A business’s reputation depends on customer experience. The more loyal customers a brand has, the higher the profitability of the business and the rate of its growth. But what is customer experience, and why did it come into our lives?
In the hospitality business, you can do everything right but forget to concentrate on the main thing: your project is not for you, it is for your clients. And the better your clients feel, the more successful the business is.
The core concept of the new book “Your Restaurant: Exceptional Customer Service” by Adina Brunetti gives us an insight into the new marketing approach where customers are at the heart of all business strategies. Consumers have become a factor of influence on brands: they advertise, distribute and criticize various products and companies. We live in the era of a customer-centric business model. And just one of the key techniques is customer experience management.
The emergence of new markets, cheap production, and the expansion of e-commerce have all led to an increase in production volumes — which means increased competition. It is no longer enough to offer the market a universal product, even of good quality: with all its characteristics, it will be lost in the general abundance. Products are becoming more individual, narrowly targeted, aimed at solving specific problems, and the approach is becoming more targeted in turn.
That’s why AB 27 Group, a marketing agency founded by Adina Brunetti, is focused more on identifying consumption patterns when working on a marketing strategy. Customer experience is a system that makes the impressions and emotions of interacting with your product manageable.
Customer experience design helps you to look at your product through the eyes of a guest, walk it through and discover barriers. It encourages the client to make a return visit, recommend your place to friends.
The goal of customer experience in hospitality is a guest-centered solution that builds a relationship of trust. When you truly understand this, your work will be divided into before and after this realization.
It is essential to realize that customer experience management has no practical value without progressively improving the quality of your product and analyzing its consumer properties. According to Adina Brunetti, most business owners are confident that their product meets customer expectations. But in fact, sometimes less than half of their consumers are satisfied.
The challenge of the customer experience approach is to break this vicious cycle and align customer expectations with reality. The ideal is to make reality exceed expectations, impress the guest, ignite the same word of mouth process in a positive light so that guests talk about their wonderful experience and recommend your establishment as the best.
