3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

It's a question that many businesses have asked: “Why should my business worry about the 'customer experience'?” It may not happen often—the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center suggests it happens “every now and then”—but it's a question that likely makes some cringe just to hear it. Yet at the same time, it's a question to answer. What exactly is the payoff from focusing on something that will change from user to user? What value is there in the “customer experience” when each customer's definition of a good one is different? The answer, of course, is that there are some common points to focus on, and failure to at least focus on some of these can cost business in the long run.

Commonly, those who support the side of a good customer experience turn to a quote from Walmart founder Sam Walton, who said, “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

The customer is the universal source of cash flow, and for most any business out there, cash flow determines whether a business lives or dies. Thus protecting that customer—and the accompanying value said customer contributes to the business—becomes important by extension. An article from Harvard Business Review titled “The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified” shows that customers who have the best experiences with an organization in the past spend 140 percent more than those who have the worst experiences. Thus the article carries on to elaborate that “delivering great experiences actually reduces the cost to serve customers from what it was previously.”

Expanding outward from there, customer experience is a huge part of marketing, particularly in terms of generating the best kind of marketing: unsolicited word of mouth advertising. Most customers have a customer service horror story out there—Ryan Block is now widely known for his nightmarish gauntlet-running with Comcast (News - Alert)—and are often eager to tell it. This in turn colors other people's perception of the business and the likelihood of making purchases with said business. With social media and similar online sources running, that horror story can be all over the planet in minutes. But so too can a positive story, and while positive stories are commonly less often told, the potential customers positive stories do reach get access to a much more positive perspective, and are more likely to buy. Moreover, some measures of customer service, like Net Promoter Scores and the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, are starting to factor into users' buying decisions.

Admittedly, customer experience can be hard to quantify. An experience that's delightful for some customers may be the minimum expected for others, and for others, it doesn't even match up to the minimum. But for those who put the effort forth to provide the best in customer service, the end result is likely to be a positive one, between great word of mouth advertising and useful future references, as well as the always-valuable regular customer.

It may not immediately show up, but customer experience has a quantifiable value that represents big things for an operation. It allows a business to stand out from the crowd and offer up a clear differentiation between itself and other operations, as well as future marketing potential, and that all represents positive benefit for any business.