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.