Lou Carbone, founder and chief experience officer of Experience Engineering, a Minneapolis-based consulting firm writes & explains about this concept:
" I say experience engineering, not customer engineering, is focus on how to turn the customer experience into value,” he says. “Whether it is an employee experience, a shareholder experience, or the customer experience, all of these experiences are the totality of creating valuable personal relationships.”
Several key principles are necessary to engineering customer experience, says Carbone. “You are moving from making and selling to really sensing and responding. We create an emotional by thinking and looking at everything from the customer back. It’s understanding and leveraging the role of the unconscious mind, becoming clue conscious, and developing a rigorous system that manages those clues.”
To understand the value, Carbone stresses, you have to understand people. “Customer satisfaction isn’t a predictor of customer loyalty,” he adds. ”Most defectors are actually satisfied customers. It’s really based on the need for emotional engagement.”
“Customers consciously and unconsciously filter a barrage of clues and organize them into a set of impressions—some rational, some emotional,” he continues. These clues involve all five senses. Some clues are relayed from human behavior (voice tone, body language) and others are mechanical (design, color, temperature). Thus, without consciously knowing it, we are aware of the comfort of a chair in Starbucks or how our hotel folds towels and half-empty toilet paper rolls.
My take: Experience is irrational and emotional but the key point being made is how do we turn experience into value. It's about making every experience tangible. One example that comes to me is Honda Service in India(as experienced by a friend of mine). While he had signed for an annual AMC for the car, everytime he would take the car for service round the year, an invoice would be raised for the service/work order amount( Say INR.33,00) but what he had to pay - Rs.zero was raised too( there was credit & debit in the same invoice)!! The value of the Honda AMC experience, therefore, became tangible and would lead to higher renewal rates year after year.