What'S The Secret?: To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience

Chapter 7. Commandment III: Nonnegotiable Experiential Standards

Experience standards everyone must follow

Because of the shift to the Experience Economy, goods and services are no longer enough; what consumers want today are experiences—memorable events that engage them in an inherently personal way. People now decide where and when to spend money and their time—the currency of experiences.^[76]

—James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want

Having nonnegotiable experiential standards for each stage of your organization's customer experience cycle enables employees to provide a consistent engaging experience that is unlike the majority of your competitors.

If your Service Vision is clear and you have hired people that truly share in that vision, now you have to create experiential standards that will allow that Service Vision to become a reality.

Experience Tax

What if your company actually applied an experience tax to everything you sold to your customers? Think about it for a moment. Similar to a sales tax, regardless of what you sell or which department you work in, at the bottom of the sales slip or the monthly invoice, you would have a experience tax in addition to the original price. What if it was an extra $5.00, or even an extra $500? Would you do anything differently? What would you add to your product or service to justify the price?

If you had to ...