Quality of Customer Experience

In a recent discussion in Gary Lemke's blog posts, the aspect of speed of CRM has been the center of attention. In today's post, the concept is linked to customer delight. Though I appreciate the perspective of the speed of the customer interaction being important to the whole customer experience, I believe that there is something more important than the speed that in a lot of cases results in more satisfied customers.



In my experience, the ability to satisfy the customer and ensure the solution is what the customer was looking for in the first place, is more important. If you quickly give the customer a pre-scripted solution which according to the organization should address the customer request, you will have statistically satisfied the customer "request".... but have you satisfied the customer as an individual?

Granted, in some cases, the individual expectation of the customer may match to the pre-scripted response. But as we all know, given the sheer number of individual personalities in the world, the individual expectations can be infinite. Please note, I am not talking about a utopian environment, which I believe is something that is again a statistical improbability, if not impossible. I am however implying that the focus on the individual needs and the aspiration to address that in a customer interaction goes a long way when it comes to customer experience, rather than speed.

Now, speed of the resolution has its own pluses. It ensures that the customer is not spending time on something which they  but it can't stand alone as the most important factor governing the delight of the customer. Speed must always stand along side your customer objective and culture.

To summarize, I would agree that the speed to achieve the customer's individual expectations in an interaction drives the delight of customer. Even if the speed is lacking in some cases, as long as the customer expectations are managed, the achievement of these expectations will still be able to drive the experience far better than the speed alone.