How Many Different Experiences Can Be Offered To Customers
8 Types of Customer Experience
There is a story about six blind men who have never seen an elephant before. Six blind men and an elephant come together and blind people were asked to identify the object before them by touching it.
Every blind man touched the different parts of the elephant and gave a different description of the elephant. One of them thinks that he is holding a rope and the other thinks that he is touching a wall. Six had compared the part of the elephant that they touched to a different object.
Surprisingly, all of their identification was true because they are identifying the elephant by their point of view and memories come from before.
Customer Experience as a new area of study has a similar story. There are many and different descriptions of it.
The definition of Tavşan-Erdem is, in my opinion, the most accurate approach in defining the customer experience;
Customer experience would be defined as the collection of subjective ideas concerning a product or service that occurred at a conscious or subconscious level as a result of a customer’s direct or indirect contact with brand related stimuli.
So, how many different ways can these experiences be handled? Now is the time to examine this.
Brand Experience
The brand experience definition captures the very essence of branding much more than brand definitions that are analytically and cognitively focused, such as brand equity, brand value, brand interactions, brand attitudes, and brand personality.
Everything that triggers your brand-related stimuli includes Brand Experience like; color, logo, taste.
Starbucks is such and good example. In every part of the world, the company offers the same quality. Smells nice and is warm to the eye, they are comfortable and put me in a better mood.
Product Experience
Product experience is the experience facet that is the outcome of an interaction between a customer and a product. These encounters can happen in both direct and indirect ways.
Direct from product experience means that there is a physical interaction with a product. Drinking a coke, touching a coffee would be an example.
A personal note; Touching the cold coke box is my guilty pleasure.
An indirect form of product experience occurs when customers gain experience via a non-physical way like an advertisement or from other people’s ideas about the product. Indirect interaction allows customers to create an idea of visiting the store or online shopping and turn the form of direct interaction.
Shopping Experience
Shopping and service experiences come about when a customer connects with the physical environment and salesperson. The shopping experience is a way to trigger the customer’s stimuli while the shopping process happens.
Creating an environment for shopping experience is one of the important tools for the shopping experience. Companies using different strategies for it. If we evaluate Apple Stores. The experience starts with the first step.
Apple chooses high ceiling branches for its store and the company use simplicity for its stores. They don’t have unnecessary things inside the stores just tables, their products, and geniuses. There isn’t any factor that can disturb the customer. Apple’s shops create a carefree, casual atmosphere with their airy interiors and glamorous lighting.
To create a recallable shopping experience companies use scent marketing which means professionally design brand scents.
Yes it sounds crazy but this is literally scent marketing.
You may not have heard of it, but there is a company called Carpex, which is very successful in its field. Carpex is one the scent marketing company that creates a shopping experience for global branch brand like Nike, Ford, LC Waikiki.
Companies use that scents in their shop which customer can smell only in the store so every time a customer visits the store with the help of smelling memory the experiences starts.
Like environment design, another important success key of shopping experience is an employee working in there. An employee can give away to adventure both positively and negatively.
Again, Apple is one of the successful examples of training its employees. Sales associates are taught a sales approach according to several staff and training manuals: not to market but rather to help customers solve problems that they even not recognized by them.
Amazon brings a new breath to the market. They created a branch that offers a new shopping experience called Amazon GO. There are no payment processor salespeople in the store. All operation handling behind via AI and customer’s Amazon account
With this new market system, amazon has solved the two main pain points of the end-user. The need to communicate with people and the long queues expected for payment.
User Experience
User experience is a concept that gains importance while the usage of the internet becomes popular. User experience focuses to trigger stimuli of the customer via virtual interactions. Now, several companies create user experiences such as webpages, internet databases, apps, and mobile phones.
If you want to learn more about UX, you can easily find many publications and articles focused on UX in medium.com
Like the shopping experience, companies should design their interaction tool environment as an experienced architect. They should design their pages in a way offering the most simple and understandable UI/UX possible for the customers.
Customers should easily find what they are looking for so the interface must be user friendly. It’s possible to follow the footsteps of customers on a page. Artificial Intelligence systems can follow the interesting topic, body size, and special days for them.
The interface should be re-designable for each customer uniquely. Organizations need to check that every actor works in unison if they wish to create customer loyalty through their user experience.
Any website or application whose interface you like can be a successful example because as I mentioned above you already liked it.
Price Experience
Price experience relates to the price variable’s relation to the overall consumer experience a customer is moving through. Price is something of a touchpoint, a position where the feelings and rational choices of a customer that connect with the experience.
The perception that leaves pricing can build positive or negative emotions and can contribute to engagement or churn.
Higher prices can mean both expensive and quality for a product or a service. Then again, lower prices don’t mean cheap always sometimes it sounds poor quality for a product.
It changed based on how the company positioned its product and services on customers’ mindset and how it triggers their understanding of price stimuli.
There is a bar called The Bar Stock Exchange in Mumbai. The bar is the first stock market-based bar chain, and beverage prices will change according to real-time and demand.
It is one of the most technologically advanced bars in India, and customers can place orders through a specially developed app. The app allows you to monitor prices and orders in real-time.
Customers can compete with each other, and the system can offer the most favorable price based on the beverage of their choice. What a successful way to provide consumers with pricing experiences!
Delivery Experience
Delivery experience is another part of the total customer experience journey which commonly unheeded by organizations like price experience. It is important to offer what is advertised in the agreed state and on-schedule delivery to improve customer experience and to retain loyal customers.
Amazon offers two innovative new delivery methods now. The first one is Prime Air delivery. Amazon offers to handle its delivery process via drones for the customers to have enough conditional requirements.
So, the pain of the long waiting time of the customer disappears via this new offer.
Second, Amazon offers Locker Room delivery. The company has a thousand different points across the country. When a customer chooses one them to deliver, the company puts their package to one of these locker rooms and sends the information to the customer.
So, the pain of waiting for a package of customers disappears. Customer experience is more powerful when the delivery experience has been well designed
A personal note; when my AirPods arrived on the same day as my order, I thought the cargo arrived at the wrong address.
Consumption Experience
Consumer experience applies to perceptions arising from the use, service, or product. So, experience stimuli triggering while customers consume or having the offer.
Like the other facets of Customer Experience; consumption experience has two-sided benefits for the customer which are utilitarian and hedonic benefits.
It can be described like this; when a person eats an apple there two main benefits from it. First, the person gets fresh beneficial organic substances like vitamins, and the person smells and tastes to fresh apple. The benefits that touch the pragmatist part is Utilitarian. The benefits that touch the more emotional part is Hedonic.
Disposal Experience
First of all, I have to say that before this article, I wouldn’t think there could be such an experience.
In today’s world using a product or before processes are not the only focus of the customer. The interest in the process after the using product. There are some aspects to increase customer experience via the upcycle or recycling of the products.
People care about the environment. It affects the decision-making process of purchasing and experiences that they gain from the product or service. The request that their products or packaging should include recycling ingredients.
Upcycle products or packaging is another opportunity to create a disposal experience. Upcycling of the items that have lost their functionality and have been started to be seen as surplus, and brought them to life by making them useful and useful thanks to some creativity and a little effort.
Using a canister to plant a flower or cutting the lower part of the old trouser leg and making them a short would be some examples for upcycling.
These are 8 topics that can be taken as a basis for customer experience, listed one by one above. Of course, none of them are separate from each other by red lines. Also, it is possible to enrich these types with subtitles.
You are now more aware of the types of experiences available to you. If you have a business, you can easily use these types of experiences. The important thing is to decide which stimulus of the consumer you want to trigger.
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