John Rockefeller once was quoted: the secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. A secret? No, not really. Small things? Yes, certainly. Sometimes small actions or inactions by a business can have a big impact on customer experiences. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit customer experience strategy.

Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience. Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems.

Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer?

It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.

Creating a great customer experience for your business requires more than just good customer service. You have to get to know your customers and invest in longer-term relationships so you can provide personalized experiences across the customer journey — from beginning to end.

The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them.

So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well.

All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.

Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.

If one considers the hundreds of interactions each customer has throughout his/her lifecycle with a company, how do you define a customer experience to focus their limited resources?

Here are some priorities to consider:

What is the experience that you are trying to deliver?

You need to define in no uncertain terms what you are striving to achieve with your Customer Experience.

You are somewhere now; but you want to improve, which is to say you want to be somewhere else.

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You need to define where that is and share it throughout your organization.

To test this concept, I like to ask three people in your organization from different departments this question and see if I get three different answers.

Successful companies will have all three employees uttering the one response. However, most organizations do not have a clear articulation of the Customer Experience they are trying to deliver and we typically get three different answers.

What emotions are you trying to evoke in your customers?

Over half of a Customer Experience is about how customers feel. Relationships are all about emotions, and you have a relationship with your customers.

For us, one of the key things we look for is an emotion that drives value (i.e., $$$$) for your organization. Knowing what that emotion is for your organization is critical and evoking it is, too.

Customer experience strategy … what is the subconscious experience?

My regular readers (and regular podcast listeners) know that I talk about this a lot.

A Customer Experience is made up of the rational experience, or the things a customer is doing, and the emotional experience, or how the customer is feeling about the experience.

Also, there is the subconscious experience, which is the part of the experience of which the customer isn’t even aware but is happening beneath the surface.

Finally, there is the psychological experience, which is how our brains influence our interpretation of and behavior during an interaction.

The subconscious experience is often the part most organizations aren’t aware they are producing. It usually takes examining your experience from the outside in, as if you were a customer, to discover how the moments in your present experience affect your subconscious.

Customer experience strategy … what do your customers really want?

What customers tell you they are going to do and what they do can be entirely different. For example, I often bring up the case of the type of food you eat at Disneyland. Park attendees told Disney they wanted the option of a salad.

However, when guests ordered food at Disneyland, they ate hamburgers and fries. So, maybe what customers really want is a calorie-free hamburger and fries; now THAT would be some Disney Magic right there!

All joking aside, customers might tell you they want something but then do something different within your experience. It is your job to ascertain what people really want in the experience (i.e., research) so you can provide it—even if they didn’t say it themselves.

How well are you embracing your customers’ irrationality?

This question addresses all the concepts we cover about Behavioral Economics, which is how psychology affects our actions as customers. Your customers are people, which means they are mostly irrational beings.

How they feel affects how they behave. If you don’t accept or believe this concept, then you will have problems improving your Customer Experience past a certain point.

To take it to the next level of excellence, you need to understand your customers’ psychology and how your experience triggers their reactions.

In our experience as global Customer Experience consultants, we find that most organizations do not understand these concepts or how their experience affects their customers’ psychological experience.

Customer experience strategy … is your customer experience deliberate?

Most organizations we work with have an experience that is accidental or consequential. In other words, they are unintentionally providing the experience they have.

They have not considered how the moments throughout the customer experience evoke emotions and how those emotions affect the steps a customer takes next.

Most organizations look at their experience from the inside and out at the customer.

We encourage them to take an outside-in approach and experience the interaction with their organization as if they were a customer themselves.

This exercise often reveals ways to design a Customer Experience that will be what they want instead of what they happen to have.

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 How customer-centric is your organization?

As global Customer Experience consultants, we often see organizations make the mistake of trying to improve their experience without actually changing anything in the organization.

Naïve, Transactional, Enlightened, or Natural. The Natural companies are the most customer-centric, while the Naïve is not so much.

Customer experience strategy … define customer segment targets

Always start by asking: For which segments?

Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.

Map the consumer experience steps

Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire journey, not just the steps your company is involved in.

For example, for the home movie entertainment businesses, these steps would be: define the occasion, select a title, get, watch, and return the movie.

It’s important to map these steps for each of your priority segments.

Also important for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next step of the journey.

And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.

Understand influencers

Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience.

In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios. Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey.

For example, a consumer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.

In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.

Experiment with collaboration

An effective way to ensure that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration.

And yes, in our opinion there are many customers that would welcome this approach.

When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.

Align customer-facing employees

The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology.

Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are firms that do a good job of orchestrating across their enterprise.

USAA has identified approximately 100 key experiences associated with customer company engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.

For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of customers, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.

Customer experience strategy … act on customer signals

Your customer insights are essential to this effort. We’re not talking just satisfaction surveys—good customer understanding doesn’t come just from spreadsheets and data crunching.

Instead, we’re talking about customer sentiments and needs through detailed customer observation, listening and relationship building.

Social skills that identify and shares unspoken or latent needs. A process of gaining good insights and then acting on them.

Experimenting at first and then full ahead. Having a governance mechanism to act on insights is critical…otherwise, there will be no positive change.

Activate Improvements

Now for the most critical touch points, you could generate ideas for improvement.

In the example above, an activation idea could be to develop a studio agnostic website that incents consumers to state their preferences, tracks their viewership, and accordingly makes highly relevant recommendations for what to watch next.

After you have implemented this framework for the first time, it will yield recommendations for what data to collect and at which critical touch points, and what types of analyses and metrics are needed to improve the customer experience.

A customer experience example

Want to know one of the most effective ways Zappos has found to create reciprocity with their customers? And create customer experience differentiation at the same time?

Surprise them!

People like getting things for free and like them, even more, when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.

For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping … without so much as even a mention on the sales or checkout page?

Why offer this sort of benefit without mentioning it?

Simple: A company like Zappos, a business leader in customer service, recognizes the benefits of surprising people with a next day delivery. That’s not even mentioning the fact that this shipping creates immense goodwill between Zappos and their first-time buyers.

That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.

The bottom line

It’s always good practice to meet customers’ expectations and ensure they are satisfied and happy with your business — but if your strategy ends there, you’re missing out on all the value you can drive back into your business.

Make an effort to leverage that superior customer experience into new and repeat business, and pretty soon, you’ll reap all the rewards of satisfied, long-term customers.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

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