Customer experience pitfall — focusing on the micro

Michel Falcon is a public speaker and business coach in the space of customer experience.  He posted something a little while ago called “Customer Experience isn’t Customer Service.

In that blog, he had a single line that struck me as excessively poignant.

Customer experience is the premeditated design of what your customer experiences when doing business with you from beginning to end.

Too many companies focus in the micro-transaction instead of the macro-experience around the customer. Elevating the experience from mediocre to phenomenal takes a lot more focused effort than how do I handle this single transaction, this single event.  There is a massive difference between how someone implements their business and focuses on the customer.

All too often, companies make the statement of “we’re customer focused”.  What does this mean?  In many cases, it means that they handle the individual micro-transaction with the customer well or it means that the company is rated A+ on the BBB or it means that they have a 5 star rating for customer service on Yelp.  When you drill down into the depths of this, the fact is that the majority of the BBB or Yelp ratings are based on a single event – a single opportunity to do well or badly. It doesn’t mean that there is a strategic, concerted effort to build a customer experience from start to finish for the entire lifecycle of that customer.

Similar to the difference between Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction (which I’ll cover in another blog post), Customer Experience and Customer Service are two separate entities.  One speaks to the way that you service a complaint or deal with an order.  The other, the more broad reaching, speaks to the overall impact that your business can have.

Customer Service leads to Satisfaction. Customer Experience leads to Loyalty.