In 1877, John Wanamaker founded one of the first department stores in America. He was also one of the first retailers to put price tags on his merchandise, guarantee its quality, allow cash refunds, and demand that both his employees and customers be treated with dignity and respect. To buy at Wanamaker’s meant top quality and top service. Not surprisingly, his business gained thousands of loyal customers and went on to become a resounding success.
The way in which things are bought and sold may have changed since John Wanamaker’s days, but people have not. Just as his customers did, we expect top quality and service, which is the foundation of good customer experience.
Customer experience is a journey. The starting point for our journey may be a visit to a website or to a store. In the case of a website, we expect it to be attractive, easy to use, to function properly and to show us what we’re looking for. If we call the number listed on the website, we expect to be greeted in a friendly manner and to have our questions answered satisfactorily.
If all these things go right, the business has started off on the right foot and is more likely to gain a customer. If the website is slow to load, eats up our data plan, and is difficult to navigate, or if the sales staff is impolite or indifferent, we’ll never visit the site again. Result— customer lost forever.
In the case of a store, we’ll be looking at how well merchandise is displayed, the quality of the merchandise and how friendly, helpful and knowledgeable the salespeople are. If both of these things go well, then a sale is more likely. On the flip side, a poorly maintained store with shoddy merchandise, or a rude or indifferent salesperson, will lead not only to a lost sale, but the loss of future sales.
Then comes the purchase, which is only a small part of our customer experience. The major part is the service we receive after we’ve purchased the product or service. A business that is proactive in this area, working hard to assure top quality and service, as did Sam Wanamaker, will have plenty of happy, returning customers. A business that is not, will have unhappy customers who never return.
This doesn’t mean there won’t be problems, even with top quality products and services. It’s a given that things will go wrong sometimes. A product you ship to a customer may fail to arrive, or arrive broken, or have a missing part. The thirty year roof your company installed last week may leak in the next rainstorm. The great CRM app your team developed may brick a customer’s computer.
While customers don’t expect all purchases to be problem free, they do expect immediate attention and a quick solution to their problems. If this happens, their overall customer experience will be good, as long as they don’t have to go through repeat performances. If this doesn’t, the answer is obvious.
Customer experience doesn’t stop here, however. We are all social animals who love to share our experiences with others. If we have a fabulous meal at a new restaurant, we tell our friends about it. If we’ve got a dependable plumber, we’ll recommend him to everyone we know. On the other hand, if someone’s done us wrong in the product or service area, we’ll warn everyone we know.
In the pre-Internet days, word-of-mouth couldn’t travel too far. You could make a phone call or two, and that was that. Whatever you had to say began and ended with your circle of friends, acquaintances, or business associates.
Now, however, those experiences, both good and bad, can be transmitted at the speed of light to virtually the whole world, showing up on Facebook, Yelp, Google, Amazon, Trip Advisor, and thousands of other sites. Today, nearly 60 percent of customers read four online reviews before making a purchase. Almost half of all internet customers post a review at least once a month. And close to half expect businesses to answer their negative reviews within a week.
This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for businesses today. If we take our cues from John Wanamaker, we’ll have no problem growing a large base of loyal, satisfied customers. Some will take to their computers and phones, leaving us positive reviews, which will bring more customers. At the same time, others will leave negative reviews. This means that successful businesses now have to recognize customer reviews as a vital part of customer experience and manage them accordingly. The challenge for every successful business today is to stay on top of its game, ensuring that the journey of all of their customers is one they’ll want to repeat again and again.