I often get asked “how is ease of doing business and customer experience alike or different”? In Bruce Temkin’s Customer Experience Matters Blog, http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/what-the-heck-is-customer-experience/, He defines the customer experience as “the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization”. I think Bruce Temkin’s definition works nicely for EODB as well, but if I replaced the word “interaction” with “transaction” I think I’d get closer to the EODB definition. I think the customer experience encompasses much more than “ease” and therefore, ease is a sub-set of but an important component of customer experience.
Why do I think the word “transaction” applies better to ease of doing business? In my mind, a transaction (making a purchase, paying an invoice, making a support request) is the focus for ease and it has heavy emphasis on the process. The process needs to be designed with the customer in mind to make every transaction or customer touch point as easy as possible. However, what is considered an “easy” transaction for one customer may well be different for another customer. So, the key is that every transaction or touchpoint must be customized/tailored and easy per the customer’s specification across the lifecycle. E.g., “making a purchase may be easy for one customer on the web, for another through direct buying, for another through a channel.
Ease of Doing Business covers the entire value chain including every process that touches the customer which can either enhance or degrade their experience, but customer experience is something more. Customer experience includes the functional, emotional and social needs of the customer. As mentioned in the wiki definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience, “Customer Experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier”. How GOOD or BAD the experience is depends on how well we address the functional, emotional and social. Creating a great customer experience requires we address these aspects; however, ease of doing business focuses on how easily the functional need is fulfilled. A functional process can be completed efficiently and accurately and thus be perceived as “easy”, but we still may not be touching the emotion of the customer. Easy may be achieved through a paperless process or elimination of a process altogether. If a customer completes an interaction and is saying “wow, that was easy!” then you’re hitting the emotional sweet spot and getting the functional process completed. So, ease of doing business is a close cousin or kin to customer experience. You can have one without the other but the most powerful relationship is built when we focus on making it easy for our customers to do business with AND a great customer experience.
Thanks to my colleague, Susan Sherman, our resident expert in customer experience, for her valuable contribution to this blog.
As this is my last blog for the year (due to holiday and vacation time much needed), I wish all of you some “easiness” in your life and work in 2009. Bye!
Posted
12-17-2008 10:33 PM
by
christina.sullivan