Customer Experience: Perception is a reality

Our product is hosted so the Internet is a mission critical piece of infrastructure which lately has been giving us some headaches with key customers. the Customer Experience is very susceptible to perception of bad things happening all the time. In this case we had some interruption of service with in a 30 day window that has turned into the "always down" syndrome that customers think is the case. the reality is the outages occurred during a time when a large number of customers needed access to their data. The experience they had quickly turned from i like this product to this product "never" delivers. the truth about uptime is this: its not 24/7/365 that matters but "when i need access it better be there" and that is a much harder service level to maintain. The Customer Experience is created and strengthened or weakened and destroyed everyday.

Customer Experience: Noise

Our Customer Experience team is creating projects for 2009. One of the things we are dealing with is "Noise". This "noise" is any type if task put to our team from either internal or external sources that does move one of our projects forward. Everyone deals with "noise" in there day to day workings. Each morning you get to work and think "today i will get these 5 tasks done" and by the end of a long 10 plus hour day you have 2.5 tasks incomplete. The reason for that is the "noise". Our group is just starting to move to the Agile methodology that is used primarily for software development. The cool thing is this methodology can apply to other types of tasks such as those our team needs to perform. Agile lets us prioritize and maintain focus on our projects without listening to the "noise" and getting distracted. we kickoff the new Agile way with our first Scrum meeting in January.

Customer Experience: Communication

Another facet of our Customer Experience team is marketing new product releases. Our group is charged with providing all types of information related to the launch of a new functionality within our product line. In our latest release we provided different types of videos from simple advertising to comprehensive instructional training. We produced release notices and quick reference guides. We even offered live online demos for those who wanted a personal touch.

What we are learning is no one method of communication will reach all our customers. Everyone absorbs new information differently. Any format we can think of to provide customers with information about upcoming changes is attractive to some segment of our customer base. It is time consuming and makes for some hectic weeks prior to the formal release date. However we need to know that when the product change impacts 100 percent of the user base our communications must impact 100 percent of the user base too.

Some customer gives us positive feedback others just thank us for not getting surprise by unannounced changes. Most just go about their business but we know we are making good progress when the support calls do not dramatically increase the day after the product updates are released.

Customer Experience: Utilization, Value, Trust

I recently joined a group at my company devoted to Customer Experience. What does that mean? Every customer has an experience when using a company’s products. Our job is to try and make that experience a good one. How do we do that?

First we must decide what a good experience is. In our case we came up with three categories to measure the experience: Utilization of the product, Value from using the product and Trust of the company that stands behind the product. Our product offering is a Software-as-a-Service model. Our customers use our product to track people within their organizations.

We liked the idea of utilization because it’s easy to measure. A SaaS model makes comparing one customer’s usage against another’s very easy. We can slice and dice our customer base any number of ways to generate patterns of utilization.

We believe that value in a product is more than just how much does it cost but more about can the customer live without it. Our goal is make the software so indispensable to the day to day operations of our customers that their perceived value of our product makes the actual monetary costs seem like a bargain. Trust is the most subjective area of the customer experience.

A customer trusts you when you deliver on your promises and you provide solutions to problems a customer has. They also equate trust with the company behind the product separately from the product itself. A trusting relationship with a customer allows greater flexibility when times are tough or when the product goes through changes that may impact a customer.