The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers

YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMPETITION

A question I am commonly asked is: “Who are the companies in my industry with best practices in customer experience?” The person asking this question is usually someone in marketing who wants to find out which companies to emulate when it comes to customer experience strategies. In fact, organizations should be asking a different question: Which are the companies with best practices in customer focus in any industry? Many benchmarking projects fall short of the mark because they do not look outside of their own world.

For example, I read a librarian's blog post about her organization's customer experience competition, in which she stated:

Libraries need to rock, to be cool. Why? To survive … to thrive … to be valuable … to be essential for our customers. I have heard many librarians proclaim arrogantly that we are not in competition with the video store, the DVD store, Google, iTunes, and YouTube. But we are! WE ARE!

Clearly, this librarian recognizes that her customers have a lot of other media competing for their attention.

The best way to determine customer expectations of your organization's experience is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Analyze what your experience looks like from their perspective. Then take a look at the experiences your competitors offer (companies that your customers may also be patronizing). Which of those experiences are better at meeting customer expectations? Which ones “rock”?

Unexpected Competition