Proof Customer Experience Impacts Your Business

The 3rd annual report on Customer Experience Impact was released today by RightNow Technologies and Harris Interactive. I didn't see anything surprising in the report, but what you will find is proof that what you've been hearing, experiencing and seeing is true and not going away any time soon:

Customers care deeply about the experience they have with your company.

Yes, they do. As a matter of fact, they're getting even more demonstrable about how much they care.

The report found the following outcomes of BAD experiences:

• 87% have stopped doing business with a company that provided a bad experience. In fact, more of them are taking action in response to bad experiences—28% more since 2006.
• 84% will tell others about their bad experience—22% of them blog about it or post negative feedback online.

What's interesting to me is comparing this research of consumer perspective in regards to experience with company viewpoint on the same subject. According to Forrester Research, 62% of companies don't view the customer experience as critical for the future.

This makes me want to ask these companies what kind of future they forecast? Going down in flames? Selling to a different species?

With the increasing ability and propensity of people to take control of their purchasing by walking away from companies who provide bad experiences—and tell others about it—companies are crazy if they're not focused on shaping their customer experience to meet excellence - as defined through their customers' perspective.

In fact, here are the payoffs for serving up excellent experiences to your customers:

• 58% will pay more for excellence in service—even in a down economy.
• 57% will recommend your company to others when they receive outstanding experiences.

Considering the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that people trust most "people like them," can you afford not to deliver excellent experiences to your customers?

The Customer Experience Impact Report also discovered which facets of experiences have the most impact in encouraging people to engage with your company.

• Improving the overall experience.
• Easy access to information of value–improve website usability and search.
• Ease in asking questions—web chat was favored highly.
• Ability to speak to a human being when they reach out.

It's also interesting to note that receiving content via mobile device was only favored by 5% and increasing a company's presence on Facebook or MySpace was only favored by 4%.

Although this report is tailored to consumers - these are the people we interact with for B2B complex sales. If they feel this way personally, don't even start to think this perspective disappears when they walk through their office door. It's time for companies to flip their focus to customers and embrace the things they value. The implications of this report can't be more clear.

Thanks to RightNow Technologies and Harris Interactive for the report.

I'll leave you with this quote from Bruce Temkin, Analyst at Forrester Research:

“In all of my work with large organizations, I’ve never heard anyone say 'we spent too much on customer insight.' That’s because most companies spend too little in this area. Customer research, including ethnographic field studies, makes sure that we truly understand our customers’ needs, interests, and desires."

Update 10/08/08: Coincidentally, CMO Council announced their latest research report, Customer Affinity from Optimized Content Delivery, which stated

"According to a 2007 Harris Interactive poll of more than 2,000 adult consumers, 80 percent of consumers will never go back to an organization after a negative experience. Seventy four percent of unhappy customers would register a complaint or tell others about their experience, the poll added."

You can download the Executive Summary for a minor registration.

Comments

[jon burg]

WOW, what a study! You just filled in a whole section of my presentation, thanks for the sharing!

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for stopping by - you're welcome and I'm glad to be of help! If you have anything to add to this, I'd love to see it...

Where are you presenting?

Ardath

[jon burg]

I'm putting together a presentation called "Making the case for social branding". This is both an internal and client facing presentation, largely focused on strategy, but I always need some good numbers to lend substance to the ideas floating around in this odd head of mine.

The classic numbers game that I play is this: 3/4 consumers are wary of brand messages. 9/10 trust fellow consumers. That means that truly social messages are over 300% more effective. Now, considering the increased connectivity and evergreen nature of the digital social dynamic (twitter conversations and blog posts live in the cloud forever), these conversations will forever impact the perceived social footprint of your brand until you the brand decide to proactively start doing something about it. Don't know if this helps, but using the 300% number, I multiply all social exposures by that number, then demonstrate the meme phenomena, ultimately bubbling up into an ad equivalency number. Invariably, the ad equivalency number is far better than an actual ad spend, though both forms of communications are often necessary.

One day, hopefully after all of my clients have invested in the solution I'm working towards, we may make this presentation public - but that is still a ways away. Thanks!

[Michael Lane]

Hi Ardath,

Hope things are well. This is a great article. I'm doing some work with one of clients on customer experience . . .I should have know to look here first for insight.