Whether you’re shopping for the latest gee-whiz-bang mobile device, enterprise software or a hotel room, chances are your satisfaction with your purchase will not be determined by the features and functions, but by your overall experience doing business with the vendor.
There is so much parity in the products we buy today that true differentiation often is driven more by customer service, support and the overall experience. It is no longer a discussion of B2B or B2C, but now one of H2H human-to-human because customers care about their experiences and will make future buying decisions based upon them.
That is why customer experience has now become the next competitive battleground. Companies such as Amazon, ING Direct, Whole Foods and Starbucks understand this and have made customer experience core to their business DNA. New research from the Temkin Group entitled What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014 highlights the importance of customer experience in driving customer loyalty.
The report examines which companies and industries provide the most bad experiences, what impact those experiences have on spending, and how the negative impacts of bad experiences can be mitigated by good service recovery. To understand the effect of good and bad experiences, the Temkin Group asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about their recent interactions with 268 companies across 19 industries. As part of the analysis, they examined how service recovery after a bad experience affects the spending pattern of consumers. They found that 62% of consumers who had a ‘Very Poor’ service recovery experience decreased their spending, while 29% of consumers who had a ‘Very Good’ service recovery experience increased their spending.
Bottom line even if an organization falls short on meeting customer expectations, if they finish strong and provide a great overall experience, customers will remain loyal and continue to spend. This is why I believe customer experience is the next competitive battleground for organizations, and those who embrace it will thrive.
Melissa Sargeant is senior director of Product Marketing for the Application Delivery business at CA Technologies. She is responsible for driving customer-focused initiatives related to DevOps challenges and opportunities and the company’s Application Delivery suite of offerings.