Customer Experience is a the Sum of all Interactions

When many organizations do customer experience, it’s piecemeal. How can you tell? It’s quite easy to tell when you’ve interacted with the organization.
In the era of instant communication and social media, customers have not only demanding more ways for an organization to interact with them but also the timing of their choosing. Many organizations have implemented multiple channels, staffing them with agents, chat experts and social media specialists but yet it all doesn’t quite work when the experience suffers.
Here’s one story which I tell people when I talk about CX and how loyalty is lost easily today. This is a major tool brand that I’ve been using for decades. I trust the brand. They have had good sales people and store demos of the equipment have been top-notch. Recently one of my power tools had a problem so I try to contact them on their website. I get an automated response but a week passes without any reply. Before the week is up, I try messaging them on Facebook. Silence. I try again two days later without success. Guess what happened then? When a competing brand had a sale, I jumped ship. Today, months later, they still haven’t responded to my questions.
Every interaction is a chance to make or break the customer experience. A good sales team will make the sale but eventually, your bad after-sales service or cumbersome warranty process dampens that experience.
Think about a brand or product that you feel delivered great customer experience to you and you will find that it will run a full gamut – from pre-sales to post-sales. We’ve not even talked about the product or service yet. So for good customer experience or CX, it has to cover the entire spectrum as you can see from the below image. Leave a gap and someone will find out. Nowadays, more often sooner than later.