Looking in all the wrong places

There’s a common misperception that Customer Experience is Marketing, however, it’s not.

Marketing is part of the Customer Experience, but so is Operations, Sales, Finance, IT, etc.

Case in point – a customer recently purchased a product from a large retailer. The item was packaged attractively in a thick plastic container. The customer was able to remove the item from the packaging using heavy-duty scissors, but soon realized that the item itself had storage containers built within it.

The customer struggled for a bit to uncover the process for opening these “built-in storage compartments” and ultimately resorted to searching for a YouTube video for help.

A 4-minute video did indeed assist the customer in opening the storage areas, but it shouldn’t take a YouTube video for your customer to use your product.

A Customer Experience fail? Yes. A Marketing fail? No. This was an Operations and Product Development fail.

The Customer Experience involves everything that your business is putting your customers through. The good, the bad and the ugly.

What do your customers have to deal with when it comes to your products and your business? Are you making things harder than they have to be?