Create a WOW Customer Experience

By Janna Pearman Jacobs

Have you defined what a WOW experience for your customers looks like? If not, you're missing a chance.

I had a WOW experience with my bank on Sunday. I wanted to know the minimum balance to avoid fees. I used the mobile app to chat with someone after hours, and they answered my question. I got the information I needed when I needed it.

On the other hand, I had a bad experience with a delivery company on Sunday. They notified me that they could not get into the building to deliver my package on Sunday afternoon, even though their competitors—Amazon, UPS, and FedEx—were able to deliver to the building successfully.

These are simple scenarios to illustrate a point. Companies engage with their customers and create positive or negative experiences. In my opinion, it’s critical to accumulate positive customer experiences. Customers are hard-won.

Here’s an approach I’ve used to identify where to invest in WOW customer experiences.

  1. Identify customer engagement scenarios.

    • Why are they engaged with you?

    • What do they need from you?

    • How do they prefer to engage with you?

  2. Categorize and prioritize engagement scenarios. Identify the ideal path (80%). Identify the least optimal path (20%). Everything else should be eliminated.

  3. Document how you deliver – people, process, technology, and or a combination.

  4. Assess the effectiveness of your engagement scenarios (measure their

    effectiveness in total and at each hand-off)

  5. Identify opportunities to improve (maximize) the ideal and eliminate what should

    not be happening.

  6. Get started.

    • Immediately eliminate no customer impact, low-hanging fruit.

    • Make investments to maximize the ideal using your categorization and

      prioritization model from step 2. Everything’s not equal.

Rules of thumb:

  • Optimize the ideal path and drive customer adoption. Don’t waste resources trying to do everything. You’ll end up being mediocre.

  • Listen to your customers.

  • Have a plan. Roadmap your actions so change is not disruptive to customers.

  • Don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy. If it’s not working, fix it or eliminate it.

Know that WOW customer experiences don’t just happen; they are architected and intentional.

If you need help assessing and designing WOW customer experiences, this is the work we do. Visit RKCMANAGEMENTCONSULTING.COM to schedule an appointment.