Harvard Business Review
Memorable Events Are the Most Valuable Experiences
When most people use the term customer experience, they mean things like being easy to work with, convenient, hassle-free, taking little of the customer's time, and so forth. And while each one can help companies focus better on their customers' wants and needs, they fall far short of the true power of the value that experiences can create.
Economic Experiences
Experiences are a distinct economic offering — as distinct from services as services are from goods. Experiences are memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way and thereby create a memory as the hallmark of that experience. Think of going to a movie, attending a sporting event, enjoying a concert, or visiting a museum. All of these are economic experiences — as are going to Walt Disney World, sipping coffee in a Starbucks, dining at an Ed Debevic's, immersing yourself in an Apple Store, spending time in an American Girl Place, or playing LEGO Universe on your computer.
Some of these companies are easy to work with (I love Apple's immediate checkout capability) while others are not (prepare to be insulted at Ed Debevic's). Some are convenient (such as the nearly ubiquitous Starbucks) while others are not (prepare to travel to an American Girl Place — a trip well worth it). Some are hassle-free (just load the LEGO Universe software and go), while others are not (prepare to queue, over and over again, at Walt Disney World). But none of them takes little of the customer's time, which is the whole point: A true experience is about getting your customers to want to spend time with you.
Spending Time
Time is the currency of all experiences. The time that customers spend is what they actually value when they buy an economic experience. If your focus on the customer leads you to spending less time with customers, then you're commoditizing yourself, teaching your customers that interacting with you isn't worth their time. It is for this exact reason that no industry has more commoditized itself than banking: Banks came to view spending time with customers as costing them money. And now their work on customer experience is all about how to reduce that time as much as possible.
Look, however, at ING Direct, whose purpose — "leading America back to savings" — and true focus on the customer led it to innovate ING Direct Cafes around the country, where potential and current customers actually want to spend time with the bank in its engaging cafe environments.
Some experiences such as these are specifically marketing experiences whose purpose is to generate demand for a company's core offerings. These include Apple Stores and American Girl Places but also Procter & Gamble's Charmin Restroom Experience, the Heineken Experience, Volkswagen's Autostadt, the Case Tomahawk Center, and so forth. And a very simple rule applies: The more time your customers spend with you, the more money they will spend now and in the future.
Providing What Customers Value
Unless you have no higher hope than being a mere commodity, turn your focus from the customer experience to the economic experience. For as people cut back on goods and services, buying them at the lowest possible price and, yes, greatest possible convenience, they seek to take their hard-earned time — and harder-earned money — and spend them on more engaging, more memorable, and more highly valued experiences.
B. Joseph Pine II, co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP in Aurora, Ohio, is the co-author of the forthcoming updated edition of The Experience Economy with James H. Gilmore and Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier with Kim C. Korn. He can be reached at bjp2@aol.com and found on Twitter at @joepine.
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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