What is customer experience?
For a customer experience to be great, we have to think of the whole experience at every customer touchpoint. Using the analogy of a three-legged stool, the legs are represented by Product, People and Place (place referring to the physical environment for B2Cs — and route to market for B2Bs). In a nutshell, your customers have expectations of a certain standard for each leg. But if one ‘leg of the stool’ is missing, the customer’s experience is less than expected. This is a superb tool to help you communicate your standards to your own people.
The stool on its own, however, is not enough. You also need to consider your positioning in the competitive marketplace. For example, the three-legged stool will work for a motor dealer regardless of whether they are selling high-end vehicles or low-end ones. Clearly both are poles apart in terms of price and quality however. Therefore, the brand positioning matrix should be used in conjunction.
BRAND POSITIONING MATRIX — LINKED TO LEVEL OF SERVICE
Your brand DNA should set the context and inform the standards for your product, people and place.
The answers are determined by what your desired brand DNA is. Your brand DNA is the core reference point and umbrella for every business. It informs ‘what good looks like’ for product, people and place. To further help you define your brand DNA and as a quick visual way to communicate it internally, plot your business in the price/service quality matrix on the right.
Example for illustration purposes…
Generally speaking – in the airline industry, Airline A would be in the top- right-hand corner and, by comparison, Airline B would be in the middle bottom. Generally speaking again, a Michelin starred restaurant would be in the top-right-hand quadrant and a fast food restaurant would be in the bottom-left one.
How to use this for your business…
Start by listing all of the main competitors in your sector. Take the most prominent competitor and rate it on both scales ie product and quality and put their initials in the appropriate quadrant. For example, if competitor ‘A’ scores 8 on price and 4 on quality, then insert ‘A’ in bottom-right-hand quadrant. Now using that first competitor as a baseline, complete the exercise and measure all other competitors against that baseline. Leave your own organisation to last. By plotting everyone in the matrix, you’ll get a visual picture of your competitive set.
What does it tell you?
Are you happy with where you sit? Are your competitors better differentiated and positioned than you? Does it prompt you to rethink your offer for differentiation purposes? The stool provides a possible set of questions and your desired positioning in the matrix will provide the answers.
Now consider where your optimum new position should be in the matrix. Do you need to make more changes? Know that there is a global movement in customer experience and organisations the world over are trying to improve their proposition. Excellence in customer experience is on the agenda of every organisation I work with. If you don’t focus on it, you’ll be exposed for not matching your customer’s expectations. You simply have no choice but to improve your proposition.
As you read this, your competitors are having similar thoughts about this topic and they too recognise the need to improve their proposition. Doing nothing as they improve, therefore, means that you risk going backwards.