Creating and Delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences

A BRIEF TOUR OF THE BOOK

The Awesome Customer Challenge starts us out. This challenge puts in plain English the real issue of what organizations need to do in order to create customer loyalty, strengthen their brand, build lasting differentiation, and deepen their relationships with their profitable customers.

Chapter 1 gets us warmed up. We jump right into tackling the big issues of becoming more customer- focused and changing your customer relationship currency. Then comes a simple way to rate your own organization’s current level of customer focus and customer relationship currency, followed by a discussion on the differences between being customer-focused and customer-manipulative. After describing the effect of being customer-focused or customer-manipulative on your capability to create and deliver Totally Awesome Customer Experiences, we explore the role trust plays in being customer-focused and the power trust has in creating differentiation and brand. The chapter finishes with the customer-focused reality.

Chapter 2 is definitely a reality check of who is really in charge! It begins with the power of customers to vote about their experiences. The chapter then proceeds to the Customer Satisfaction Continuum and the importance of receiving the Delight Vote. We then examine the value of the customer vote, along with why it’s crucial to take your organization beyond customer satisfaction all the way to customer delight. We explore why customer satisfaction initiatives have failed to deliver customer loyalty, and we show you how to use customer satisfaction initiatives to leverage customer delight. The chapter concludes with customer delight as a strong differentiator and prepares you to learn the process of creating and delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences.

Chapter 3 is a monster! We give you an overview of the Five–Step Process of Creating and Delivering a Totally Awesome Customer Experience with an introduction to Customer Experience Mapping©. We then discuss the Create and Deliver processes in detail, followed by an illustration of the entire five-step process. The chapter continues with the economics of a Totally Awesome Customer Experience. You’ll see how you can increase your profits while improving the experiences you deliver to your customers. We then describe how creating and delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences can improve the consistency and repeatability of your experiences. We go on to show you how the five-step process provides you more control over many difficult customer-experience variables. There’s nothing like reiterating the benefits of adopting and using the “customer experience language” in helping your organization adopt an experience-based culture. The chapter ends by presenting the magic formula for creating and delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences.

Chapter 4 covers the nuts and bolts of Customer-Experience Mapping. The chapter starts with Customer Experience Maps as the fundamental component of a Totally Awesome Customer Experience. Next comes an explanation of how the Science of Customer Experience Mapping© helps you create your Customer Experience Maps and reduce your costs. We then look at each element of an effective Customer Experience Map and its role in making the map effective. The chapter finishes with noting how valuable Customer Experience Mapping is in your strategic planning process and its capabilities as both a key planning and documentation tool.

Chapter 5 says, “Grab your palette and paintbrushes — it’s art time.” This chapter is all about the Art of Customer Experience Mapping, as well as creating Experience Touch Points (the points where you interact with your customers). You’ll learn the Ten Rules of Creating Effective Experience Touch Points. We’ll discuss how using different kinds, categories, and types of Experience Touch Points will increase the acceptability, relevance, and value of your product or service to your customers. On our soapbox, we preach about the importance of Experience Touch Point coordination and consistencyin the creation and delivery of Totally Awesome Customer Experiences. We also explain how these two principles dramatically reduce costs. After touching on the aspects of Reach versus Richness in Experience Touch Points, the chapter ends with a discussion on how you measure an Experience Touch Point’s success.

Chapter 6 is Ready, Set, Go. It’s time to talk about implementing Totally Awesome Customer Experiences within your organization. The implementation process starts with helping you perform your Initial Transaction Assessment. This process documents where you are and ends with your rollout— in other words, where you want to be.

Chapter 7 is simply delicious! Together we take a step-by-step guided tour through a case study conducted at Rivers Effortless Dining, an upscale, progressive restaurant, using the process of creating and delivering a Totally Awesome Customer Experience and Customer Experience Mapping. Why a restaurant, you ask? Because all of us are “dining experience experts.” Almost everyone knows what a delightful dining experience should be — so let’s see if Brent and his crew were up to the task.

Chapter 8 is incredibly unique. We demonstrate the power of creating and delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences and Customer Experience Mapping in planning a web site: not just any web site, but our own new web site. You’ll enjoy reading the comments from the planners and designers.

Chapter 9 covers an issue that’s growing geometrically in importance: a customer’s privacy. We discuss the ethical issues of gathering customer knowledge for use in creating and delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences while exploring how the concepts like CRM (Customer Relationship Management), data mining (customer knowledge), and customer privacy all interact in this highly explosive arena. You’ll learn about a new path we think leads all of us out of the customer privacy woods. This new path offers a new perspective for the use and implementation of customer knowledge to help you increase customer trust, delight, and privacy.

Chapter 10 has you ready to make the leap off the Olympic ski jump. It’s time for you to take off and perform your own perfect landing. This chapter deals briefly with setting the right expectations for both your customers and your employees. We then discuss how to create, assess, and measure experience performance standards that really work, along with some helpful tips.