Question

1. a. Explain some of the most rapidly advancing technologies customers are seeking out. - and  b. Find an article that discusses the topic of customer service. Summarize your findings. PLEASE DO NOT COPY FROM ANOTHER ANSWER ON HERE. THANK YOU

Answer 1

Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use, and service and is usually initiated by the customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company’s products, services, or brands and takes the form of word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms, advertising, news reports, reviews, and so forth. Such an encounter could occur when Google’s whimsical holiday logos pop up on the site’s home page at the inception of a search, or it could be the distinctive “potato, potato” sound of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle’s exhaust system. It might just be an e-mail from one customer to another.
The secret to a good experience isn’t the multiplicity of features on offer. Microsoft Windows, which is rich in features, may provide what a corporate IT director considers a positive experience, but many home users prefer Apple’s Macintosh operating system, which offers fewer features and configuration options. A customer’s experience with an Apple device begins well before the purchaser turns it on—in the case of the iPod, perhaps with the dancing silhouettes in the TV advertisements. The origami-like (and recyclable) packaging enfolds the iPod as though it were a Fabergé egg made for a czar. A small sticker, “Designed in California, Made in China,” communicates the message that Apple is firmly in charge but also interested in keeping costs down. Even Windows users appreciate the device’s intuitive, Mac-like feel and find that downloading tracks from iTunes is easier than buying a CD on Amazon. Every Apple product is designed with the overarching purpose of making the time one spends with Apple an enjoyable experience.

A successful brand shapes customers’ experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in offerings’ every feature. For BMW, “the Ultimate Driving Machine” is much more than a slogan; it informs the company’s manufacturing and design choices. In 2000, Mercedes-Benz introduced a system that automatically controls the distance between a Mercedes and the car in front. BMW would not consider developing such a feature unless it amplified rather than diminished the driving experience.

Service quality and scope matter, too, but mostly when the core offering is itself a service. For example, the tracking and shipping support FedEx provides on the Internet and by phone is as important to customers as its fundamental value proposition—on-time delivery.

In their concern with logistics—how something is provided, not just what is provided—business-to-business companies take after consumer-service companies. For both, the goal is to provide a positive experience to the end user. The business partner or supplier of a B2B company helps the latter do that first by understanding where in its direct customers’ value chain the B2B can make a meaningful contribution, and then when and how. Those are different undertakings from capturing and parsing a given human being’s internal, ineffable experience. A business’s “experience,” one might say, is its manner of functioning, and a B2B company helps its business customers serve their customers by solving their business problems, just as an effective business-to-consumer company fulfills the personal needs of its customers. In a B2B context, a good experience is not a thrilling one but one that is trouble-free and hence reassuring to those in charge.

Thus, a supplier satisfies the purchasing department of its business customer by providing a balance of costs and benefits; it satisfies operations by offering products or services that are easy to use; and it satisfies a customer’s executives by expanding capacity at the same rate as the customer and in general evolving alongside it. Accordingly, sales and marketing do not necessarily monopolize points of contact with customers: Operations people at the first company deal directly with their counterparts at the second, and so forth. The functional nature of the relationship—indeed, the fact that it is a true relationship—creates a pervasive awareness of experience issues and priorities.

Whether it is a business or a consumer being studied, data about its experiences are collected at “touch points”: instances of direct contact either with the product or service itself or with representations of it by the company or some third party. We use the term “customer corridor” to portray the series of touch points that a customer experiences. What constitutes a meaningful touch point changes over the course of a customer’s life. For a young family with limited time and resources, a brief encounter with an insurance broker or financial planner may be adequate. The same sort of experience wouldn’t satisfy a senior with lots of time and a substantial asset base.

Not all touch points are of equivalent value. Service interactions matter more when the core offering is a service. Touch points that advance the customer to a subsequent and more valuable interaction, such as Amazon’s straightforward 1-Click ordering, matter even more. Companies need to map the corridor of touch points and watch for snarls. At each touch point, the gap between customer expectations and experience spells the difference between customer delight and something less.

People’s expectations are set in part by their previous experiences with a company’s offerings. Customers instinctively compare each new experience, positive or otherwise, with their previous ones and judge it accordingly. Expectations can also be shaped by market conditions, the competition, and the customer’s personal situation. Even when it is the company’s own brand that establishes expectations, the customer can be set up for disappointment. For example, Dell transformed buying computers over the Internet from a risky to a reliable experience. When it extended that set of procedures to the selection and purchase of expensive plasma HDTV sets, however, it disappointed. Dell did an effective job of creating positive customer expectations, but they turned out to be better fulfilled by the in-person sales force at Best Buy.
Ideally, good design makes both the most routine and the weightiest customer experiences—checking a price, getting a question answered, or placing a multimillion-dollar order—pleasant and efficient. However, even when dissatisfaction or wariness arises, artful control of consumer experience can overcome it.

In its development of a new AIDS drug, Gilead Sciences provides a good example of how a failure to understand the experience and expectation component of a consumer segment’s dissatisfaction can turn into a failure to reach that segment. Upon releasing the new medication, which had demonstrated advantages over existing ones, Gilead noticed that while sales to patients new to therapy were robust, sales to patients already undergoing treatment were growing far more slowly than expected. For HIV/AIDS patients, switching medications, Gilead discovered, is very different from choosing an alternative cold remedy. Switching requires ending a trusted relationship in the hope of reaching an uncertain improvement level. The company also learned that HIV-positive patients are far more interested in the potential adverse effects of a new drug than in its supposedly superior efficacy. With this new understanding, Gilead decided to emphasize in its marketing the new drug’s lower incidence of serious side effects. It also segmented the patients’ physicians by their willingness to prescribe a different medication from the ones they knew. Once Gilead made it easier for patients to switch drugs, the market share of the company’s main competitor dropped 33%.