Customer Experience is the experience which is coming from the customer and not from the brand who wants to build the experience for the customer… this would be brand experience. But how do we build a true Customer’s Experience with the ” ‘s ” in it’s core?
There is a huge discrepancy of companies goals and customer goals. Companies work mostly for their stakeholder. If a company is on the stock they work for the share price development. To increase the share price there are different ways to reach this.
- Work with existing client and grow them
- Offer new products and services
- Grow the client base
No rocket science. In reality a company works on all directions which is important. Let’s step into an example on a business network which did all this points well.
The network has a huge number of premium and free user. Now they want to grow business and the share price. They offer new different premium accounts with new features (great), they win massive new clients (great)…. They offered special accounts for recruiter for example. Recruiters went happy and have had no problem to pay much more than before.
- Features in the premium account are cutted step by step and shifted to other premium accounts with a much higher price.
- Usability of the website went down, functions where shifted from one place to another and user need to search for it
- Performance of the website went down massive. Just a like of a post needs around 10 seconds now.
- …
The worsted thing was and is that they don’t listen to their customer. They push their strategy through. Existing premium clients got frustrated, but this doesn’t matters because the share price is growing through the acquisition of new clients and squeezing the existing once.
Existing clients are frustrated an angry on a very broad base. When their pain went to massive they deleted their account or they just canceled their premium subscription and often pointed to their profile within another business network. Often they have had no chance to leave this business network because people they want to network with are only in this network. That’s why the switch to another network isn’t taking place quickly. But if you are looking on the profiles you see that more senior people switch more. So the C-level rate is going down since a while.
The company behind the network did everything well. The share price is growing and the stakeholders are happy.
If we are not just a stakeholder, if we are an active user of the network and a networker, we see a growing powder barrel. On the one side they made one group of user (recruiter) very happy, but they lost the connection to the broad base and many other groups of user. Senior management level is rare and important for a business network for example and this group switched already to the other network. It’s just a question of time till enough user of the broad base has switched to the other network. At this time there is nothing which holds the rest. At this time the share price will go down and there is no chance to stop this.
From a hospital we know the sentence “Operation successful, patient dead”
What this company did was building their strategy and experience for the network. This they want to implement in the market and in the heads of the user. This is no customer experience, this is brand experience… and a very bad brand experience. They placed company goals and revenue higher then customer interest, needs and pains.
The given example is a very clear example of how to do not. For sure your company is doing it better. Sure? Often it is exactly the same, but not that obviously like in this example. Have a look at the goals behind and what’s really driving the company. It it the customer’s experience or the revenue?
Operation successful, patient dead… this is the direction we are heading to at the moment withing the topic customer experience. We need to awake and change something. It is not a risk to do so, it’s a great chance!
