Last week while on vacation, I had the privilege of going to a spa for a few days with my Mom and sister. While there, I thought about my work with the customer experience, and wondered how spas are so successful at making the customer experience so great.
Sure, it’s easy to make someone’s experience a good one when you’re offering lush towels, saunas, massages, and whatever else one desires. Yet, do customers at spas expect anything less than a great experience? When a customer walks into a spa, they expect everything to be perfect.
This does not apply when walking into a bank or a car dealership. In these cases, customers lower their expectations. The demand for employees to deliver a good experience is not as high.
How then, with so much pressure, do spas succeed? Shouldn’t the same expectation be held at banks and car dealerships? Shouldn’t customers have the right to expect and receive the best customer experience possible? If customers demanded a better experience, as more and more are, would standards be raised?
Expectations and perception play a huge role in the experience, but I think it's in a different way. Think about things people hate dealing with - insurance companies, customer service call centers or the DMV. Dreading a situation or expecting it to be difficult lowers our patience and primes us to do things like argue, complain and fight. It's called a self fulfilling prophecy and you can find many examples of this in earlier posts on this blog and most complaint sites around the web.
Posted by: cooper | October 25, 2006 at 11:32 AM