Engineering The Customer Experience

Hundreds of hours of engineering goes into creating the well-crafted product, but the customer experience that wraps around the product is often an afterthought. Why not engineer the customer experience?

When you have a well-crafted product that projects an image of high quality and performance to the marketplace, prospects and customers expect the experiences around the research, purchase, support and service of that product to match — plain and simple.

Unfortunately, the customer experience, or customer journey as we like to say, is usually an afterthought. And the people who do think about it are typically functioning within separate and isolated silos such as marketing, sales, service, support and distribution.

When we gather everyone in a room, and ask them how to better engineer the customer experience, we are always stunned by how many good ideas are poured forth.

What you also would notice, is that in almost every case, each would need help from one or more of the other functions in order to implement their great ideas.

To take advantage of these ideas and the enthusiasm behind them requires leadership to move customer experience engineering up in priority and make it part of business strategy.

As such, leadership (aka the mothership) would become responsible for inventorying the ideas and perceptions of marketing, sales, service, support and distribution and then conduct customer research to see where the disconnects are. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? What are we not doing at all?

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What Distributors Really Want from the Mothership

The mothership would then create an initiative which would result in a finely engineered customer experience that called out every touch in sequence for every possible scenario. With this exercise comes the role each department plays in the customer’s journey. Their journey will be far better if you go on it with them.

Engineering the customer experience so that it is on par with the quality of your product creates deep congruency. It takes work. But those who are willing to work at it will be rewarded with the trust that results in decisions from prospects and stories told by customers about how great you are, for years to come.