This is my first blog here, so I am going to try to lay down some ground work.  Before we can embark in detailed work of what makes feebdack work, and how you can create better customer experiences - let's put some definitions out there.

First, let's look at an experience - what is it?  You could use the dictionary definition of experience:  "a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something".  There are two words I like -personal, instance- and one that I don't -something.  When I was at Gartner, we decided that an experience was the sum of all feelings about a particular event.  Again, parts of it (feelings, event) I like - but it is still too vague.

My definition of experience is somewhat different - an experience is all the events, interactions, and results a customer must go trough to obtain a product or service from an organization.  The part that I like about this definition the best is that it is flexible enough to accomodate issues like segmentation and personalization. An experience, in my mind, is a personalized set of actions and results that define a process by which a customer completes an interaction with an organization.

So, where does Feedback come in?  Good question.  Feedback is when you ask your customers what they think about... well, just about anything.  This is what is going to make or break your experience building.  See, you can create your experiences the best possible way, and you can even implement them -- but you can never tell whether they are successful just by seeing them execute.  Customers have needs and wants that are not evident or apparent: you have to ask them about them.  This is where Feedback comes in.  Feedback is how you ask customers what they want from each experience. Yes, each one separately.

Now, what is their relationship?  This is the question that brings it all together and makes your Customer Experience Management iniatiative shine. As much as you want to believe that - you don't know what your customers want.  You think you do, but you don't.  Trust me on this one.  Their needs change faster than you can adapt to them -- unless you constantly ask them.  Enter feedback.

Through well constructed feedback events (anything from focus groups to surveys) you CAN indeed find out what your customers want to get in the form of experiences and you CAN incorporate that into the design and improvement of the processes.  Notice I highlighted the words CAN.  Yes, you CAN do it - but most organizations choose not to do it.  Even the ones that go through the process of deploying feedback events, not all the feedback is considered or used when developing or evolving processes.  Why?  Well, that is the next entry...

What are your doing for your experiences?  feedback?  anything you want to share?  Next week we start looking at the best way to start moving all this "stuff" forward...