Stories about how a company far exceeded a customer’s expectations are fun to read, but unless you manage a luxurious resort those experiences don’t make a measurable difference to profit.
Think about the last customer experience you shared with someone else. Most likely it was a bad experience. Customers share accounts of bad customer experiences much more than they share great experiences.
Your customer experience doesn’t need to delight. It needs to be good.
The best customer experiences have little friction. Friction is anything that wastes the customer’s time or makes it harder to interact with your product or service. Your customers may not need to crawl through mud, under barbed wire, to reach you, but they may feel like it.
Examples of friction:
- Shipment notifications sent days before an item is shipped
- Insurance policies that consumers cannot understand
- Menus without food photos
- Chat bots that don’t understand people
- Businesses that offer chat or email channels but don’t monitor them
- Voice systems that don’t provide wait time
- Bank websites that don’t work with password managers
- Packaging that cannot be removed without tools
- Documentation that’s not accessible in the format or language the customer needs
Customers notice friction when something doesn’t go smoothly. Customers may not appreciate the effort required to provide frictionless experiences, but they notice when experiences works as expected.
Customers don’t expect you to delight them. They expect frictionless experiences, and are glad to pay more for products and services that deliver that.