Creating Customer Experiences

The beliefs your customers hold shape the purchasing decisions they make, and those beliefs won’t change unless you create new experiences for them. Customer experiences shape customer beliefs, customer beliefs determine customer buying decisions, and customer buying decisions favor your organization or its competitors.

Here’s a case in point. The CEO of a client organization in the healthcare industry approached one of his disgruntled customers with a simple message: “I know you’ve developed some rather negative beliefs about us over the past few months, and I’m here to find out exactly what those beliefs are so that we can change them.” After the surprised customer delivered a detailed description of her beliefs and the experiences that had created them, the CEO surprised her again by saying, “These are not the beliefs we want you to hold, so we’re going to create a whole new set of experiences for you—experiences that will change your negative beliefs about us.” For the next several minutes the CEO discussed the new experiences that he and his organization planned to create in a determined effort to change the customer’s beliefs. What ensued in the weeks that followed was a dramatic, positive turnaround in the customer’s beliefs.

Is there a shift in beliefs that you need to make with one or more of your customers? If the answer is yes, then begin by identifying the result you’d like to achieve with your customer. Write it down. Next identify the beliefs your customer currently holds that might prevent you from achieving your desired result and ask yourself, What are the beliefs I want my customer to hold? This step may require one or more in-depth discussions with your customer. Then identify the new experiences that you will need to create for your customer in order to shift his or her beliefs. Finally implement the new experiences and test for movement.

Creating new customer experiences is the key to shifting or changing customer beliefs—and customer buying decisions. To learn more about how to change the beliefs of people inside and outside your organization, we invite you to join the Accountability Community where you can review actual client case studies.

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