Sur­prise … cus­tomers want their en­tire ex­pe­ri­ence to be just right. All touch­points have to be on point and all need to be mem­o­rable. When a busi­ness asks its cus­tomers “What did we do well to­day?” af­ter they have com­plet­ed their trans­ac­tions, all of the an­swers should be a re­sound­ing, “Every­thing.”

Sounds un­at­tain­able? On­ly if your busi­ness is aim­ing for ba­sic ser­vice. The busi­ness­es that have set sky-high tar­gets for cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence find noth­ing in­cred­u­lous about the “every­thing was done well” sur­vey re­sponse.

There is a ma­jor dif­fer­ence be­tween the busi­ness­es that set sky-high cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence tar­gets in­ten­tion­al­ly and those that aim for thresh­old-lev­el ser­vice. The for­mer busi­ness­es have no time to waste on per­for­ma­tive ef­forts, de­signed pri­mar­i­ly for echo­ing fash­ion­able nar­ra­tives that es­pouse an undy­ing com­mit­ment to ex­ceed­ing cus­tomers’ ex­pec­ta­tions. They un­der­stand that to­day’s cus­tomers judge busi­ness­es on what they do, not on what they say that they are go­ing to do. Per­for­ma­tive busi­ness­es, on the oth­er hand, miss this mark, since they’re too busy fo­cus­ing on pro­mot­ing their promis­es and not busy enough in­stalling the in­fra­struc­ture to sus­tain the promis­es.

Get­ting the en­tire cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence right is a fun­da­men­tal ex­pec­ta­tion of to­day’s cus­tomers. While yes­ter­day’s cus­tomers were will­ing to over­look the one or two ser­vice fail­ures that may have oc­curred along their trans­ac­tion or in­ter­ac­tion jour­neys, not so with the new­ly mint­ed gen­er­a­tion of cus­tomers, who are clear on their agency re­gard­ing ac­cept­ing or re­ject­ing poor ser­vice and who have demon­strat­ed their will­ing­ness to cast a vote with their feet when nec­es­sary. They will not hes­i­tate to pull the plug on their cur­rent pa­tron­age and plug in­to a su­pe­ri­or ser­vice de­liv­ery brand, where words and ac­tion are wed­ded.

One of the fun­da­men­tal as­pects of set­ting sky-high tar­gets is en­sur­ing that the mi­cro ex­pe­ri­ences which com­prise the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence jour­ney, are all su­perla­tive. Great at the start, poor in the mid­dle and sat­is­fac­to­ry at the end, or any oth­er per­mu­ta­tion that re­flects ir­reg­u­lar­i­ty, will no longer be tol­er­at­ed by the new gen­er­a­tion of dis­cern­ing, em­pow­ered and val­ue-ob­sessed cus­tomers.

For busi­ness­es that are un­ac­cus­tomed to tak­ing deep dives in­to defin­ing what it takes to keep cus­tomers hap­py, this means dis­sect­ing each step of each typ­i­cal trans­ac­tion or in­ter­ac­tion and treat­ing these steps as mi­cro ex­pe­ri­ences. This is re­al­ly mi­cro­scop­ic work that will test the re­solve of a busi­ness to ex­pend the ef­fort that is nec­es­sary for get­ting the end-to-end cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence right.

Let’s talk about the scale of this ap­proach. Each mi­cro ex­pe­ri­ence will need to be re­gard­ed as both a unique and an in­te­grat­ed step in the over­all ex­pe­ri­ence se­quence. Cru­cial to this process is go­ing be­yond hav­ing well-de­fined jour­ney maps and mi­cro ex­pe­ri­ences, in­to en­sur­ing that every de­part­ment across the busi­ness un­der­stands its role in sup­port­ing the chain of val­ue.

Cus­tomers re­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ate hav­ing a su­perla­tive ex­pe­ri­ence. The goal in this re­gard, is for a busi­ness to task it­self with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to “guar­an­tee” the out­come of every cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. Yes, while I know that many busi­ness­es con­sid­er this to be a risky act, we are sur­round­ed by a few busi­ness prece­dents that at­test to the fact that it is doable.

The busi­ness­es that ac­cept the chal­lenge to cre­ate these guar­an­tees, tend to have an ap­petite for set­ting big, bold au­da­cious goals and tend, as well, to have a propen­si­ty for dis­rupt­ing them­selves. In oth­er words, these busi­ness­es live in the epi­cen­tre of change and to them, the enor­mi­ty of what’s pos­si­ble is not a call to anx­i­ety, but a call to pur­su­ing the next big chal­lenge with an open dis­po­si­tion.

The ques­tion is, “What is hold­ing back your busi­ness from be­ing able to guar­an­tee a su­perla­tive cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence?”