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Attention is Good, Isn't it?

The wrong kind of attention doesn't help retailers one bit when it comes to customer experience and word-of-mouth. 

January 2, 2011 by Mike Wittenstein — Customer Experience and Service Designer, Storyminers

Bad customer experiences get the attention. Good ones get the profit.

Some PR people will tell you "Any news is good news. Take whatever press you can get." This dictum doesn't translate well to today's retail reality. Obviously, the inventors of these phrases didn't live with smart phones, the Internet, and millions of shoppers ready to tweet their concerns and complaints in a millisecond. The last thing a retailer needs is bad word of mouth. 

Retailers dealing with ever-more-fickle-less-brand-loyal-and-ready-to-switch customers should know that focusing on the customer experience is critical to their survival -- and to their ability to thrive. The customer experience, after all, is where most of the value of a purchase is created and maintained. Design your customer experiences well and you'll make more money than competitors who don't sweat these important details. At sales of $5,000 per square foot, the highest in the history of, well, history, Apple has proven the correlation between a better experience and higher profits. You may not have an Apple-like store, but if you focus on the experience in 2011, you can expect to see more black in an ocean of competitors swimming in red. 

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