Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience" - Susan Cheever

Those of us, who have ever fallen in life, find it hard to explain how it happened and why
it happened. Arguably one of the best feelings, it is notoriously difficult to explain in
rational scientific terms. Yet, many of us spend a good portion of our lifetimes looking for
love, falling in love, trying our best to stay in love and staying close to our loved ones.
And we don't just love people, we love cars, some love certain places, others love food,
movies - people have a knack for loving a host of things. But wait - why are we talking
about love in a piece titled "Customer Experience"? Because great experiences are
similar to love, extremely challenging to engineer but when executed right, can make
your customers love you for life. And the reason, they are extremely difficult to engineer
is because customer experience is built on human interactions - it's partly science
but mostly emotions. And as the Maslow's hierarchy tells us - emotional trumps physical
any day!

Customer Experience has become so important in recent times that several analyst
firms publish regular indices like Forrester's US Customer Experience
Index covering host of industries like airlines, hotels, insurance providers, cable TV
providers, couriers, etc. But what if you are not a services organization but a product
organization like Facebook, Google, Uber or WhatsApp? Who does the customer call
when his WhatsApp is not working or when his Uber keeps crashing? Enter the world
ofProduct Experience - a subset of Customer Experience, heavily studied
by industrial design specialists, among others and of immense importance to
organizations who cannot afford to (or want to) spend heavily for customer
marketing, customer journey mapping or customer service. Ideal for product
entrepreneurs as well...

Product Experience is what a consumer remembers about the product through various
stages of interaction with the product - purchase, initiating use (opening the box),
utilization and disposal. From the perspective of experience, the three dimensions that a
product must perform on are - Functional, Sensual and Emotional. These are
independent of the business aspects of the product - cost, price and production
efficiency (which are equally important attributes).
Functional Experience (Value)
Questions that any product must answer is what is the basic functional human need that
it being met by the product? Is it the need for transport, accommodation, knowledge or
something else? This is often also referred to as the functional value that is being
created by the product.
Sensual Experience
No one likes an ugly looking car regardless of how fast it can run. Beauty may be in eye
of the beholder but things must be pleasing to the eye and easy on the ear. Some even
believe that smell can evoke experience (like use of amoratherapy in hotels, spas and
restaurants). And indeed, people do judge the book by its cover. So tell a good story,
solve a great problem but make sure it is good looking and sensually appealing.
Emotional Experience
What emotional response does your product invoke in its user - sense of power, sense
of well-being, of belonging, attachment, dislike, pleasure or pride. Given the wide variety
of customers you may want to address in a B2C (Business to Consumer) world, there is
no one size fits all but still investing the time in studying the reaction of your customers
in the environment that they are likely to consume it in Ideo style Design
Thinking helps.
Memorability
This is the icing on the cake, proof of the pudding, the holy grail of product experience.
Does your product induce a memorable or a forgettable experience in your target
customer based on the above 3 dimensions?
So if you design a scale of 1-5 to measure the three dimensions of your product
-Functional Experience, Sensual Experience and Emotional Experience along
with a way to measure its subsequent memorability, it can provide a good

quantitativeProduct Experience Measurement Framework to estimate the

probability of success for your product among your target customers.
So while customer journey mapping may be a good method to preempt the touchpoints and consumer reaction to your services throughout the customer life-cycle,
aProduct Experience Measurement Framework can help you enhance the
experience and hence the appeal of your product to your consumers by quantifying the
different aspects of experience.
In summary, a great product experience can make someone fall in love and then it
becomes like Susan Cheever said, "...addictive..."

Other relevant links on customer experience:

1. Omnichannel is nothing Experience should be channel specific
2. Where Digital meets Consumer Experience Five examples
3. Social Media Logins OAuth affecting profits
4. Four steps for monetizing Social Medias Big Data
5. Lufthansa Impersonalized Inspiration and Inspired Instagram
6. Booking.com Personalization & Customer Analytics
7. Is Digital Experience + Mobility = Apple Inc + Android?
8. Hey You! & OAuth Monetization of Social Medias Big Data
9. Social Media & Big Data Declared preferences vs. Discovered
preferences
10. What is Customer Experience? A synopsis
11. What actually is Big Data? The different definitions
12. Monetization of Customer Experience for hotels Big Data & Sentiment
Analysis
13. Hilton, Marriott, Hotels Customer Experience Index (CXi) & its
quantifiable benefits
14. Singapore Airlines A legacy of Customer Experience, struggling with
Digital Experience
15. Digital Customer Experience Execution plan for Airlines