A recent study in Holland revealed that half of so called ‘faulty’ new electronic products that were returned to retailers actually worked perfectly well. The consumer of the product just simply could not figure out how to operate their new electronic device and assumed it was broken.

Even worse still, an American research suggested that 10% of consumers purposely damage or sometimes even destroy such devices out of pure frustration. In one particular study, they found a restaurant manager can thrown his laptop into the deep fryer, resulting in a ruined laptop and deep fryer.

It isn’t just high-tech products that cause this rage. The BBC reports that 90 percent of people feel angry and frustrated after dealing with a call centre. I felt this last year when I was moving house and getting my phone switched to the new address took nine phone calls over two days, totalling 167 minutes on the phone.

What astounds me is that organisations spend so much on advertising a product or service, and so little on ensuring that it is easy to use. In the end, if a consumer has had a bad experience with a product, no amount of advertising will tempt them to buy that brand again.

Instead, companies need to focus more on improving the consumers’ experience. This involves things like understanding and meeting the customers’ expectations and the quality of their interactions across all products and/or services of that company.

Understanding expectations is about knowing what customers want to do, and how they would like to be treated. These expectations can be entirely different, depending on the nature of the visit. A customer ringing for support may have very different needs to one looking at the website, wanting to buy the product. Customer expectations can be driven by word-of-mouth, advertising and their own previous experiences.

To make this even more difficult, organisations now offer many ways for customers to interact with them. Email, websites, call centres and local branches all need to give consistent information, appropriate to the constraints of that medium. Different technologies persuade people in different ways, and some channels are more suited for some interactions than others.

If a company can get its customer experience right, the results are obvious; increased customer satisfaction will lead to more sales. A product/service differentiation will also create an important competitive advantage and improved or better brand perception will lead to an increase in market share. On the other hand, bad customer experiences can lead to angry customers, a fading brand and of course, lost revenue.

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