The WoW Factor in Customer Experience

--By Barkha Jaiswal--

Customer experience is an important part of customer relationship management. Customers who have a great experience with a business are more likely to become repeatedly loyal customers. If you want your customers to stay loyal, you have to invest in their experience!

This brings us to long-discussed, debated, and deliberated words like customer service, customer experience, and customer delight- creating that Wow Factor. Often used interchangeably in our daily lives without realizing the horizons each one of them covers.

Let’s take a deep dive into how these differ and then question where an organization I am.

CUSTOMER DELIGHT – CREATING THAT WOW FACTOR

Sounds great. All of us dream of having happy customers. Easy said! With the determination of an organization to be achieved. We have examples of many brands before us who have been able to achieve it to a very large extent and have become aspirations for others.

When a company manages to achieve customer delight or has created the WOW factor it earns the trust and loyalty of the customers.  Then the question is not about customer acquisition it’s about customer retention and maintaining the delight factor – could be through the introduction of timely quality products in case of IT firms, a new collection in case of fashion brands, getting the latest trending products to store for a departmental store and so on.

When an organization works towards customer delight every aspect of the organization internal and external has to be aligned to be at the edge of the cliff to view the horizon.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

We all talk about our experience with a brand in day-to-day dealings and develop a perception. This perception leads to our decisions about a brand/company in the future. With a plethora of channels budding through which one can connect with current as well as prospective customers, it becomes a challenge to achieve a channel-agnostic service. Once you have channel-agnostic or omnichannel customer handling capabilities you have started creating customer experience.

Many a time, it becomes difficult for organizations to map their customer-facing processes and channels and become channel agnostic.

Let’s look at an example that many of us would have experienced in our lives – I walk into a retail clothing chain, before reaching I had a look at the products in the E-commerce multi-brand store and their E-commerce store. I already have 2 price offerings for the same product. When I walk into the store I might or might not get a price similar to any one of the above. As a customer, I am perplexed, and indecisive on the fake and real products and hence might not buy without an answer on why the difference.

Result- a customer who could have walked out with a purchase we have a customer with a negative experience.

In today's, technology-driven, fast-paced world it has become a necessity for all brands to be omnichannel if they want to be in the race.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service is a reactive approach to connecting with the customer. Here are a few examples-Customer walks into a store I connect with the customer post he enquires about a product I am reactive and, hence, I give customer service. Another example to ponder over Imagine the product bought by the customer did not work, I get a call from the call center and I am reactive again.

In the above 2 examples, it highly depends on the customer and his/her perceived value of your services to build a long-term image of your Brand, which might or might not lead to increased sales through Word of mouth or Customer Loyalty.

We at QDegrees have been working closely with our esteemed customers in defining the journey from a customer service-oriented company to creating the WoW factor in customer engagement.

We bring this through our cutting-edge customer experience management and customer service measurement solutions designed and developed on the latest technologies (Schedule a call with our Consultants to know more about our services)

Stay Tuned for more on what factors impact customer experience.