By Whitney Satin
My last post looked at why the customer experience is the best opportunity for marketers to build greater loyalty with their customers. But how do we figure out what actually matters in the experience as far as getting customers to actually prefer us?
To answer this, we surveyed over 9,000 customers from 15 member companies representing a range of B2B industries. We asked customers to rate different aspects of the experience across three categories:
- Touchpoints—the specific interactions between a customer and the company (e.g., customer service, technical support, online experience).
- Common Benefits—the qualities every company hopes to deliver across the customer experience (e.g., is easy to do business with, trustworthy).
- Unique Benefits—qualities specific to each company, or, the sources of value that set one experience apart from another (e.g., simplifies my supply chain, provides great ‘out-out-of-the-box’ experience).
Using regression analysis, we looked at how each category contributes to customer preference and repurchase intentions. The results were surprising. The perceptions customers have of touchpoint performance have virtually no impact on preference.
In fact, customers who express indifference—or worse, dissatisfaction—with the overall experience are just as likely to have the same opinion about a given touchpoint as even the most loyal customers. Marketers take note: exceeding expectations on any one touchpoint won’t get your company very far.
Touchpoints have little power to drive customer loyalty.
This doesn’t mean we can ignore touchpoints—customers can’t hate every interaction and still have a great experience. But a strategy that makes each touchpoint as good as it can be inevitably leads to local optimization without the coordination necessary to deliver a seamless experience. For example, the Web team will spend plenty of time enhancing the online experience, but this occurs with little regard to improvements also being made to the company’s tech support or distribution network. Touchpoints get looked at in isolation of one another, not as part of a connected system that creates a good or bad experience. This may help eliminate sources of dissatisfaction, but it doesn’t impact preference or repurchase.
So how are companies winning with their experience? Turns out, the Common and Unique Benefits a company provides do far more to drive preference and loyalty than even the strongest touchpoint. More on this in my next post.
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