Anyone you meet in today’s day and age will have at least one story of how their experience with a particular product or service was so horrible that they continue to remember it to this day, even if they had multiple great experiences with it beforehand. It is the same situation within information technology (IT) within an organisation and that is why every company needs an Experience Management Office (XMO).
Bad Experiences Are Stronger Than Good Experiences
According to a 2001 research paper published in the Review of General Psychology, bad experiences have a significantly deeper impact on a person’s mind as compared to good ones. The study suggests that:
“The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”
Even though this is a well-known truth that everyone encounters in their daily lives, it's difficult to comprehend why companies that claim to provide "high-quality experiences" either don't grasp the basics or appear to be pretending to care, or worse, don't care at all. However, not caring is never going to help in this situation. As the research paper states without explicitly saying, the reasoning for remembering bad experiences over good is biological.
Our modern brain, largely unchanged from early human brains is wired to alert us to danger. The relative comfort of modern life for many of us means that now the danger has moved from attack by wild animal in the early days of humanity to stress and anxiety in current times. It therefore makes sense that we would alert others of negative experiences we’ve had over good ones as a type of evolutionary response. It might be haughty to suggest organisations improve their experience due to the evolutionary changes in what our brains alert to us as potential danger but it is the reality to some extent. Organisations need to recognise that not matching the customer's or employee's perspective of a good experience may encourage them to alert others of their bad experiences. Too many instances of this and an organisation may struggle with reputation. Understanding what may be preventing a good experience is a big part of the XMO.
The Average Process Of “Resolving A Ticket”
You spend minutes on the phone with a chatbot, asking questions that you know aren't going to help you fix your problem.
After waiting for 5-10 minutes, you will eventually be able to speak with a live person about your situation. After a few minutes of checking on the matter, the individual acknowledges that something requires a ticket and provides you with a ticket number. That's all they can do for you at the moment, and the conversation comes to an end.
You anticipate a speedy response, but your problem hasn't been handled after a whole day, and you'd like to know what's going on.
There's no way to check on an open ticket anywhere, so you have to engage with the chatbot AGAIN, go through the process of connecting with a real person AGAIN, and talk with them.
They inform you that the ticket has been reported to another team and that they are "working on it," but they provide you with no time frame for when it will be resolved.
Fast forward to your fifth day of checking in with someone through chat to see how things are going, and they simply say they're "working on it."
If you have ever raised a ticket hoping to find a solution, you must have come across this process and it is not the best of experiences to have. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The company providing you with this experience has potentially lost a customer.
You would then go on to tell 5-10 of your friends about how bad your experience was while seeking the company’s service. Right at that moment, 5-10 more potential customers are lost to the company even before making direct contact with them.
Service Management Isn’t The Same As Experience Management
In the example above, there lies a clear distinction between the service and the experience that the company was providing you.
While you had a bad customer service encounter that could have been handled better, the corporation should track user support and experience to see if there is a larger, systemic issue with, in this example, customer support.
Your unique concern was not addressed by Experience Management. That was supposed to be handled as a separate Service Management problem.
Why Is Experience Management Important?
Experience Management gathers user and customer sentiment and addresses the whole experience for everyone. If a pattern emerges and is perceived by a large number of customers, the negative experience will be tracked, reported, and handled in order to actually enhance the service provider's offerings.
Understanding the user's overall mood or feeling is the most important aspect of Experience Management, as it allows you to assess and monitor the experience and make modifications as needed.
What Is An Experience Management Office?
Our partners have created an extremely effective model called the Experience Optimisation Framework, which breaks down the five-step process of successfully integrating Experience Management into a company’s business for happier customers and employees. In brief, the Experience Framework's five phases are as follows - Explore, Envision, Enable, Execute and Embrace.
The Experience Management Office (XMO) becomes a vital portion of the organisation during the ‘Execute’ phase when the company decides to evolve from Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)
Also Read: What Are Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)?
This move from SLAs to XLAs would require a team with expertise in Experience Management. This is the Experience Management Office (XMO). This is the team who will collate all the experience data points, be them operational (service) data, technical data, or - and this is essential for any experience management project - sentiment, or experience data, and represent them visually to identify where experience is lacking for employees and, more importantly, enable them to draw correlations between the data points as to why experience is lacking.
Does Your Company Need An Experience Management Office?
Here’s a list of questions that you may use for a quick assessment of your company to understand whether or not you need an XMO.
Do you face problems while taking effective feedback from your customers and employees?
Are you unsure about whether you’re asking the right questions during the feedback sessions?
Do you have trouble making changes to your services based on your customers' and employees’ feedback?
Do you struggle to find how your customers really feel about the products and services that you are providing?
Are your customers and subscribers leaving or cancelling your services?
Is retaining customers becoming a problem?
Is your share in the market slipping away?
Does your business have bad ratings on platforms such as Google, Yahoo and Glassdoor?
Are your high-performing employees unhappy and leaving you for another company?
If your answer to these questions was “yes”, then you probably require an XMO. This is where Bright Horse can help you turn things around. It is not magic and it won’t happen in a day. However, with the help of our XMO consultancy, you will not only boost the experience of your customers and employees but will also be able to retain them for longer periods of time.
Are you still thinking about including Experience Management in your business model? Why not get in touch with us and we can discuss your situation in a more personalised way?