Think beyond Customer Satisfaction

Just thinking why the high customer satisfaction score reported by many companies is not converting into business growth for most of them. This leads me to think (apart from validity of some of these scores) if customer satisfaction alone is enough to survive and grow your business? Probably not and specially after reading this interesting book – Experience Economy, which gives valuable insight into how and why every business has to evolve from being into selling commodities/goods/services to providing experiences.

This means businesses are under constant and compelling needs to rediscover. Look yourself – every industry is now shifting more and more towards being a service industry – be it aviation or automobile or Internet based businesses. In fact the industry where in I work – the software industry where companies were so far concentrating more on product creation sees its future in services!! How else would you describe the growth levels achieved by companies like salesforce.com or rightnow or other software as a service companies and the predictions? Look at how many software companies are now offering on demand type of services.

In these times, as the books proclaims, the only way to distinguish your product or service is through providing customers – THE EXPERIENCE.


In fact the sub title of the book makes it even clearer – Work is a theatre and every business is a stage! What a remarkable way of looking at the modern way of conducting any business wherein we all can become artists on that stage and work towards creating a lasting positive experience in customer’s mind.

And probably I could get some clue in the book as to why customer satisfaction is not converting into business success. The book suggests, while customer satisfaction is important as always, one has to look beyond it and also concentrate into Customer Sacrifice ( i.e. difference between what customer expects to get and what he settles for), Customer Surprise (break customer’s monotony of doing business with you by throwing some kind of surprise element) and Customer Suspense ( What customer doesn’t yet know, let him keep guessing what’s coming up next while doing business with you)


And most of all, the book reminds us that we are not selling goods or services, we are selling memories! So next time when you talk to customer, think yourself an artist who is working on a business stage in a work theatre !!.

And go read Experience Economy.