How Customer Experience Moves From Offline to Online

While focusing on the online customer experience is critical because so many customers choose to engage with companies online, it is also important to remember that offline experiences can quickly come online so they too need a brand’s attention.

In this post, we’ll focus on offline experiences that can move online, and what brands can do about it.

Offline experiences become online experiences when customers decide to share, and the impetus to share is fairly clear, as explained in this equation:

The first step is determining whether the company has met, exceeded, or missed the customer’s expectations. That outcome causes the customer to feel some sort of emotion – he or she is happy (or pleasantly surprised) if the company goes above and beyond and exceeds their expectations, but sad/disappointed/angry if the company misses expectations. Unfortunately for brands, customer expectations keep rising, so just meeting them can cause a “meh” response (neither positive nor negative) and very little willingness to share.

The more polarized the elicited emotion, the more likely the customer is to share his or her experience online. That’s why we often see both really positive and really negative product reviews or social media posts. Very few people ever go online to share that the experience they had was just OK.

So what can brands do? The answer is to focus as much on the offline experience as the online experience, since the former may quickly become the latter.

During a recent trip to Las Vegas, I noticed an impressive garbage receptacle in a high-end pastry shop within a large casino hotel on the Strip. Unlike typical small receptacles in fast food joints, this one was notably large, making it easy to dump garbage without making a mess. I tested if a tray would fit in the hole and found it wouldn’t, meaning the designer thoughtfully sized it: large enough for easy dumping but small enough to keep trays from falling in. Brilliant!

I realize that no one is likely to post on social media about their garbage dumping experience, but the point still holds true: A well-designed customer experience can lead to the exceeding of expectations, which leads to customer happiness, which increases the chances of sharing.

Compare the garbage receptacle example to the electrical outlet on some planes, when available at all, that is so far underneath the seat that you have to bend all the way forward until your head is in your lap. While there may be myriad reasons why the outlet is located there, the customer experience is uncomfortable to say the least, and likely increases the chances of people sharing their experience online. (Luckily, newer planes have found a better location for the plug — behind the tray table.)