One of the patterns I keep seeing in customer experience management is the importance of delivering efficiently on the right things, not every-thing.
The Customer Experience Board reports, “Leading financial institutions do not try to create customer delight. Rather, they develop a rightsized customer experience management strategy that delivers the organization’s value proposition at the lowest possible cost.”
This is very similar to the second “D” of Bain & Company’s three D’s of customer experience. Researching the companies that customer believe deliver superior experiences, Bain found that:
- They design the right propositions for the right customers.
- They deliver those propositions at the lowest system cost.
- And they develop the institutional capabilities to do it again and again.
Low cost doesn’t mean threadbare and cheap. It means choosing the right moments to excel at, the ones that win and keep the right customers. IKEA doesn’t try to excel at face-to-face customer service, they excel at a self-guided shopping experience. So the question is, what conscious trade-offs are you making?