Customer experience is vastly different from customer satisfaction, which is more limited in scope and focuses on how a company’s product or services fail to meet or exceed expectations at any given time. Customer experience, on the other hand, is about understanding the critical moments when a customer interacts with a company and, ultimately throughout the relationship, with a brand to drive purchasing and loyalty.
The customer experience journey starts long before a potential customer buys our products. It starts with awareness of our company and our offerings. From the moment someone hears about us, through brand awareness, we are working to build their trust. We do that through shared values and goals. Do our products, our philosophy, our core values align with theirs?
In order to understand and enhance our customers’ experience, we developed customer journey maps last year to identify every step, every interaction (touch) along our customers’ journey with Konica Minolta. The maps are complex and revealed 205 touchpoints in our direct operation and 84 touchpoints for dealers. These maps help us understand our performance and identify areas of improvement to focus our efforts. These customer journey maps have become our blueprint for redesigning our experience and engaging front-line employees. As an example, within the direct journey map, we identified installation as a customer touchpoint to review. For the past few months, we’ve worked with the service and CRM teams to implement customer installation surveys to provide immediate feedback for the branch and service teams after every technology installation. By analyzing customer satisfaction, we can better understand how we are impacting the customer experience.
We take every interaction with the public to heart. Social media is another area where we continue to gather feedback and listen to the voice of the customer. We had a descriptive post on Twitter informing us that the delivery and installation team “smelled”… surgical-masked emojis included. This interaction spurred our logistics department to standardize uniforms across all our third-party delivery partners.
But that’s not enough. The customer experience closely follows the employee experience. Our culture and every person at Konica Minolta become a stop along the way on our customers’ journey. Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Great employees create great customer experiences. Think about the Ritz Carlton. No matter where you travel, if you stay at a Ritz Carlton, you receive the same outstanding level of white-glove service. Ritz Carlton differentiates itself from other hotels because employees deliver consistent, superior service to every guest for the duration of their stay. There are no variables.
Each of us here at Konica Minolta must strive for our own version of white-glove service. The engagement of our people, the culture of our organization ultimately shape how we interact with our customers. Today, October 6, is the perfect time to pause and think of how we touch each customer relationship. Today is global Customer Experience Day, a celebration of the companies and professionals that create great experiences for their customers.
The foundation of our culture lies in our corporate philosophy and 6 Values. As the essence of our innermost beliefs, they define how we go about our business and how we interact with customers, partners and the public. One of our 6 Values is to always be customer-centric. We exist solely for our customers.
Our loyalty to Konica Minolta and the unity across our organization to support customers drive our culture and, ultimately, our customers’ experience. Our culture determines how we “get the job done.” With passion, we transform a routine customer experience into a white-glove trusted relationship.
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