Customer experience is such a vital part to the purchasing, and most importantly re-purchasing process.
Experience is the sum of many parts and I like to see it as textured or at least to attempt to create a textured experience.
If you think of plain cotton material - I like to see that as the core principles on which all customer service stands:- honesty, transparency, simplicity and politeness.
Now if you want to create a higher quality you need to either improve the material to even higher levels or by adding patterns to excite.
- Higher levels:- one click ordering, personalised service, transparency up front rather than on demand, honesty in for example, recommeding others who could do a better job.
- Texture:- Add another aspect that people are not expecting. Think Zappos who commit to free returns (listen to my interview with Tony Hsieh from Zappos here) or deliver before you expect them to! Or adding something to the experience that is that step beyond...for instance Abel and Cole send a free recipe with each delivery of organic food.
Experience is so vital and starts when people start researching what they want to buy and from where....all the way through to the recommendation to a friend and reordering in the future. Social media can be a texture, a tweet to say thank you for your recommendation, a blog post to help the research, a podcast to help people understand more about the life you wish to influence.
Think experience, think texture......think textured experience!
