One of the more recent buzzwords in the field of hospitality is customer experience, often abbreviated as CX. These days, you can hardly escape the term; it is the saveur du jour of business consultants everywhere. But while it seems newfangled, its coinage is most often attributed to Lou Carbone, who wrote an article titled “Engineering Customer Experiences” in the Winter 1994 issue of Marketing Management magazine. (That’s nearly 30 years ago!)
You can actually read that article here, if you’re curious. In this article, Carbone defines the broad term of experience as, “The aggregate and cumulative customer perception created during the process of learning about, acquiring, using, maintaining and (sometimes) disposing of a product or service.” And before Carbone, the principles of forging strong business-customer relationships go back to the earliest days of consumer theory in the 1960s.
Does It Matter?
The terminology hardly matters, according to Shep Hyken. In a recent opinion piece, he writes, “[people] often use the terms customer service and customer experience interchangeably. Are they confused? Do they not know the difference? Maybe, maybe not. And in the end, it doesn’t matter. They don’t care, and neither should you.” He goes on to explain, “All you should worry about is giving them the experience they want, expect and deserve—regardless of what your customers call it.”
Getting Specific
Indeed, Hyken goes on to list the common definitions people use when defining customer service, and they’re fairly broad: customer service might refer to the actual team of people who help customers with their problems; it might refer to the way employees treat customers; it might refer to the friendliness of an experience; and it might be about the ease and convenience of an interaction.
Technically, CX is concerned with discoverability (how customers learn about a business), engagement (how customers interact with a business), and delivery (how timely and frictionless products reach the customer). These aspects color the customers’ perceptions of your business, its people, and its products and services. Customer service (no matter how it’s defined above) factors into both engagement and delivery.
Beyond The Technicalities
This is all academic and inside-baseball, and not something that should concern the customers, as they care most about whether they’re satisfied. Moreover, these distinctions should rarely matter to your employees, whose sole mission in this regard should be to make sure the customer feels valued and well-taken-care-of.
Tuning and improving the three components of CX—discoverability, engagement, and delivery—do matter to you, in your capacity as a leader, but from the employee point-of-view, it should really come down to treating the customers with respect. Respect for their patronage and for their needs, as well as with respect to what customers expect from your business.
Keeping Track of It All
There are a lot of terms and ideas within consumer theory, a lot of great ideas and a lot of bad ones too. While delivering a great customer experience should absolutely matter to your business, you shouldn’t get tangled in the weeds. Your talents and ability are better suited to the running of your business, so that’s where The Brandt Group comes in.
Customer service, customer experience, happiness quotient, consumer satisfaction—whatever you want to call it—is what we specialize in. Let us aid you with that expertise so that you can maximize what matters most: the relationships your business fosters with its employees and clientele. We’ll help you improve those relationships with the tried-and-true methods of feedback surveys, mystery shopping, and leadership training. Armed with these tools, your business will be positioned to win both employee and customer loyalty—now and always—making your company the measure by which your competitors are judged.
