In Eastern beliefs, “Karma is the law of moral causation.” You don’t have to understand the intricacies of this ancient philosophy to see the wisdom in the Sanskrit text, “According to the seed that’s sown, So is the fruit you reap there from…”
During our last conversation I mentioned two bodies of work on the subject of the importance of customer service and customer experience. Adding to this dialog, a recent survey by the research firm Strativity Group contributes that, “Customers continue to reward exceptional customer experience even in tough economic times.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and how the concept of the karmic effect seems to be expressing itself in the marketplace accelerated by the explosion of social networking.
First the survey: The Strativity 2009 Customer Experience Consumer study of nearly 2,000 respondents showed that companies who focus on superior relationships with their customer gain:
"• Significantly lower customer attrition;
• The ability to charge higher prices than their competitors; and
• The ability to capture a higher percentage of their customers’ wallets."
The survey also showed that inversely, “Unhappy customers are ten times more likely to cease doing business with companies within the next 12 months than loyal customers.”
Meanwhile according to Royal Pingdom, “Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year.”
So you’ve got a great product. You’ve spent significant sums on R&D, marketing and product launch. It knocks the socks off your competitors in features and functionality. Your studies show that you are priced right and you’ve started to generate a buzz.
Now customer experience enters the picture.
Customer experience begins before the purchase and continues through the relationship. Before they buy, how easy is it for your sales prospects to obtain information that allows them to decide in favor of your product? How easy is it for your customers to make their purchase? If they have an issue, how easy is it for them to get resolution? If they need information how readily available is it? If they call in with a question, how many times do you ask them for their account number before they reach someone who satisfies their concern? Does the information that they read on your website jive with what they hear on your voice self-service system?
Unlike karma, that is believed to be perpetual, the effects of good customer experience can be ephemeral. The afterglow exists in the mind of the customer but it is perishable. There are unlimited opportunities before and after the sale to fail. Success means perpetuating the experience factor across each interaction.
Think of all the touch points that contribute to the customer’s feelings about the experience. Each is a “moment of truth.” These interactions come in many forms. They can be: static as in the experience of a textual webpage, automated as in a self-service application, or personal as in a phone call or visit to or by a customer or service person, just to name a few. Experiences may even be observational, as you may see below.
It has been said that each “awe-shucks” wipes out a dozen “atta-girls.”
Here’s where the concept of the karma of social networking enters the picture. In today’s competitive environment, social networks can supercharge that “awe-shucks.”
Today, not only do you need to satisfy each customer, you need to worry about what their networks of friends and followers come to know about their feelings about the experience. One person’s comments can transcend their immediacies. The interconnectedness of the echo effect of social networks quickly becomes geometric. A single bad feeling can go viral and reach across the globe in what seems to be a nanosecond.
Consider this recent Twitter example. Across my feeds came a tweet, “Just watched a [package delivery service name deleted] guy crush a box to get it thru the xray at SFO #fail.”
Instantly, because this person’s social networking accounts are linked, not only did their 272 Twitter followers have this comment on their Twitter feeds, immediately their 802 Facebook friends had the comment available to be read via computers and mobile devices.
Because there are seemingly endless new social media outlets, many with astonishing volumes (by some estimates accounting for almost 10% of all internet time) and because these accounts can be federated, there is no complete way to know how far this information propagated.
There’s no telling how many - beyond the over 1,000 people who now associate the name of package delivery service with #fail - who saw this post “re-tweeted” it, replicating it across their networks, of networks, of networks.
And there’s more. By adding hashtags, which are a Twitter community creation that allows users to categorize information, word spread even further. #fail drove this comment to anyone monitoring this Internet euphemism for the topic of observed mistakes. This includes many applications such as the real-time hashtag monitoring google scroll “Latest results for #fail.”
So you may see how the wisdom embodied in the ancient concept of karma is today expressing itself through the electronic medium of the social networking. This revelation should present your organization with a whole new urgency behind creating transcendental superior customer experience for your customers.
Related discussions:
The Ultimate Weapon Enhanced 11 January 2010
Conquering the Hassle Quotient with Superior Customer Experiences 12 November 2009
What are your thoughts? Join the conversation below.
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