MIT Sloan Management Review

Marketing

 

Managing the Total Customer Experience

By Leonard L. Berry, Lewis P. Carbone and Stephan H. Haeckel

April 15, 2002

Offering products or services alone is no longer enough: Organizations must provide their customers with satisfactory experiences. Competing on this dimension means orchestrating all the “clues” that people detect in the buying process.

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In recent years, managers have become increasingly aware of the need to create value for their customers in the form of experiences. Unfortunately, they have often proceeded as if managing experiences simply meant providing entertainment or being engagingly creative. The issue is far more complex than that.1 Restaurants that put photographs of movie stars on their walls and retailers that hang motorcycles from their ceilings — to give just two examples — will ultimately be disappointed in customers’ responses if they fail to make such objects part of a well-conceived, comprehensive strategy of managing the customer’s experience.

To carry out such a strategy, companies must gain an understanding of the customer’s journey — from the expectations they have before the experience occurs to the assessments they are likely to make when it’s over. Using that knowledge, companies can orchestrate an integrated series of “clues” that collectively meet or exceed people’s emotional needs and expectations. The internalized meaning and value the clues take on can create a deep-seated preference for a particular experience — and thus for one company’s product or service over another’s.

An organization’s first step toward managing the total customer experience is recognizing the clues it is sending to customers. Companies that sense trouble — in the form of falling customer-satisfaction scores or new competitive threats — would do well to... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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