This is how one customer recently experiences a service company: “When I called those people the first time, nobody answered until the sixth ring, and then it was a machine telling me that ‘all our representatives are busy helping other customers.’ I held on, but I wasn’t happy.” To avoid such unhappy customers and increase satisfaction and retention, organizations must strive to understand and manage expectation. And when those organizations go a step further by delivering exceptional experiences, they can take advantage of the most powerful weapon in the marketing communications arsenal: word-of-mouth referrals.

But how do they accomplish this? “Service quality is a design issue” is the keynote of the groundbreaking book Delivering Service Quality by Valarie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and Leonard L. Berry (The Free Press, 1990). It reveals: “With rigorous, detailed attention to customers’ expectations for each step in a service process, it is possible to design quality into the service.”

Read more about experience mapping by downloading a copy of the full article here:  In Their Shoes