With Experience Mapping, Marketers Can Take Advantage of
Word-of-Mouth Communication
Personal recommendations are critical to ensuring the success of a service-oriented business. To help their organizations remain competitive, marketing managers must learn what the marketplace expects and receives throughout the total customer experience. Experience mapping – developed from in-depth qualitative interviews with a sample of customers and frontline employees – is the framework for creating exceptional experiences that convert users into advocates.
To avoid unhappy customers and increase satisfaction and retention, organizations must strive to understand and manage customer expectations. 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 In Their Shoes.
