Is Your "Customer Experience" Hurting or Helping Your Customer Retention?

By David Lazear

At the core of great customer service is the “customer experience”. When it's positive, it leads a dramatic increase in customer retention. Allow me to introduce this concept of customer experience by way of a story about when I purchased my first car.

I was in college. My parents finally agreed that I could get a car but I had to do it on my own; although they agreed to give me their advice along the way. It was the end of my sophomore year; however, I looked like I was a freshman in high school! I basically knew nothing about buying a car but I jumped into the process to learn by doing it.

This all took place before the days of the internet so I had to do my research via newspaper ads and just dropping in to used cars lots. One ad which caught my attention talked about used cars at great prices for the first time car owner. I decided that this was where I would begin.

I remember walking on the lot of the company which ran this ad. The first thing I noticed is that no one noticed! No one noticed that I was there; or rather, apparently no one thought that this young kid was a serious buyer. I wandered around by myself and eventually found a light yellow Corvair (a compact car made by Chevrolet back in the 1960s) which was in the price range I thought I could afford.

I had to go find a sale representative to assist me. In fact to get someone to help me, I had to interrupt a coffee break where several reps where sitting around talking with each other. I really felt like I was an intruder on some private club meeting.

Eventually a salesman joined me on the lot to talk about my desired Corvair. I had a number of questions about the car. The whole time he talked down to me as if to say, “Sonny, why don’t you come back when you’re older and know what you’re doing?”

I don’t know why I preserved. Today I wouldn’t. But I desperately wanted a car. I told him I wanted to take it for a drive. He said “Fine, but I’ll go with you. And I need to see your license first.” He had apparently missed the fact that I had driven my father’s new Pontiac Bonneville to the lot!

During the whole driving experience I felt like I was back in driver’s education just learning to drive. It was pretty humiliating. But somehow, I got us both back to the lot alive.

I told him I was interested in the car but wanted it for a lower price. (My father had told me to negotiate with them if I found something I wanted.) Finally we agreed on the price and we moved to the financing. From my experience thus far I’m sure you can guess what this experience was like. I had a job, a good chunk of money I had been saving for my first car, and I had established my credit-worthiness through a couple of credit cards.

Of course none of this mattered. Eventually my father had to come in a cosign with me on the loan. I got my car, but my customer experience was dismal. As I said earlier, being older (and hopefully wiser!) this company would never get my business today.

My guess is that no one in business today would treat a potential customer with such disdain. However, as you think back over my story, were you reminded of any areas where the “customer experience” in your organization needs some work?

Designing the “Customer Experience”

The customer experience involves every single moment of contact a customer has with your company or organization from the very beginning, through the actual sale, to the contact with the company after the sale into the future. In my car-buying episode my customer experience began with the newspaper ad that led me to the used car company in the first place.

Customer experience involves both the direct and indirect contacts and dealing with your company whether it be customer experience through your website, a print ad, FAQs you may have posted, forms which they fill out requesting further information, the experience of calling your 800 number, the “on hold” experience when this is necessary, the sound of the voice at the other end of the line, the first impressions they form in face-to-face customer service situations, what your body language communicates, and how your dress impact them.

Literally every single, minute part of a customer’s contact with your organization, regardless of how subtle, consciously and unconsciously creates the customer experience. This is why carefully considering your relationship marketing is so important.

The number one key to designing a great customer experience is to understand that each customer is unique. Each customer has different needs. They have different goals and dreams. They have different problems they're trying to solve or challenges they're trying to deal with.

The quickest way to connect deeply with your customers is to also understand that each customer processes information in slightly different ways. They’ll express their goals, needs, concerns, issues, problems, and challenges in ways that are unique to their “learning profile”.

When you can recognize how they learn best, how they process information, how they remember things, how they know what they know in their lives AND you tap into their uniqueness in your dealings with them, the customer experience suddenly becomes an experience of building long-term customer relationships, which goes way beyond the present moment with a given customer.

I'm going to follow up this article with several additional articles on how to assess and recognize a customer's learning profile AND how you can adjust your communication with them to address their learning profile. So return to this space over the next several weeks to get your copy of what I call "CustomerSmart Strategies".

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About the author:

David Lazear is a mentor and coach for mentors, coaches, and trainers. He is an associate of Mike Klingler and Ann Sieg at the Renegade University and Renegade Professional.

David has written some 15 books and created numerous resources for home business entrepreneurs, coaches, and trainers. His expertise is training others in how to assess and address other’s “learning profile” using the research on “multiple intelligences” (a.k.a. The 8 Kinds of Smart).

David Lazear teaches how to turbo-charge any mentoring, coaching, and training you provide so you Reach Everyone, Everytime – Guaranteed!

Contact information for David Lazear

Phone: 773-525-6650
E-mail: David@Home-Business-Smarts.net