Thursday, July 14, 2011

Customer Experience Is Personal, But Difficult, For That Reason

Forrester Research analyst Harley Manning points out that "customer experience is personal. It comes down to a pilot who holds a plane, a phone agent who makes a problem just go away, or a barista who anticipates a customer’s order."

He's right, of course. But any executive, product manager or operations manager knows that even good advice has to be qualified when put into practice. "Personal" activities do not scale very well, by definition. They are "one-to-one" events. So the problem for many providers of goods and services is how much money and time the organization can afford to spend to really "personalize" a product or experience.

In many cases, in fact, organizations really cannot afford to do much of anything without destroying their profit margins. That might explain why some businesses routinely get lowish markets for "customer experience," "satisfaction" or "customer service." And there are times when a firm has to invest more heavily in such interactions or risk market failure. Most mobile services firms, and Sprint in particular, have discovered that truism in recent years.

But lots of firms probably struggle with the margin implications of "personalized" experience, except for providers of digital goods, where software can be used to highly customize and personalize many aspects of experience, with the end user actually doing the tailoring. Experiences built around physical products are a harder problem, by far.

But even there, as the saying goes, more of the value and experience of most products these days is embodied in software. And some of us would include the content wrap-around to a product as a "software" enhancement. You might include "frequently asked questions" and user forums, blogs about "how to get more value from your product" and so forth as part of the value wrap-around that, if not completely "personal," create a more-personal, more human, "higher touch" feel about a product.

In that sense, content marketing is about more than lead generation or branding. Content marketing can be part of the way a product that is hard to support in a genuinely "high touch" personal way, can be made "more personal."

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