Experience is very personal

Experience is yet unfathomable. With so many decades of research, we have scantily understood the capacity and capability of the human brain. Emotions are even more complex to understand. Experience comprehension requires a great understanding of both intellect and emotions.

If two people encounter the same situation, their experience would, in all probability, be quite different. The variable in such a case would be oneself - all those tangible and intangible attributes that each of us are characterized by. Infact, if we encounter the same situation twice at different times, our experience is quite likely to be different.

To attempt a comprehension of Experience, intimate knowledge of the person is vital. Knowledge about the person's upbringing, behaviour, skills, talents, experience, observations, exposure, philosophical leanings etc. to name a few provide facets of a person thru which we can make an attempt to draw a person's Experience map.

Let us talk about some real-life examples. Take any service - for example, a Retail Bank. Are you aware of any Bank that states that they will not let you wait for a Call Center Executive for more than 30 seconds? Are you aware of any Bank that lets you personalize your Internet Banking site? After all 80% of the times, we log on to a Bank site to do repetitive transactions only and each of us are most productive when the layout of the site matches our intuition...

Let us go into something more simple - a Restaurant. You go to a reputed restaurant for dinner with your friends. Your experience with the restaurant's menu spread, service, its ambience and quality of food can easily be shattered by an unclean washroom. So much so that you may swear never to go back to that restaurant again. The restaurant's core value proposition of great food will not be able to change this decision.

Prospective Vehicle owners' choose not to buy a great automobile based on trusted information about the service quality being poor or the dealers' not being very sincere and empathetic to the buyer's needs.

Each of us hold and expect some Experience values - Sincerity, Straightforwardness, Empathy etc. These values have an overbearing effect on the benefits of the product or service that we are contemplating to buy.

A good experience may not necessarily lead to a very loyal customer for a business. But, a bad experience will definitely help you lose the customer for good. While it is important to focus on all aspects of the product or service in question, a business has to equally focus on the customer's experience through different touchpoints, and ensure that the latter augment's the product's or service's value proposition, not bring it down!

Experience was not as high a challenge earlier, when most interactions were between people to people. With the advent and advancement of technology, a lot of our interactions (like this one) has become impersonal. We interact more with our computers than with people. How many times have you not felt that sending-an-email is better than picking-the-phone? Given these changes, understanding of people has become that much more important to help them live a positive experience.

I would like this blog to be a platform for exchanging views on Customer Experience - I firmly believe Customer Experience will become the key differentiator for businesses in the days to come...