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Customer experience case studies to start 2008
What do Amazon, Apple, SAS, Whole Foods, and Zappos have in common?
They succeed by creating a good experience... for their customers, or their employees, or their suppliers, or all of the above.
Let's open 2008 in Good Experience with this idea: the idea is catching on. We now can point to case studies of major successes that explicitly and provably stem from a focus on good experience. (And they're getting more frequent; these five case studies all popped up within the last few weeks.)
Joe Nocera's analysis of Amazon is extra-entertaining because it shows Wall Street analysts delivering ever-more complex reasons for the results - R&D expenditure ratios and the like. As CEO Jeff Bezos has been telling them for years, it's the customer experience.
The Times also covered the Apple Store's customer experience with the striking statistic that 20% of Apple's corporate revenues now come from the store. The store is known, most of all, for its customer experience.
The Economist covered the software company SAS: "Every aspect of life on the large, leafy SAS campus in Cary, North Carolina, is designed to bring the best out of employees by treating them well." Guess how SAS's results look. (Link may require registration.)
Here's a quick anecdote on a holiday customer experience at Whole Foods. I think it's indicative of the general "good experience" strategy of the company.
And finally, the CEO of Zappos.com refers to what as the source of their success? "Any money that we would have spent on marketing, let's instead put it back into the customer experience..."
Let's hope that 2008 is filled with even more of these case studies, and more opportunities for all of us to create good experiences - within our companies, schools, hospitals, community groups, families, and for ourselves.
Resources
Good Experience will, I hope, continue to be a resource in encouraging and spotlighting leaders. Here are three resources that can help:
• Our annual in-person gathering, for anyone interested in good experience, is coming up in April: Good Experience Live, also known as the Gel conference... Gel 2008 is April 24-25 in NYC.
• To create space for authentic good experience, many people first need to escape the oppression of digital technology. See the book, Bit Literacy, that has made a difference for so many readers.
• For anyone at an operating company - manager, VP, or other executive - who wants to really dive in, our Councils are the best community I know of people who are encouraging good experience in global business. Drop a line for more info, or watch this video.
P.S. If you just want a pure fun experience, scan through my compilation of every Fun Stuff entry from 2007, including highlights of my favorites from the year.
