Client Satisfaction: How Customer Experience Plays a Major Role

by Donald Davidoff | Jun 1, 2017 12:00:00 AM

With all the attention on the recent series of airline service mishaps, we thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit about the difference between “customer service” and “customer experience.” Harvard Business Review defines customer experience as “the sum of all interactions a customer has with a company.” This covers everything from when someone becomes initially aware of a company, through their purchase process, use of the product and re-purchase experience. The Disney Institute refers to “the critical moments—what we call touchpoints [their emphasis]—that create an organization’s overall customer experience.” It reminds me of Jan Carlzon’s seminal book Moments of Truth in which he defined his airline (SAS in the 1980s) not as a collection of airplanes, gates and routes, but rather as the sum of all of what he called “moments of truth” (hence the book title). These are the individual interactions between company associates and customers. In the digital age, we would add interactions through technology (for airlines, think of the online booking engine, airport check-in kiosks, auto-notification of delays and gates changes, etc.). As personal aside, this has always been a passion as I wrote my master’s thesis as a case study of the cultural change Carlzon led at SAS in the 1980s.