Customer Experience and Service Quality

• These notes cover key concepts related to customer experience, service quality, customer relationship management, and individual skills.

Expectations and Experiences

• Customer satisfaction is influenced by customer expectations and experiences.
• Memorable experiences, both positive and negative, occur throughout the customer journey, especially during peak and final moments.

Elements of Service Experience

• A customer's perception is shaped by touchpoints, images, and emotions.
• Service quality is affected by responsiveness, reliability, and the physical environment.

Developing Customer Experience

• Customer experience development focuses on improving customer relationships and exceeding expectations.
• Proactive service and personalized attention increase customer engagement.

Characteristics of Good Service

• Key features of good service include reliability, flexibility, professionalism, and a positive attitude.
• Exceeding customer expectations can strengthen a company's reputation and credibility.

Key Elements of Service

• Key elements include efficiency, ease, and emotion.
• Efficiency means smooth processes and added value for the customer without complications.
• Ease refers to a seamless customer experience, including communication and issue resolution.
• Emotion constitutes the customer's emotional experience during the service process, where they feel valued and acknowledged.

Service Quality and Expectations

• Service quality can be measured using gap analysis and the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Balancing expectations and perceived service strengthens customer loyalty.

Developing Customer Experience

• This involves focusing on improving interactions and addressing customer emotions.
• Real-time data is crucial for creating a comprehensive understanding of the customer.

Purchasing Decisions and Behavior

• Demographic, psychological, and social factors, like needs, motives, values, and group pressure, affect purchasing decisions.
• Customer behavior can be analyzed based on purchase frequency and types of products purchased.

Purchasing Process

• The purchasing process includes identifying a need, searching for information, evaluating alternatives, making a purchase decision, and post-purchase evaluation.

Types of Purchases and Risks

• Different purchase types exist, including routine, careful, and risky purchases, which involve quality, financial, and social risks.

Customer Segments

• Customers can be segmented based on lifestyle, such as "Dinkies" and "Woopies".
• Segmentation helps to customize marketing and sales strategies.

Digitalization and Purchasing Paths

• Digital customer journeys allow for independent information gathering and decision-making, up to 80% before contacting a seller.

Customer Service Representatives

• Customer service representatives act as the "face" of the company, and good customer service supports the company's reputation and marketing promises.

Ecosystem Thinking

• Businesses operate within a dynamic business environment, which they can actively influence.

Complaints

• Handling complaints is an opportunity to learn and improve service, emphasizing listening and solution-oriented approaches.

Internal Marketing

• Developing employee skills and motivation is key to improving customer service quality.

Value Creation

• Providing value to customers, such as quality and ease, enhances the company's success.

Defining Customers

• A long-term cooperative relationship is the definition, based on trust and mutual value creation.

Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction

• Ensuring quality involves understanding customer expectations and continuously improving the service experience.
• Quality can be measured by customer satisfaction, accessibility, and the success, and smoothness, of service interactions.

Customer Lifetime

• Consists of acquisition, onboarding, development, and retention.
• Different steps are needed to maintain the customer relationship at each steps of the customer lifetime.

Strategic Customer Management

• Strategic customer management focuses on supporting the customer's value creation process and mutual benefit.
• Customer orientation emphasizes cooperation and avoiding confrontation.

Customer Relationship Strategies

• "Napper strategy" (one-off deals) and "zipper strategy" (deep cooperation).

Self-Leadership

• Involves goal-orientation, self-awareness, stress management, time management, decision-making, and interaction management.
• Key skills include maintaining a positive attitude and adapting to change.
• The key is identifying one's motivates, strengths, areas for development, and coping skills.

Expectations and Memory of Experiences

• Overall situation is affected by expectations and experiences.
• Averages do not say everything, important interactions and key impressions affect memories.
• The experience can be positive or negative and depends often on expectation
• Expectations affect evaluation of overall situation

Time Management

• The following is important: planning, prioritizing, and balancing life.
• Evaluate time usage and time-off balance and ability to say NO to unnecessary tasks.
• Goal achievement requires realism and continuous self-reflection.

Digital commerce issues

• Global growth of online commerce has presented many challenges
• Has not been successful in change operations to respond to customer-needs and expectations
• Ease means a client can easily contact business and does not have to repeat self.

Customer Service Quality

• Overall, two thirds of overall is sentiment
• Strongest sentiments are related to human interaction
• Similar to establishing a human-to-human connection, people can ruin a connection as well
• Client relationships are key
• Customer service quality is key

Gap Analysis Model

• Lower part is inner-processes, which make up upper-part. Must be in balance, a lower-part issue can easily affect upper.

NPS Model

• How likely will a customer recommend to family or colleagues?
• Assessed using the scale of 0 to 10
• 9-10 is strong recommendation, 0-6 is low (or critical)
• Important metric for business, for growth

Quality

• Quality is not always first, benefits and costs must be evaluated
• costs arise from production and maintenance
• Improvements are always expensive
• No role in the importance, work-only sentiment not sufficient
• Not all clients require services, and must not overserve. Service depends on agreements.

Customer Choice

• Need to improve self
• Respect clients as well
• Need common group feel
• Security

Customer-behavior-based grouping

• Last transaction
• frequency
• Cost/Average
• Product grouping

Demographics and customer behavior

• Can be based on:
• Age
• Gender
• Civil-status
• Hometown
• Family size, life-stage in general
• income
• purchasing power
• job
• education
• language, nationality, religion

Customer-behavior

• Very basic for each business

Purchase decision affecting factors

• Innate factors: needs, sentiment, attitude, values etc.
• Social and group factors: family, friend opinions
• Environmental
• Competition, pricing, advertisement etc.

Personal factors affecting purchase

• Reasons/Inspiration to purchase

Sentiment

• Preconceived attitude
• Affected by personal experience

Psychological Factors

• Needs and sentiments
• Lifestyle

Social factors

• Referral group: Finnish, families, students, Gen Z (interaction: online, chat, phone, face2face)
• Primary, Secondary or Desire Group
• Negative: groups to not be part of

Why the customer purchases

• Benefit gain
• Savings
• Fulfillment
• Activities can be developed.
• Trade security
• Simple
• Feeling part of a segment
• Self-esteem

Miscellaneous

• Bad tires
• Inspection of tires
• Bad car: Road assistance called
• Company works around client promise

Marketing

• Important workers kept for success
• Central strategy within company
• Corporate entrepreneurial attitude, not owning any business
• Deeds

Business

• Monetary
• Low cost
• Long relationships

Reclamations

• All is not well
• Listen (more data)

Customer Relationships

• Tested by face-2-face
• Business or client adapt