Customer experience

Superior execution demands a sharp focus on the details that shape the customer experience, right down to the cleanliness of the floors. 

Lesson 1 Focus on details that shape the customer experience... 

Technology enables competitive advantage in terms of both the quality and speed of the customer experience and management decisionmaking. We want to get customers into and out of the stores faster. We want to move products in and out faster. And we want to get information to managers and executives faster. 

Avoid costly innovation missteps and consistently provide a superior customer experience. 

Throughout the life cycle of a product or service, variation can and will occur. Because variation negatively impacts performance, the resulting customer experience will also be negative when the product or service fails to live up to expectations. Robust design seeks to predict variation before it occurs, and then prevent or minimize it through design. 

Customers have been eonditioned to expeet eonsistency thanks to businesses like Starbucks, McDonald s, and countless others that strive to deliver the same product regardless of location. Control Plans enable any organization to replicate the customer experience by clearly doeumenting how to keep the process in control, what to do if it goes out of control and who is responsible for putting it back in control—all of which results in a reproducible process that delights customers and maximizes prohts. 

When you identify clear roles and accountability prior to delivering a new product or service, you can better predict and control the customer experience. This field simply documents who (or what) is responsible for keeping the process step in control. It could be an employee, a supervisor, a supplier, or even a machine setting or software program. 

The how is often the hidden delighter in the customer experience. Customers will be infinitely more forgiving when something goes wrong if the response is appropriate and is delivered in a predictable manner. 

Salespersons can learn important, relevant scientific facts about what they are selling and can directly inform the R D person about problems their customers experience. 

To make a claim for benefit, a working age applicant must call a First Contact Officer , based in a call centre. This official identifies the clients personal circumstances, issues the appropriate benefit claim form and books an appointment with a PA (usually within three to four working days). All claimants must then attend a WFI with the PA whose task is to check documents, assess employability, identify barriers and provide employment assistance. They may match and submit the individual to vacancies available on the computerised Labour Market System . Claimants are then subject to job search, activation and WFI requirements related to the benefit they are entitled to. This JCP customer experience process has been designed to reinforce its employment first strategy by separating benefit advice from employment assistance (see Fig. 21). 

Another group of methods uses the assessment of service encounters or moments of truth (i.e., the contact between customers and the service provider) for measuring service quality. An example of those methods is the critical incident technique (Bitner et al. 1990). This method uses structured interviews to gather information about customers experiences that have roused either very negative or very positive emotions. From those interviews, the most relevant problem areas are determined. This type of method allows the customer to describe the service encounter from his or her point of view instead of assessing it by predefined criteria. The method normally leads to the most significant causes of service failures. 

Perhaps the biggest drawback to developing exceptional customer satisfaction is that information about what is important to customers comes from talking to ourselves (the executives of the company), not the customer Understanding the customer experience from representative samples of customers using qualitative measurement and analysis is generally possible, and it guarantees that poUdes and procedures instituted by a company ate not based on idiosyncratic and/or nonrepresentative (of aU a company s customers) pieces of data or belief. 

It really is very simple. If you want people to solve problems right now, give them right-now information. And magically, if you want employees to create an enhanced customer experience (internal and/or external), give them the right information exactly when they need it. Access will be realized in a combination of bricks-and-mortar storefronts, the call center, and the Internet. If you don t deliver consistent accessibility, someone else will. 

There are many aspects which effects customer service. Some of them are directiy influenced by the structure of the distribution network [3] response time, product variety, product availability, customer experience, time to market, order visibility, and retumability. These factors, as explained below, affect supply chain network design decisions. 

Customer experience comprises ease and customization of orders, value gained during sales process. 

Response time, product availability and variety, customer experience, time to market, order visibihty, and retumability effect supply chain design decisions Manufacturing processes (i.e. batch, job shop) have impact on supply chain efficiency. 

The service concept component integrates both the operations concept component and the customer targeted component. It delivers multidimensional information through the business and its value-adding internal and external partners, and delivers a broader customer experience. In short, the services concept model delivers the what to the service value encounter. 

Experience of suppliers and customers plays an important role in an SC. In particular, customer experience management (CEM) will become a major issue in e-SC because the latter is a customer-centered service in the Internet world (Sun Lau, 2006). Further customer experience is a prerequisite for customer satisfaction in SC, which is highly dependent on the flexibility of the SC, such as its ability to respond to ehanges in demand. Because the selection and interaction space of customers in e-SC is theoretically infinite, how to manage customer experience in e-SC also becomes a significant issue for any e-SC providers. 

As an application of EM, customer experience management (CEM) has been studied in business and commerce (Schmitt, 2003) and e-services (Sun Lau, 2006). 

Schmitt proposes a framework to manage customer experience (Schmitt, 2003, p. 25) which targets the business managers or consultants. This framework consists of the following five steps ... 

Schmitt, B.H. (2003). Customer experience management A revolutionary approach to connecting with your customers. Hoboken, NJ John Wiley Sons. 

All of these stages present opportunities to enhance the overall customer experience, as well as to gain additional insight into customer wants and needs. Learning what information to collect at each stage and how to make use of it is an important research subject. 

The sales step is only part of the overall customer experience with an e-tailer. Providing convenient on-line ordering is certainly important, but if the firm doesn t back it up with prompt, reliable delivery of the product or service, the customer is unlikely tp return. For this reason, customer leadtimes are a critical issue in e-commerce systems. 

The user and the environment comprise the final level of the system interaction. The level of assurance for protection and safety on system level depends on the implementation by the manufacturer/supplier and also on the actions of the end user. This part of system level safety is about understanding the intended use of a product, and mitigating reasonable and foreseeable misuse that may occur. IEEE PI625, the Standard for Rechargeable Batteries for Portable Computing, was the first standard to encompass all levels of the battery manufacturing process and include the customer experience. 

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