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Does the Experience of Being our Customer Make People Happy?

As consumers, we all understand that the experience of buying from some brands is better than from others. We may find similar products at similar prices elsewhere, but some brands make the whole experience feel more like one we want to repeat.

In its simplest form, this is what we mean by customer experience. It is the sum of everything involved in a commercial transaction that ultimately decides whether somebody will feel positively or negatively about their experiences with our business.

Customer experience is more complex than customer satisfaction (at least in the way that customer satisfaction has traditionally been measured). It goes beyond the individual interactions that are easy to measure and considers the entire experience.

Here’s a simple example to explain the difference. A business might have 90% plus satisfaction with the way it handles technical queries. However, customers might rate their overall experience as poor if the reason they need to raise technical queries is because product is seen as too complex or the after sales support and documentation are inadequate.

In the above example, a focus on customer satisfaction metrics might lead to an examination of the efficiency of the call centre and the training of call centre staff. A focus on customer experience asks: What can we fix so that people don’t have any queries or can easily find the answer for themselves?

For infrastructure projects, customer experience can be complex to understand, but the principle is simple. It means understanding, in detail, how critical customer journeys look – from ITT to delivery and beyond. What are we like to work with as an organisation (including our supply chain)?

Analysing customer experience means understanding what it feels like to deal with our organisation – the detail and the big picture. It means facing up to potentially uncomfortable questions:

  • Are end users of our infrastructure projects, and those inconvenienced during delivery, unhappy because they have unreasonable expectations, or because they have reasonable expectations which are not met?
  • Do contract disputes arise because customers want to avoid paying the full price, didn’t understand the contract, or because we didn’t deliver everything they expected, in the way they expected?

We need to be able to answer the following questions with confidence:

  • What would a potential end user expect to experience in terms of quality and responsiveness if they know we are the contractor?
  • How will people in the customer’s organisation react when they are told that we have been selected as the contractor?

When we consistently deliver an excellent customer experience, we can answer the above questions as self-confident organisations. It’s a significant challenge but it’s one we can, and must, meet head-on.

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