How much is customer experience costing you?

How your customer experiences your business is the acid-test of your advertising and marketing. Whether it happens in your store, or in their home, in an instant your branding pays off or goes up in flames. The Customer Experience Factor may hold the key to optimizing what happens when your customers have a tangible experience of with your company.

Mike Dandridge is author of The One-Year Business Turnaround. It’s the story of his experience leveraging the Customer Experience Factor to take a business he ran from $3 million in total annual revenue to a million dollars a month. And, he did that in one year.

Now, Mike has created The Customer Experience Factor, a tool that provides an objective measurement of how well businesses manage the critical moment of customer contact. Mike shares some insights into optimizing your customers’ experience in a conversation with had recently.

How did he do it?

Listen to part one of my three-part conversation with Mike. In this segment, Mike lays out the basics of CEF. The remaining two segments will appear next week. (Double-click the arrow to play the interview)

[audio:https://charliemoger.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/MikeDandridge_1of3.mp3|titles=MikeDandridge_1of3]

Partial transcript:

What is the Customer Experience Factor?

“The Customer Experience is almost self-explanatory. It’s really defined by how the customer feels and thinks and feels in response during and after a business transaction. Now, the Customer Experience FACTOR is simply the measurement of that experience.

We all have a kind of mental scale as customers; a measurement we use when we go into a business. Whether it’s a restaurant, or we’re buying something. We grade the performance of that business. So, that’s what the Customer Experience Factor is.

If a customer comes into your store, and they have the same exact experience they expected and leaves, it’s just a neutral experience. But, if they go in and they’re blown away, then that raises the needle on The Customer Experience Factor.

On the other end, if they come in and they have a really disappointing experience, that’s going to tip it the other way. And, those are the ones that usually cause people to talk and tell their friends about their bad experiences”

I imagine a negative score has a lot more carry power than a positive one.

“Certainly is. Unfortunately, that’s how we are.”

Most people probably take it for granted when they walk into, say, a Starbucks. You know exactly what you’re going to experience when you walk in, that same arrogant disregard behind the counter.

(chuckles) “Well, the expression was, “we have the best service in town.” And, everyone says that. If your competitor is saying the same thing as you are, someone’s lying. Not everyone has the best service.

So, it’s really broadened into not so much the words you speak as the actions you take. You used the Starbucks example, a good way to give an illustration of the way we measure an experience.

I was out of town and needed a toothbrush. So, I went to Target. And, when I went in, I had preconceived expectations of what I was going to experience based on all the other times I’d gone into Target. And, it was exactly the same. I walked in. There’s a guy at the door to greet me. He hands me a basket. There was someone walking the aisles to show me where the toothbrushes are. Checked out, paid the price I expected and left.

It was just an ordinary experience. Now, in Target’s defense, it was, of course, a wonderful experience. But, you see, they’ve raised the bar on their service to such an extent that you expect that. So, you’re not surprised. You’re not overwhelmed. You’re not going to tell your friends about it.

The challenge for businesses is, how do you keep exceeding your own setting of the bar. But, most people don’t have the problem Target has. Most people have the problem of just delivering a compelling customer experience to begin with.”

I was checking out at Wal-Mart one time. The woman at the register said, “did you find everything you were looking for?” I told her, “No. I was actually looking for that WalMart that I see on TV with the people who are ready to help me.

“Yeah. I think we’re all looking for that.”

NEXT TIME: Learn some of the 100 elements used in the Customer Experience Factor.

Rock your marketing and advertising like Warren Buffett

Differentiating your brand could be tricky work if your marketing and advertising involves one of the world’s richest men—unless that man is Warren Buffett.

“We thought, What’s the most ridiculous getup we could think up for Warren — and thought, Nah, we can’t do that,” says Phil Ovuka, director of creative media services at Geico.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett has become a staple of the Geico employee-created videos used to kick off their annual team meeting. Over the past four years, Buffett has appeared as a hobo and a DJ. This year, his tattooed Axl Rose send-up stole the show and netted thousands of viral impressions.

What can Warren Buffett teach your brand?

Suppose an employee brought you a marketing and advertising idea so off-the-charts outlandish you couldn’t contain your laughter. What would you do? Dismiss that idea and you lose three ways: employees lose trust in sharing ideas, your brand loses fresh thinking, and you lose an edge that can differentiate you from competitors.

“Differentiate until you want to cry,” says Jon Spoelstra, author of Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts! Otherwise, you’re just like everyone else.

Spoelstra’s track record of creating marketing and advertising success stories in basketball and arena football are legendary. The way to start, Spoelstra teaches, is “by making new a way of life.”

Step into each day looking at things from new and unexpected perspectives. Slaughter the sacred cows and bring in fresh thinking. Doing so will make your people happy, your brand strong, and you rich. Ask Warren Buffett about that.

The bigger the response, the better the idea

Ideas everyone agrees on are safe, bland, vanilla. They’re dreck. It’s the thinking that produces ad-speak-laden messages: “family owned with a commitment for quality and your satisfaction.” Gag me.

Marketing and advertising ideas worth exploring are the ones that double over half the room in laughter, while revolting others. Strong reactions tell you that idea carries a charge that will light up a brand. Nurture such thinking in people and you’ll create an unexpected employee benefit: opportunity.

By stepping into his Guns N Roses persona, Warren Buffett tells everyone, Geico is alive with opportunity. The boss is on the team, not in the watchtower. His appearances in those videos is a clarion call to every Geico employee: your ideas are welcome at the top. It’s a marketing and advertising message that resonates with customers too, earning Buffett and company over 327,00 plays on YouTube as of the moment this was written.

Employees created the video, wrote the lyrics, delivered the message. It works because it’s an authentic sentiment delivered by people who believe. This kind of thing only happens when you create a safe space for outrageous ideas.

How welcome are outrageous ideas at the top of your company?

Jon Spoelstra is our brand of crazy. That’s why you’ll find him teaching a class called How To Make Big Things Happen Fast at Wizard Academy. I spent two days attending his first workshop and highly recommend it–especially if you want to find the way to your envelope’s edge. Click here to learn more.

Getting more from what you give

WEDNESDAY’S WEEKLY READER

Food for thought gathered from around the web and served fresh to you.

Food for thought gathered from around the web and served fresh to you. This week: How to build a better social media following, what makes content to boost your credibility, why the yellow pages aren’t dead yet, and a look back at Super Bowl ad winners and losers.

Your following equals your giving

Brand marketers want consumers to follow them to build buzz and engagement, but social media users often desire something in return. What they’ve come to expect is a good deal, but many consumers—including the most active users of social sites—are also interested in deeper engagement.

A truth more powerful than your own

“Consumers create content for two reasons: 1. the company failed to adequately answer the questions they have and/or 2. they’re excited (positively or negatively) about the company’s offering,” says Bryan Eisenberg. That’s why consumers are more credible than the company. It is only because companies have spent so many years hyping up their “value” that the consumer B.S. meter has gone into overdrive, and we count on advice from others like us that we can trust.

Rules for ideas worth spreading

Here’s a bonus gem: Seth Godin’s random rules for ideas worth spreading. My personal favorite: “Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.” Which are you?

Tradition teetering on irrelevance?

Every year, a new telephone book, usually weighing a few pounds, lands with a thud on my front steps. While it’s estimated to consume millions of trees a year to produce, the question is: who uses it? Since most Americans now carry mobile phones, do we still need printed phone directories?

How many winners will play Super Sunday?

It’s not just the most-watched television event of the year; it’s also the one day when people actually sit down in front of the TV specifically to watch the commercials. The pressure to be among the best — or most noticed — has led to some of the biggest fumbles in advertising history. Thanks to the Internet, such embarrassments no longer fade away after the final touchdown.

What they buy teaches you how to sell

Food for thought gathered from around the web and served fresh to you.

Buying our way through 100 years

How much have people changed in the past 100 years? Not as much as their spending habits. Visual Economics’ 100 year graph tracks shifts in buying patterns. See what we value more today than we did a century ago. Specifically, see how much more we spend on transportation now as contrasted against a century earlier.

Tale of the Christmas register tape

The spend this Christmas told a story of value-centric consumers. See updated sales performance numbers for leading retailers across the country as gathered by The Wall Street Journal. The winners made their case on value. Those who didn’t lost big. Consumers made a choice for quality and set frivolous purchases aside. Zogby concurs, reporting Americans expect to make less in 2009 which will only intensify the importance an authentic value proposition in your advertising. Roy H. Williams predicted this buying behavior back on December 8, 2009. How are you making a value case in your advertising?

The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever hoid

Those who curse the changing market would be wise to seek the tutelage of Groucho Marks. How do you crack the code and get your business on top? Seth Godin sums it up: when the market changes, change with it or get left behind.

Hating Wal-Mart won’t hurt them, but it could kill you

That old man at the front door who greets you. The clerk who leads you to the product you can’t find. The person who answers the phone and cares enough to make sure you get an answer you can use. My partner Tim Miles points out how customer service, once the domain of the little guy, is being appropriated to make a big impression by the big guys. Beating them at that game isn’t a simple matter of out-nicing them. Get the details here.

How big do you want your toys?

Saving your sanity sometimes means getting away and doing the unexpected. Like, say, playing with real-life Tonka trucks–the kind used to build roads and buildings. Dig, in Steamboat Springs Colorado, allows you to play out your big truck fantasies.

Here’s even better news: they do birthday parties too. Sounds like a road trip!

Your intrepid correspondent

Grooveyard of posts past