Designing the customer engagement journey

Logan Wedgwood asks whether you’ve designed your customer experience to ensure every defining moment is awesome. Because your business depends on it.

There are key moments in business that are make or break. 
The same is true with your customers’ experience of your business. Good experience or bad experience, this is your chance. Your one moment to leave an impression that is either intentionally awesome or mistakenly terrible. 

So let me ask you this. Have you consciously and intentionally designed your customer experience?

Marketing, at its essence, is delivering a solution to a need. But what we forget is that the experience your customers have while they are being delivered that solution is also part of marketing. 

Your opportunity in designing your customers’ experience is in making sure the defining moments are awesome. Take care of them in a way that makes them feel like a rock star, like you know them, like you understand them. 

A friend of mine has a high-end hair salon. New customers waiting for their haircut are shown to a comfortable seat, handed a drink, and have a staff member massage their shoulders while they wait. 

Another example: While you are waiting for a new Porsche to be delivered, you receive a number of packages from the company, including keys in a custom-made box, clothing and other branded items. Sure these are promotional for Porsche, but they’re also slowly ramping up your anticipation until the delivery of your vehicle – and they’re likely to get you talking.  

I had a burger at a joint in New York once. The waiter took our drinks order before he started taking our food order on his iPad – our drinks arrived before he finished taking our order, all without him even leaving our table. We’ve never experienced service like that at a burger place before (or since, in fact), but it was slick!

Now these are some extreme examples, sure – but think about a bad customer experience you have had. Where they couldn’t find an order you placed earlier. Where the receptionist didn’t acknowledge you when you arrived. I know you can picture in your head right now a customer experience that definitely did not make you want to rave. 

I once used our standard quoting template to provide a quote for a new customer and forgot to change the text from “To whom it may concern” to my new client’s name. She was mortified, and rightly so. How could I not acknowledge her name after three meetings and lunch? I knew her name, of course, but my poor attention to detail made her feel like ‘just another sale’.

Consider every touch-point
Think about the key moments a customer engages with your business. Talk to your staff and write all of the moments down. From landing on your website or arriving in your reception area, to producing paperwork, working together, communicating by email, delivering an order and sending an invoice. 

What is that experience like? Have you designed it in a way that makes the customer feel special, from end-to-end? 

How well do you know your market’s expectations? Do your new customers feel like rock stars? Or are they being treated as just another sale? 

If you do ONE thing today, look at the weakest part of your customer service experience and make it great.