Shifting to a Customer Experience culture

Why do some companies decide to bet on free marketing by investing in their customer’s experience instead? How to Shif from a buzz marketing to a customer experience culture.

Going back to one of our latest articles on doing marketing for free, instead of spending a big budget on advertising, some companies decide to bet on free marketing by investing in their customer’s experience instead. For companies Like Johnny Cupcakes, Zappos or Delivering Happiness, their driver for growth has been repeating customers and word of mouth to actually get free advertising. Most of the money they would have spent on paid advertising like regular companies do, they invested it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting customers do the marketing for them through word of mouth and relationships. They will recommend your brand to their friends, talk about you on their social networks, generate repetitive sales and sometimes even give you ideas for potential new products. Basically, customers become what I call “lovers” of your brand.

customer experience

So what is a great experience?

What is a great experience? Why is it so important? it is not just regular customer service. It is to take care of every detail in every contact with your customer, face to face, online or even on the phone. Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos says that “If you get a 10 minutes interaction right, the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tell his or her friends about it. You need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory”. So, the key is to focus on building engagement and trust, seeing every interaction through an experience of a long-life relationship lens instead of an expense-minimization lens.

This shift from buzz marketing to experience marketing can only be possible through a cultural transformation within the company. All the old habits of just minimizing cost need to shift towards customer centered habits. What is interesting is that to be really successful, don’t get confused about what customer means. Customer needs to be recognized not only as the external ones, the ones that buy your products, but also the internal ones. Remember, all the interactions count, even the ones that are invisible to the final customer. You have to give great service to everyone: customers, employees, vendors, supervisors, community.

The right culture

The problem is, You can’t possibly anticipate every possible touch point that could influence the perception of your company’s brand. An unhappy customer or a frustrated employee can share their bad experience through twitter or facebook and spread it to millions of people in just hours. So quality management or customer service shouldn’t be just a department, it should be the entire company. How you do that? Through the right culture.

One of the fathers of Quality, Edwards Deming, proposed a cultural transformation in his last work, the System of Profound knowledge. This method shifts organization from “Me” to “we”. A “We ” organization means that departments work together, and make decisions considering the interactions they have with each other. “We” means everyone, again: customers, employees, vendors, supervisors, community. As Deming puts it, we need to mind not only about doing “good parts” but also about “the gaps” between the parts. That is, your report can be done correctly, but if it doesn’t fit the needs of your customer, it may not be as good for him. We need the customer / the employee/ the vendor to raise the voice to make a change in the process. In the Deming method know “what do to” is not enough, learning “how to do”makes the difference. And the job of the leader is to accomplish this organizational transformation.

“Everybody will win, no losers” Edwards Deming

The “We” culture is crucial in an experience-based marketing, as everybody needs to be involved in getting the right interaction to the customer, everybody needs to be open to see how the company can do better and be part of it.

The cultural change needs to be lead by the head of the organizations by example (top-down), define core values, and provide the appropriate training of those values to the employees to offer bottom-up solutions. These core values will help you hire employees and make decisions.

Next steps

Is it too late for your company to start doing this now, after so many years in business? No, it is never too late. Just make a conscious decision of shifting to a “We” environment. Start by asking your employees what the core values could be, and make a list. Together. Good luck!

Luciana Paulise

Founder & Director Biztorming Training & Consulting

@lupaulise