User Experience and satisfaction are vital indicators of success for a business, and in a saturated market, service and experience become strategic to gaining new clients and keeping old ones.

Just read Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business by Peter Merholz at  HarvardBusiness.org, and started thinking about the importance of becoming aware of my company’s touch points, processes, and service. Where and what are they? How are they? And how could they become better experiences?

I really like what Merholz has to say about developing customer experience -

“Customer experience is an organizational mindset. It’s not something a business buys, it’s something a business becomes.”

So where do I need to become? Some thoughts…

1. With my internal customers (teachers): I think the most obvious experience point for teachers would be in the pay scale they ride. I feel that this is perhaps one of my big areas of strength in that we strive to pay above market wages to our employees. We also strive to schedule regular increases according to inflation and performance.

A potential area of opportunity would come from one of our differentiation points: we adapt course content to client needs. While this offers a strong advantage in the sales process, it also creates a potential weakness in that we do not always follow text books. This could likely mar our experience with our internal clients. (“I don’t have the material I need.”)

Solution: We are currently working hard to create a “living textbook” online that would easily allow teachers to find and use client centric content. However,  ongoing training will be essential to help make this a great experience. (Databank info as well as content development ideas should be included in a welcome pack to new hires. Online options could also be made available.)

2. Reporting – a great deal of attention should be placed in how we report to our clients. Information that is valuable to clients should be identified and krafted into a regular reporting process. This process must also be streamlined and designed to deliver within 3 business days after each month ends. Our goal should be to provide timely and valuable information to our client that will help them – not suck time away from their review process.

(And what if the reporting process no longer had to be paper based? What if there were online options available that the client could access at any time and any place? This would reduce paper usage, storage issues, and increase our reporting speed.)

Customer Experience is something that businesses – especially service oriented ones – must think and act about on a regular basis. With the economy the way it is today, a delightful customer experience could mean the difference between you being a defined as a cost to be cut, or an indispensible added value.