Most of what I buy these days is offered by a number of retailers at pretty much the same price with the service around the shopping experience as the only difference. This fact makes it hard to understand why so few retailers, even in the 21st century, don’t focus on creating an experience that makes you want to buy from them again, instead of buying from a competitor a click or street away. (Ok in some industries like mobile network in UK they don’t need to care because the service is bad at all the networks).
I am a big advocate of using twitter and other social media as a way of sharing customer experience, it both gives retailers an opportunities to learn from customers and for addressing customer service issues. Experiences shared on social media also helps potential customer to decide if a retailer care about customers (and I secret hopes it also speed up the exist of the worst service offenders – consumers deserve to be treated as intelligent humans not as a source of revenue or as somebody you just have a transaction with.)
New opportunities for sharing customer experience has not made people started to share experience, it has just amplified it and made it more important to focus on creating good customer experience. (WHSmith , Vodafone, Pret are you listening?).
I agree with Tom Fish Burne’s post where he says:
Overall, the on-line review phenomenon puts the impetus on marketers to pay more attention to their product or service experience (and less trumpeting their features and benefits). That’s a good thing ultimately for consumers.
Torben Overgaard's blog 