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Service and Experience

Some family I had not seen in a while showed up over the last long weekend. Among many things people discussed over meals, one was the quality of customer care from most businesses these days. Despite the surfeit of technology, it is not easy to get problems resolved to our satisfaction.

 As long as your behavior as a customer was designed for, you would likely be okay. The moment you stray from that path, things will start to get rough. There is something inherently transaction about the design of customer experience. It does not take the full view of the relationship over time into account. That explains why it can be so brittle and unaccommodating of variations. 

 The Chris Zane quote "Customer service is what happens when the customer experience breaks down" was mentioned by someone and it seemed to provide an explanation for what we all had learned about being customers. Just that the experience breaking down and service taking over is not seamless and it does not always contribute to a positive brand experience. I was not able to find the where and in what context Zane had made this remark but found some other interesting quotes on the same topic by way of the Zane quote.
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