- What are the products and product categories on which the store is providing discounts?
- What type of discounts are given, e.g. price reduction, bundle offers, in-store discount, bundling, combo offers, quantity discounts etc.
- What kind of people are looking for discounts. Do rich people really care about discounts?
- Do discounts help in increasing sales?
- Do discounts affect impulsive buying behaviour?
This program involves students staying in 3 villages near Gobichettipalayam, 60 kilometers from Coimbatore for 6 days. Divided into three different teams, each team spends two days in each of the village on a rotation basis so that each of the team spends 2 days in each of the village. During this field visit, each of the team would be physically stationed sans their regular luxuries - mobile phone, lap tops, well-furnished and air-conditioned classrooms, air-conditioned off-campus, hot-served food, etc. It is not to steal away what they deserve, after all. It is more to let them empathy with the target group - the rural markets. The resulting dissonace (if at all!) would enable them to not only appreciate the ground realities but also equip them to serve them better in latter years.
Especially from the view point of delivering better customer experience to the rural customers, what better way is there than to visit them at their place and understand their innate needs, drives, motives, implicit and explicit behavior etc?
What is customer Experience Management? Before I attempt to answer this question, I would like to throw up a few interesting questions:
Who is a customer? What is the difference between a customer and a consumer? What is a consumer decision journey? Why does a consumer consume something instead of letting it go? Can he consume everything that he 'desires'? What does a customer buy- a product or an experience or both? How does he define his priorities?
What is experience? How do consumers and customers experience? What are the modes through which experience is received and felt? Is experience emotional or logical? Or is it both?
What is management? Can customer experience be managed? Are there any principles which would govern the way the experience should be managed?
What are the implications of these questions for the companies, CMOs, other CXOs, Marketing Managers and Store Managers. Of course, these are not exhaustive questions. However these few questions help us find the direction. And once the direction is set, setting the pace etc isn't a big issue.
The answers to these questions would define what is customer experience management all about?
Are you not curious to know about world's first Institute of Customer Experience Management? Like everyone else, I too was curious to know about the ICEM. Essar's Aegis Global Academy has partnered with IIM Indore, SQC (Singapore) and COPC (USA) to offer a PGDM in Service Management.
The beginnings of such a course can be found in the evolving and the inevitable convergence economy where the customers are engaged not with the (tangible) products anymore but the service. And therefore the way a company engages the customer defines its long-term standing in the market. There are three components to the Customer Experience Management:
Customer Centricity + Customer Experience + Customer Lifetime Value
And each component has a reverbating effect on the other components and therefore they effectively form a virtuous cycle.
Deeper insights on this proposition would be posted some time later.
