Managing the Total Customer Experience

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 people detect in the buying process. Customers always have an experience ? good, bad or indifferent ? whenever they purchase a product or service from a company. The quality of the experience lies in how effectively the company manages it, in all its facets and from beginning to end. Organizations that simply tweak design elements or focus on improving isolated pockets of the customer experience ? by providing a quick hit of entertainment, for example ? will be disappointed in the results. An organization's first step…