May 15, 2007
Do people care about customer experience, yet?
No, not according to Google Trends.
Google Trends is a cool new feature. You can compare the volume of searches for any two terms since 2004. The red bar represents searches for “customer service.” The flat blue line (appearing only in 2005) represents searches for the term “customer experience.” So, despite the success of The Experience Economy
Why? Well, for one thing, the term customer experience got appropriated by a very specific, narrow set of parameters in business called CEM, for customer experience management, which focuses mainly on improving the performance of call centers. I have a Google news feed set up to fetch articles including the term customer experience; for the last six months it’s netted only press releases from companies or consultants focusing on CEM.
A search on Amazon gave me 41,488 books tagged “customer service” and only 3,147 books on “customer experience.” So, believe it or not, we’re still on the leading edge of this discussion. There’s still a lot of room for fresh ways of looking at the customer experience, from Danny Meyer’s book Setting the Table to Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber’s new book, Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough.
Why do you think the concept of customer experience still seems “new?”
Bizzy said,
May 15, 2007 @ 10:30 am
In answer to your question, I think most of us ( myself included) did not know customer experience is separate from customer service. But, it makes sense now (correct me if I’m wrong): the first is about taking steps to create specific experiences that are favorable to your business. The second is about reacting to or avoiding existing problems- which is working your way out of an experience that has already gone sour (hence your example on call centers).