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

MANAGING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE—OR NOT

When an organization says it wants to “manage” the customer's experience, often it indicates the desire to design a perfectly branded encounter, every step of which moves the customer closer to the organization's goals. In short, the organization would like to be able to exert total control over the customer experience.

In actual practice, we can no more “manage” our customers’ experience than we can control the rising of the sun. Our customers all have free will; they may choose to take the path we lay out for them or blaze their own trail. A better, far more reasonable and achievable goal is to ensure that each part of the customer experience is positive and helps meet customer goals as well as business goals.

Fortunately, even when customers choose to blaze their own trails, a business can learn a great deal about how those customers think, what their desires are, and how they want to be served. With that information in hand, organizations can respond by engaging and interacting with customers in a customized manner at each touch point. And subsequently, each time a customer engages with a business, the business can continue to learn about the best way to meet that customer's needs.

In this way, “managing” our company's customer experience becomes a strategy for the organization, ensuring that we engage with our customers in an optimal way at every opportunity. It gives us a structure from which we can capture important insights from those ...