Customer experience (CX) is the product of any interaction between an organization and a customer. If you have a customer, then you have CX. Unfortunately, there is a tendency, when formalizing CX, to unwittingly overlook the customer (the very focus of CX efforts) while attention is directed toward journey mapping, physical & digital touchpoints, service levels, features & benefits, surveys, metrics, etc.
I recently bought a new Ford Expedition Max. Ford is a sophisticated company. The carefully crafted customer journey led me from an online shopping experience, inside the showroom, and into a vehicle, before reaching my final destination: the finance manager’s office. Everything went swimmingly along the journey until I picked up the vehicle and noticed a promotional sticker on the rear window beneath the brake light that drew attention to a new safety feature: The brake light blinks several times in succession before going solid (to conspicuously alert other drivers that you’re braking). The sticker didn’t easily peel off. In fact, it appeared to be fused to the window with Gorilla Glue®. I pointed this out to my salesman and he had someone from the service department scrape it off. Aside from the inconvenience of having to wait, when I took delivery of the brand-new vehicle, the rear window was badly scratched where the sticker had been, as though the tech had used a screwdriver to remove it. Ultimately, this was resolved after Ford scheduled a rep to come to my home and replace the rear window.
Ford has a pretty thorough post-sale voice of the customer (VoC) program in place to rate the buying experience. I invested time to complete the survey, detailing the sticker issue, and questioning the need to use a type of adhesive that could lead to such an avoidable (and expensive) CX issue. I have yet to hear back – and this was six weeks ago. This is a missed opportunity for Ford to strengthen our relationship (and increase my brand loyalty, intent to repurchase, and willingness to recommend) by demonstrating that they heard my feedback and are doing something about it, whether discontinuing the promotional sticker, changing adhesives, or retraining the service tech(s). My suspicion is that Ford will continue to apply the stickers (highlighting a safety feature that had no bearing on my purchase decision) using the same adhesive and the service tech(s) may or may not have been retrained.
If I’m right, then this is just one more illustration of a “customer-centric” company, by all appearances, steeped in elaborate CX processes (customer journey, physical & digital touchpoints, features & benefits, surveys, etc.) that appears to have lost sight of the customer (by unwittingly devaluing his time and feedback) and continue a practice that could lead to increased customer dissatisfaction and higher costs.
