Experiencing

We often make the topic of customer experience and customer management way too hard.  At the most basic level customers want solutions to problems.  You then have to provide that solution.  Generally the bigger a company the more difficult it is to deliver the target solution effectively and efficiently – resulting in customer dissatisfaction and loss of revenue.  In service industries human dynamics play a major role  because of a concept called sales and service delivery by people (aka “your branded associates”).

To start you on your way, here is the definitive article on how to think about customer experience in the service industry, Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work.

Here is an excerpt from my Master’s Thesis (which I hope to recraft as a book) about considering new techniques and tool to upgrade customer experience.  It’s based on Heskett’s service profit chain model and the work of Joe Wheeler, Service Profit Chain Institute’s Executive Director.

More recently I have been exploring multi-variate techniques and ran across a company called WhyData, who have a patented approach to get at near real time customer experience (and resource allocation) optimization.

So have fun building a better “Branded Associate”.