In terms of hairdresser, I am not loyal at all. I never had any outstanding experience that made me want to stick to a specific hairdresser. I want a simple cut, nothing fancy. So a good stylist does not make much of a difference. Most importantly I want to spend as little time as possible in the company of the hairdresser. The main things I look at when choosing a new hairdresser is price and convenience. That could be a short version of my persona, summarizing my behavior in relation to getting my haircut.
When walking in the streets of
Get a HK$50 note readyI then started to tell my friends around that they had to watch the movie and that it was so important to realize that if habits are not changed there will be serious repercussions. But with movies like “The Devil Wears Prada” or “The Departed” the Hollywood remake of a
As I was reading “The Tipping Point” from Malcom Gladwell at that time, it got me thinking about the “stickiness” of the green message in general and why it seemed it received so little attention in
The expo, targeted purely at buyers, did not have the kind of innovation I was looking for, but I still met some very interesting people and learnt more about what the government in
If you are interested in Green Technologies, please do look at the following links:
In his book “Call of the Mall”, Paco Underhill talks at length about the way mall floor plans and directories are badly designed and make it hard for shoppers to find their way. In one of my expeditions to Mong Kok (most famous shopping district in Hong Kong) I was looking at the small booklets provided by Langham Place shopping mall to help shoppers find their way. These booklets could prove handy in a shopping mall that offers almost 600,000 sq. ft. of floor space and spans over 13 floors!
Aesthetics driven
There is a great speech from Malcom Gladwell, the author of bestsellers "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", that I think explains very well the need to consider customers as individuals. It thus complements nicely the concept that customer experience is about individuals as I highlighted in my last post on What is Customer Experience. It also highlights the need to use innovative techniques when researching customers to uncover needs that cannot be identified by direct questioning. His talk on “what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce” was made during the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) 2004 event in
When watching this, we can wonder how ready the organizations we are working in or we are interacting with are to identify, understand and leverage differences among customers.
It is about emotions!
When considering customer experience, the very first thing to do is to acknowledge that customers are people. A customer cannot be put into a labeled box or market segment and expected to stay there for the rest of his or her relationship with the company. Customers are individuals and we should say customers are changing individuals.
Several factors influence customers. Some uncontrolled factors will affect their perception and expectations of a company. For example outside information like blogs or reports can have positive or negative effects. The customers’ present need is also changing depending on his or her state of mind, the environment, and much more. Apart from uncontrolled elements, the company has a way to regulate expectations using its value proposition communicated through advertising for example. Finally and most importantly, customers’ expectations are regulated by their past experience with a company.
It is about small things!
Focusing on customer experience also necessitates the realization that small things matter. Customer experience will be impacted by things like the tone of voice of a sales person, the weather outside a shop, the blog that a customer read before purchasing a product, the argument that a customer had with his or her daughter the day before, the way the support staff at a competitor’s store handled a problem, etc.
Of course it is impossible to address all these. In the end, the company that succeeds is the one that is able to identify these “small things” and allow enough flexibility in its processes to adapt to them. Some small things may appear insignificant or may even relate to unconscious needs of customers, but they still play a very important part in exceeding customers’ expectations.
It is a virtuous circle!
Experience is not built in one day. Experience is built over time and taking a snapshot at a precise moment may not be enough to understand the whole picture. When looking at customers, companies should look at the interactions they have over time and how these interactions lead to a positive or negative experience. While a negative experience may lead to a customer breaking the relationship all in all with the company, a positive experience does not mean that customers’ expectations will be higher the next time they interact with the company. Yes, they will demand the same level of care, but their expectations will not increase indefinitely.
It actually appears that with time, as discussed in the book “Married to the Brand” written by William J. Mc Ewen (Gallup Press), customers who had a long term relationship with the company are actually less demanding than new customers. This fact even reinforces the need to focus on current customers and exceeding their expectations to keep them longer rather than targeting higher and higher customer acquisition rates.
This post is a first try at communicating about the concept of customer experience and future post will hopefully relate to this definition and highlight examples of how it translates into reality.
In news dated October 12th, 2006 IBM announced that the US Army will use its new speech-to-speech translation software in Iraq to support troops on the ground. The difference with this speech recognition software is that it can process and translate free speech instead of predefined sentences. 
A picture taken in a local ParknShop in Hong Kong. This is the leading supermarket here...
But what happens when a customer who does not know the concept enters?
That’s what I observed the other day in one of the Ikea store in
They continued running around the shop shouting (and for sure not looking at the products). Finally finding a shop assistant, they asked: “Where is the closest exit please?” Then the shop assistant had the best answer to calm down the ladies: “It is pretty far you know…” and then just let them continue their journey along the dreadful arrows. The two poor customers were fuming and just continued to follow the arrows until they finally reached the exit.
The interesting thing about this is that the shop has actually two floors. The store has a first basement floor with all the furniture and then another floor below with basically all the accessories. At the time the ladies were already looking for the exit, they were on the first floor somewhere in the middle. It would have taken only a short time to escape by turning around and heading to the entrance. But with the layout of the store maybe, and with these arrows everywhere, both the ladies and the shop assistant did not even think about this solution. Somehow they had to move forward.
In a way, it means the store is really well designed, as the clear aim of Ikea is to get customers to go through the whole store every time. Nevertheless in this instance this lead only to more frustration for our two ladies; especially when they reached the escalator to go down to the second floor. At this point there was only a glass to separate them from an escalator going up, the exit and the much looked after day light, and they had no choice but to go further down… quite sadistic in a way, no?
In the end these two may not be returning customers… at least not in for while.
Nowadays, smaller is better, but does small become TOO small at some point? The newest memory cards, called microSD, are barely the size of your fingertip and can hold roughly as much memory as its older brother, the miniSD. Now, that’s technological innovation for sure. It is really impressive to see the progress that is made in memory storage devices these days. Progress that is necessary when we see the diet mobile phones, mp3 players and other portable devices are going through right now. It is the race to know who will be the thinnest. One day it is Motorola and then Samsung fights back. Who’s next? We may wonder when the first association against mobile phone anorexia will be created…
To be frank, when my friend pulled out her Samsung X828 out of her jean back pocket the other day, I was stunned. Thinner really looks cooler! If we can have less bulky and lighter phones we are happier right?
Nevertheless when I see microSD cards I cannot help but wonder if these guys did not go a bit too far. I mean, how do you handle such a small piece of hardware? How many people will inadvertently drop their memory card in their coffee cup or lose them somewhere around the house? Memory cards are meant to be moved from one device to another. In such situation, small may at some point become TOO small.
The product feels and looks cool, but usage is what matters in the end. The early buzz may change into frustration when consumers are faced with difficulties actually handling the thing… just wondering.
