing to analyze customer opinions; what it reveals and what are the actions to be developed.
In order to implement customer experience management process, companies could extend their evaluation of past patterns (eg surveys) to observation and face to face interviews in order to understand also present or potential future patterns.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Service availability
In some industries, service availability is one of the key success factors of companies. Providing service to customes when and where they need it is crucial.
In Helsinki, there is an ongoing project called "snow fight". Snow fight is a crisis initiative by the city of Helsinki to clean the streets of snow. There are few places where to place snow, there are problems ploughing the snow due to parked cars. Overall there are 2.600 km of streets to plough and there is a question of availability of snow ploughing equipment and personnel. It is difficult to keep their number optimal since we haven´t had this much snow this time of the year in several decades.
I was trying to find snow ploughers myself. It seems the availability of snow services is scarce or I´m simply asking at the wrong time. It´s the high season of snow. In my neighbourhood my household is the only one who would like to pay for snow ploughing service. The experience from previous services is bad. Therefore people rather do it themselves. Nobody was just able to predict the scope of this work few years back. Last winter was horrible. I was out snowploughing even four times a day. This winter I`ve already had enough. I sprained my back. I was out last night. I was out this morning. I will go again since snow just keeps coming.
The companies I called were not interested in just one flat out of many. Too long trip or too small job. Some contact people were just not interested in ploughing snow. They had other jobs more attractive and were busy with those. Service availability is scarce and we´ve not even discussed about price yet. If somebody invented a company where you could call ad hoc? No news, those companies exist already and still no progress. Which online application would integrate people who could do the job vs those who need the service now.
In Helsinki, there is an ongoing project called "snow fight". Snow fight is a crisis initiative by the city of Helsinki to clean the streets of snow. There are few places where to place snow, there are problems ploughing the snow due to parked cars. Overall there are 2.600 km of streets to plough and there is a question of availability of snow ploughing equipment and personnel. It is difficult to keep their number optimal since we haven´t had this much snow this time of the year in several decades.
I was trying to find snow ploughers myself. It seems the availability of snow services is scarce or I´m simply asking at the wrong time. It´s the high season of snow. In my neighbourhood my household is the only one who would like to pay for snow ploughing service. The experience from previous services is bad. Therefore people rather do it themselves. Nobody was just able to predict the scope of this work few years back. Last winter was horrible. I was out snowploughing even four times a day. This winter I`ve already had enough. I sprained my back. I was out last night. I was out this morning. I will go again since snow just keeps coming.
The companies I called were not interested in just one flat out of many. Too long trip or too small job. Some contact people were just not interested in ploughing snow. They had other jobs more attractive and were busy with those. Service availability is scarce and we´ve not even discussed about price yet. If somebody invented a company where you could call ad hoc? No news, those companies exist already and still no progress. Which online application would integrate people who could do the job vs those who need the service now.
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