Customer Experience is important

Greg Lederman has written a new book titled "Engaged!: Out-behave Your Competition to Create Customers for Life".  He makes the point that the value of the customer experience is a significant factor in creating fierce customer loyalty. He suggests that the customer experience is really the brand of your company as much or more so than your company logo.

In his book he offers eight key principles to manage the customer experience. The principles are:
1. Keep every employee on stage, delivering an experience
2. Keep your team happy to create engaged customers
3. Don't just announce your culture, make it visible
4. Focus on culture change rather than culture talk
5. Turn common sense into common practice
6. Build relationships and stop surveying customers
7. Incent engagement with training and recognition, rather than rewards
8. Build trust in you as a leader by managing the experience.

Lederman suggests that highly engaged organizations grow profits as much as three times faster than the competition. Other benefits that he mentions are that they can reduce staff turnover by as much as 87%, improve performance by 20%, and increase customer satisfaction by at least 12%.  He suggests that companies who provide memorable experiences will create what he calls fiercely loyal customers.

The bottom line is that he makes some obvious and some not so obvious points that every corporation should consider as significant aspects for their customer relationships. A few of the eight points have been given very little attention in the literature. The idea that building relationships is even more important than serveying the customers is not very popular. However, upon reflection, it is easy to understand that loyalty come from the customer experience, not from a survey.  Making the case for the customer experience as a significant component of corporate strategy is as exciting as it is novel.