Exceeding Customer Expectations Is A Moving Target
According to a recent study by Gartner, 89% of marketers expect that customer experience will be their primary differentiator by 2017. The quality and relevancy of the product and the competitiveness of pricing will continue to be important. However, good product and pricing alone will not be sufficient to differentiate one company from another and create brand loyalty and advocacy. Customer expectations regarding the entire experience continue to increase with regards to the pre-purchase process, ordering, receipt of goods and services, customer support, billing, and after-sales support.
The problem is that just when a company figures out how to exceed the expectations of its customers, the bar is raised and that solution ends up becoming the new expectation. There is an old term from New Orleans called “Lagniappe”, which was coined when people bought things like sugar and flour in bulk. The shopkeeper would measure out the number of cups that the customer ordered and then throw in a little extra and declare “Lagniappe”. Webster defines Lagniappe as “something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure.”
Some companies have successfully used the “Lagniappe” principle to differentiate themselves from competitors. If you have ever visited a Ghirardelli store, someone always meets you at the door with a free sample of one of their chocolate squares. When you shop at Nordstrom, the sales clerk walks around the counter to hand you the shopping bag, rather than just handing it to you over the counter. If you have ever been to a Five Guys Restaurant, when you order fries, there are always just as many fries laying in the bottom of the bag as there are in the actual fries bag. We used to order dog food by mail and whenever we received our order, there was a sample bag of some other product thrown into the box. All of these little extras delight customers and add to the quality of the total customer experience.
But what happens when you do not get the free piece of chocolate, or the clerk does not walk around the counter, or there are not extra fries in the bag, or the pet food company stops throwing in the sample bag? The customer becomes disappointed because what was once “Lagniappe” has now become an expectation. So companies are challenged to constantly find ways to meet the rising expectations of customers by finding new ways to improve the customer experience. Amazon is a great example. The company has done an incredible job of continually raising the bar on the customer experience. Many people first started shopping at Amazon because of the price. But they continued to improve on the customer experience with quick delivery times, great availability of products, an ever increasing breadth of product offering, and services tied to their Prime status like free shipping and live video and audio streaming.
There is significant research and evidence that, in fact, the customer experience is driven by the employee experience and their related level of engagement. The implications to an organization are significant when they think about where they spend their time and resources. The best way to ensure that a company always has its hand on the pulse of its customers and understands how to constantly exceed their rising expectations is to create a culture in which employees are engaged and passionate about what they do and about the experience they create for customers. We often hear from organizations that start down a path of creating a culture of high engagement, only to find their efforts distracted by other priorities that have come up and require their time and resources. If in fact, 89% of marketers agree that the customer experience is becoming the basis for differentiation in the market and overwhelming evidence supports the belief that the employee experience and level of engagement drives the customer experience, what could possibly be a higher priority than investing in creating a culture of high engagement?