Customer experience: The next major evolution
Customer experience: The next major evolution
Rhenald Kasali
Contributor
Jakarta
Is there any company that makes you feel very special? Are
there any beautiful memories of the last time you purchased a
product or service? Are you loyal to any brand? How often do you
recommend a brand, be it of a product or service, to anyone else?
These are some of the questions that prompted the emergence of
"experience" as one of the hottest words in marketing strategy
for more than a decade.
"Experiential marketing" was a mantra introduced to the
marketing world in the mid-1990s. This new concept was based on
the premise that customers were seeking more than functional
values -- price and quality -- as they started to demand the
fulfillment of emotional values.
Consumers were using all their senses and started to feel,
think and take action accordingly in their relationship with
companies through their products and services. So, using this
experiential marketing concept means that companies have to
provide an experience -- utmost and lasting satisfaction, in a
simple phrase -- that is holistic as it blends every element:
sensory, emotional, conceptual, participatory and relational.
By using experiential marketing a number of companies have
indeed gained success. Starbucks with its "Third place" concept
has changed the perception of drinking coffee not only in
America, but in numerous countries. Disney World and its
associated companies have for years been loved by children
worldwide.
Harley Davidson makes men dream of owning their products. In
the airline business, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and
Southwest Airlines, and Amazon.com for online shopping, are
success stories of experiential marketing. These successes have
given many other companies no option but to follow suit. However,
not a few of the followers failed in the implementation. Their
huge investments in this strategy, to their great disappointment,
increased neither their profits nor customer loyalty.
The companies who failed forgot that each company serves
customers with uniquely different characteristics. So the success
of one company in the same line of business does not
automatically mean that similar success can be achieved by just
copying the other company's strategies. Imitating a successful
company's strategy becomes even more difficult when the types of
businesses are worlds apart. Therefore, experiential marketing
that works for an airline cannot be copied in its raw form by,
say, a telecommunications company or a bank.
Another reason for failure is that companies design customer
experience from their own point of view, rather than what
customers really expect, both from the physical or concrete
features and the ensuing emotional impact. Hence, the creation of
the second mantra, customer experience, which is, in fact, a
natural and more effective evolutionary step of experiential
marketing.
Customer experience is often defined as a blend of a company's
physical performance and the emotions evoked in a customer,
intuitively measured against the customer's expectations across
all moments of contact.
Some basic differences exist between customer experience and
experiential marketing. Customer experience is more "outside in",
while experiential marketing is still in the "inside out" stage.
Clearly, "outside in" means being able to identify consumers'
expectations in a holistic way, both physical and emotional
aspects, so that the company can provide them the ultimate
experience at every moment of contact. In short, it has its roots
in customers' wishes and entails the fulfillment of the relevant
wish.
Until now, a number of companies still mistakenly think that
moments of contact for customer experience only take place in the
conventional channels, such as shops, dealers, service points and
so forth. These locations, albeit necessary, are costly and not
all customers use them all the time. Take the payment point of a
telecommunications company, for instance. Today, many payments
are made through ATMs or e-banking, at least in major cities.
Physical payment points with their costly offices and staff are
useful in smaller towns or in some isolated areas. Given this
situation, telecommunications companies are well advised to
improve the payment points in smaller towns and remote areas and
keep such heavy investment offices to a minimum, while,
simultaneously, enhancing the virtual points of contact -- ATMs,
e-banking and phone banking -- for a more elevated customer
experience.
In the more holistic customer experience concept, evoking
customers' emotions to the fullest and regular monitoring is
required. Indofood, for example, has launched a wide range of
variants on its fast-selling packaged noodles, Indomie, to
satisfy the taste buds of the entire nation. Different spices and
flavors are produced to specifically cater to each region. Bank
Mandiri, with its Mandiri Prioritas product concept, is offering
customers a specially coordinated art and shopping tour to some
of the country's famed tourist resorts. At first, this may seem a
simple idea, but to the bank's priority customers the trip to
handicraft centers in serene villages has proven to be a
memorable experience.
Paraphrasing what Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler wrote in their
book Managing the Customer Experience, the essential core of
experiencing the brand lies primarily in managing a brand well
and changing desired values into promises that are implemented
for the customers' lasting and memorable satisfaction. The
product itself is then only an "artifact" of the truth of a
promise. Generally speaking, only companies with established
brands in a mature market adopt this strategical concept. Take
Coca-Cola, for example, which offers its customers experience
refreshment.
With today's fierce competition, customer experience is
acknowledged as the natural evolution of experiential marketing
and, undoubtedly, one extremely effective tool for any company's
success beyond simple survival. It boils down to really serving
the customer to the utmost. The decades old adage the "Customer
is king" is no mere slogan anymore. (The writer is a senior
lecturer at the University of Indonesia's Schools of Economics)