Customer Experience
Improvement Program

Customer Experience Reviews | Customer Experience Improvement Program |
Designing a Spiky Customer Experience

How can you improve customer experience? How can you design a customer experience improvement program to manage the critically important customers at the extremes of "problem children" and "delighted customers".

SRD Group takes clients through the "Two Birds with one Stone" program.

Outraged customers are true problem children. They not only defect but also (often) depart in a storm that is time consuming and de-motivating for your staff. Alternatively, delighted customers' actions bring real benefits. Their profit impact brought about by their loyalty has been well documented. They are usually great to deal with and openly show willingness to actively support you. The more of them you have, the better.

The challenge is, "What strategies should managers employ to best manage the critically important customers at the extremes—to encourage the advocates and silence the problem children?" Given the importance of the two customer extremes, SRD Group's Customer Experience Improvement Programs are largely based around the 'Two Birds with One Stone' (pdf 108k) strategic logic.

In short, this strategic logic argues that two strategies must be employed in order to maximize growth from a customer base - these are the “two birds”.  The first strategy must be to reduce dissatisfaction by meeting the basic expectations of customers.  To do so reduces the number of “detractors” - negative customers who tend to leave for a competitor and bad mouth the offending firm.  Fixing the problems that cause such dissatisfaction will not in itself, however, overcome the ambivalence customers feel towards a provider.  This requires another strategy altogether aimed at making a company stand out above the rest.  This is the second “bird” in the two birds with one stone strategy.  One of the most powerful ways of doing this is to deliver an outstanding experience for the mass of customers- a “spiky experience”.  To deliver on these two strategies requires consistency more than anything else.  Customers need to know what to expect and to get it reliably over time.  The “stone” in this logic is “consistency”.

SRD Group's customer experience research is also conducted with this logic in mind so that we can identify customer expectations, the performance against these expectations and what customers believe an organisation stands out for. The results of the research form the basis for our customer experience improvement programmes, the goal of which is to improve performance against expectations and to develop an experience that the company stands out for - the sum of which is the best way to get organic profitable growth.

This is done either through a facilitated programme where we work with a designated team of individuals to develop 'basic' and 'spiky' recommendations for implementation or on a consulting basis where we carry out the bulk of the work.

Some of the companies that we have have conducted Customer Experience Improvement Programmes include Jade Software Corporation, Fuji Xerox New Zealand and Crop & Food Research.

Further details of what is involved in a Customer Experience Improvement Program and how we can help improve customer experience is available on request.