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!

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.

To build that perception you need to build a customer experience. Some companies understand this. But what many organizations fail to see is this: the customer experience is comprised of EVERYTHING. That is every interaction, communication, and process. It all matters. Look at your customer experience not as one grand process, but as an integrated series of processes, each with the goal of building toward an ideal customer perception.

So I ask you: What do you want your customers to do? What do you want them to think? Are each and every customer “moment of truth” consciously created to accomplish that? If not, it’s time to get to work.

As the late great Marshall Field said, “Your customers are your only profit center.” Yet most businesses are not set up with that as a core part of their philosophy. The businesses that do focus on the customer relationship, and build processes, product and service around it, seem to also be the companies that continue to succeed in down economies, which, last I checked, we were in right now.

Something to think about.

We stopped in Cooperstown, NY, for a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame for my 12 year-old’s birthday. I know I’m an irrational customer (of course, we all are), but my overall impression of the Hall and Cooperstown in general is a 10 our of 10. If there is a community that “gets” the concept that an experience is made up of all the little moments, it’s Cooperstown.

There are no chain hotels in the town; we stayed at the Inn of Cooperstown, a three-story 100-year old former mansion, with a long front porch that accommodated a line of rocking chairs, and a series of unique well-kept rooms (no TVs necessary). We stayed up playing Sorry and Trivial Pursuit, laughing the evening away in the game room. Then in the morning, we enjoyed a relaxed breakfast in the dining room, complete with homemade banana-nut muffins. The staff was friendly and helpful, and we could stroll down the main street to the Hall.

There, my son Griffin received special treatment since it was his birthday, with a special card, discounts, birthday buttons and a photo in the Hall Gallery in front of Babe Ruth’s plaque. Overall, it was a big warm and fuzzy.

Then, off to Boston where we stayed in a larger downtown hotel. As I was nearing our room, a member of the cleaning staff eyed me warily and said, “Oh, no. They did not already check you into this room.”
Chagrined, I said, “They did indeed.”

“Well,” she uttered, shaking her head, “it’s not clean yet. I still have to vacuum.” She then stared at me, wondering how I was going to fix the problem.

Not a big deal, but a glitch in the process that became a little “moment” in my experience. Things got better, but it reminded me of the importance to creating a full customer experience, one that keeps in mind how much it all matters. A cold word, or a warm homemade muffin, are enough to color customer perception, and determine if and when customers will come back.

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.

If you’ve been in business for awhile, you know that I’m right. Have you ever hired somebody with the right technical skills for a job, but also with a holier-than-thou air? It’s over. Spend money on training, spend money on processes, and you can improve the customer experience slightly, but with that attitude, your employee will be able to “overcome” those efforts to create a negative customer impression.

Think about the companies who take customer experience seriously – Zappos, Southwest, Union Square Hospitality Group. Do they all spend time and energy on processes, technology, and training in order to create a memorable customer experience? Absolutely! But first, each focuses on unique and time consuming methods for assuring that they’re hiring the right people. They understand that the foundation for exceptional service and experience is the people. The other stuff just helps those great folks to deliver what they want to in the first place.

How’s your company set up? Do you have employees that touch customers who don’t naturally seek out ways to connect with and help people? If so, you better take a hard look at your hiring processes. It’s the key to customers who – whether they know why or not – keep coming back.

But do others agree? Check out, and participate in, the debate here.

The main reason these companies were able to bump satisfaction substantially (up to 12%) is because they were so poor at serving (or caring about) customers to begin with. When a large percentage of your customers don’t really like anything about dealing with your business,  some simple service tweaks can be enough to make a difference. These aren’t companies with satisfaction rankings in the 90’s or even 80’s. More like 59% of their customers were “satisfied,” whatever that means.

So when you see how businesses are improving satisfaction, consider the context. If the starting point is bad service and disillusioned customers, there’s nowhere to go but up.