In Holland, a recent study found that half of the 'faulty' new electronic products returned to retailers, actually work perfectly well. The buyers simply could not figure out how to use their new mobile phone or entertainment system, and assumed it was broken.
Even worse still, an American research suggested that 10% of consumers purposely damage or sometimes even destroy such devices out of pure frustration. In one particular study, they found a restaurant manager can thrown his laptop into the deep fryer, resulting in a ruined laptop and deep fryer.
It's not just high tech gadgets which causes such rage. The BBC states that around 90 percent of people feel frustrated or angry after speaking with someone at a call centre. After moving house last year, I feel their pain as it took nine phone calls over 2 days resulting in 167 minutes on the phone just to get my phone switched over to the new address.
What amazes me even more is that companies spend so much on advertising a product or service and very little on advertising its ease of use. Ultimately, if a consumer has had a terrible experience with a particular product or service, chances are, no amount of advertising could persuade them to use that particular brand again.
Instead, organisations need to focus on improving the customer experience. This involves understanding customers' expectations and the quality of their interactions across all aspects of the company, its services and products.
Understanding expectations is about knowing what customers want to do, and how they would like to be treated. These expectations can be entirely different, depending on the nature of the visit. A customer ringing for support may have very different needs to one looking at the website, wanting to buy the product. Customer expectations can be driven by word-of-mouth, advertising and their own previous experiences.
In this day and age, companies and organisations now offer various ways to interact with them. Mediums such as email, call centres, websites and even local branches all need to make sure they give out the same information appropriate to the constraints of that medium. Different people are persuaded by technology in different ways, and some channels are just more suited for some interactions than others.
If an organisation can get its consumer experience right, the benefits are obvious. Increased customer satisfaction leads to more sales. Product/service differentiation creates a valuable competitive advantage and improved brand perception leads to an increased market share. A bad experience, on the other hand, leads to angry customers, an eroded brand and ultimately, lost revenue.
Even worse still, an American research suggested that 10% of consumers purposely damage or sometimes even destroy such devices out of pure frustration. In one particular study, they found a restaurant manager can thrown his laptop into the deep fryer, resulting in a ruined laptop and deep fryer.
It's not just high tech gadgets which causes such rage. The BBC states that around 90 percent of people feel frustrated or angry after speaking with someone at a call centre. After moving house last year, I feel their pain as it took nine phone calls over 2 days resulting in 167 minutes on the phone just to get my phone switched over to the new address.
What amazes me even more is that companies spend so much on advertising a product or service and very little on advertising its ease of use. Ultimately, if a consumer has had a terrible experience with a particular product or service, chances are, no amount of advertising could persuade them to use that particular brand again.
Instead, organisations need to focus on improving the customer experience. This involves understanding customers' expectations and the quality of their interactions across all aspects of the company, its services and products.
Understanding expectations is about knowing what customers want to do, and how they would like to be treated. These expectations can be entirely different, depending on the nature of the visit. A customer ringing for support may have very different needs to one looking at the website, wanting to buy the product. Customer expectations can be driven by word-of-mouth, advertising and their own previous experiences.
In this day and age, companies and organisations now offer various ways to interact with them. Mediums such as email, call centres, websites and even local branches all need to make sure they give out the same information appropriate to the constraints of that medium. Different people are persuaded by technology in different ways, and some channels are just more suited for some interactions than others.
If an organisation can get its consumer experience right, the benefits are obvious. Increased customer satisfaction leads to more sales. Product/service differentiation creates a valuable competitive advantage and improved brand perception leads to an increased market share. A bad experience, on the other hand, leads to angry customers, an eroded brand and ultimately, lost revenue.
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