To have good CX, make your experience forgettable

In a post-pandemic world, customers expect more from brands in terms of a good experience. But to deliver that good experience, brands need to understand the relationship between service and experience.

Aarron Spinley, independent CX consultant spoke to Digital Nation about how good service is one a customer doesn’t notice.

“It is not that experiences aren't important, but it is service layers, all those touch points you have. When you want to pay a bill, you want to check your balance, you want to make a payment, all of those things you don't want to have a memory about,” he said.

Spinley said an experience is part of a customer’s memory architecture.

“You don't want to go out this amazing time paying company XYZ, my bill. You want to get in and out. A service characteristic is that it is frictionless, it’s utterly forgettable, it’s over and it's done," he said. 

For those brands that want to build experiential memory creation for customers, Spinley said they have to earn the right to do so.

“Most companies haven't done that yet. They talk about experience, it's like we get paid to say the word experience at the moment," he said.

"Everyone talks about experience as if it's one thing. From an operating model perspective and customer service excellence perspective, it is two very different things."

Spinley said you can escalate a service into an experience by either doing it well where it's novel.

“A good example is when Uber came along, you could jump out of the car, you didn't have to hang around and pay when it was raining, that was amazing,” he said.

“Most people remember their first feelings when they used Uber, but then that normalised, now you don't even think about it. It went from an experience back to a service.”

The other way it works, of course, is if a brand ruins the service, Spinley explained.  

“In order to have a memory, which is what experience is. It is predicated on having an emotion about it. You don't have a memory about anything, you don't have a feeling about it. That is the ingredients for a memory,” he said.

“If I get to the payment process and the price changes, the delivery costs were exorbitant, or my favourite colour was no longer there. I am now frustrated, annoyed or all of those things. I took something that should be forgettable service into a memorable experience for all the wrong reasons.”

Spinley noted that brands confuse those all the time.

“It's one of the reasons I should say we have a really low quality of customer service. It's a global problem, but certainly pronounced here in Australia as well,” he ended.