I’ve been working with more and more professional service firms, including investment advisors, web development agencies, and others. I’m helping them to better understand the experience they are providing for their clients, and how they can improve it to achieve specfic business goals.

What I think businesses are starting to understand is that it really doesn’t matter what type of company you have: if you want to succeed in the long term, you better pay attention to the entire customer experience. What I wrote in my book, “All Customers Are Irrational,” holds true for everyone: all decisions are emotional, including purchase decisions. And that doesn’t change whether someone is looking at buying some new running shoes, or deciding which agency to select during an RFP process.

What about your business? Do you really know what type of experience you’re providing for your customers or clients? Are you giving them the subconscious and emotional reasons (as well as the logical) for buying from (or staying with) your company?

If not, others are catching on, so you better start paying attention!

My iPhone crapped out on me last week. I marked the time of death as 2:10 PM Thursday. It’s tombstone would say: 2009-2009. It was the day before I was heading to Boston. I called into the service line twice and, despite everyone’s best efforts, it would take a couple of shallow breaths and then, quickly, dash any hopes of resucitation.

Ironically, my 18 year-old college son, who has a Zune, scoffs at my Apple products. Maybe he has a point about their planned obsolescence, but maybe it’s just my bad luck.

So anyway, the next morning, I went into the Apple store in Oak Brook, Illinois, where I met with a “genius.” Not sure if that was an accurate description, but he looked smart enough. The long and short of it was he was pleasant, listened (as opposed to acting like he was listening) and tried a couple of possible solutions. When those didn’t work, he took about 90 seconds of rummaging and programming, and handed me a new iPhone. The whole process took about 10 minutes. No paperwork to speak of. All my contacts and apps were right there – a freakish clone of my first iPhone.

I tried to imagine the same thing happening with T-Mobile, and I laughed to myself.

What do you really want?

For most businesses, there is a business goal. Maybe it’s to maximize profits. Or it could be growth: increased revenues or a larger customer base. But at the core, you have a business goal. The mistake I see companies make when they decide to start paying attention to their customers is that they don’t start with the business objective. Instead, there’s a vague “improve” customer service or some such mantra.

If you really want to effect change that will impact your bottom line, there’s an order of attack that will increase your odds of success. Think of it as a logic problem:

1. What’s the Business Goal? Yes, this seems obvious, but humor me. You can’t accomplish your goals unless you know your goals, and everyone on the team agrees just what the goal is. Start here.

2. What’s the Desired Customer Behavior? In order to achieve your business goal, you must define a “desired customer behavior.” For example, if your business goal is to increase the size of the customer base without increasing your marketing budget, you need to drive your customers to refer your company to others more often.

3. What’s the Desired Customer Perception? To drive a desired customer behavior, you must create a desired customer perception. That is, you  must convince your customers to think about your company in a certain way, so that they will act in a way to achieve your business goals (e.g. tell others about you; stay longer; buy more).

4. What’s the Desired Customer Experience? In order to create that perception, you must provide a customer experience that delivers in a specific, positive way, everytime. That means each communication, each interaction, each channel must consistently leave the customer with a desired impression or emotion. What that impression is depends on your business goal and brand promise. Any experience, big or small, that doesn’t deliver will reduce your chances of achieving your business goal.

5. What’s the Current Customer Experience? Only after working through those issues of business goal, brand promise, desired customer behavior and desired customer perception is it time to get moving on your existing customer experience. Now is when you must take steps to objectively analyze your current customer experience, and begin to incrementally improve upon it in order to achieve your business goals.

I’ll talk more about the actual analysis and improvement steps in another entry. The important thing here is to first take a breath and figure out just what you want to have happen before you start down the customer experience path.