Analysis Of Customer Experience With Apple And Samsung Mobile Phones

Customer Journey Map

Select 2 separate products or services or any of the following that you have personal experience with that are in the same industry:
• 2 products, OR
• 2 services, OR
• 2 companies, OR
• 2 institutions, OR
• 2 venues OR
• 2 events

Apply CEM concepts in explaining what made one a poor experience and the other a positive one. Provide a brief introduction to each component of your selection, and a brief explanation of your service experience with both.

The product concept that I have chosen for this assignment is Mobile Phone. The industry has many players and two specific products that I have chosen for this analysis is one of the phones from Apple Incorporation and the second one being Samsung Incorporation. I had one very good experience and with one of them a very bad experience. We will be aligning with one of the alignment diagrams to explain both the poor customer experience and good customer experience. With Apple Incorporation I had stupendous experience throughout the customer lifecycle while with Samsung Incorporation I had very bad personal customer lifecycle experience (Bernard, 2017).

We would be using alignment model of Customer Journey Map to assess in this assignment.

The basic areas covered in this cycle are on boarding, purchase, service issues during the lifecycle of the product, customer retention policy and finally any closure if it happens. It also looks into the fact whether customer remains a loyal customer post the first experience.

I had one of the premium models of Samsung Incorporation which had costed me near to $1,000 while buying and hence my expectation was of the highest order. Branding of Samsung phones is among the premium segment and hence I was attracted towards it with the kind of branding and Promotion Company had done for the product. My purchase experience was very smooth; I went to the posh Samsung store which in itself is a very superior experience. The staffs at the place were very friendly and abled to help me in decision making (Canfield, 2017). I bought the recently launched premium phone of the company and was explained all the features of the phone by the store manager. I bought the phone and was on boarded by the company. For my specific need I even bought an extra year warranty for any kind of damage that might occur(Bernard, 2017). My initial journey with the product was very good and I had no problem. However in the third week of the product usage, I dropped the phone by mistake and the edge part of the phone with corilla glass suffered and it broke. I went to the Samsung centre and asked them for replacement or repair. They examined the phone and conveyed that it will be sent to nearby facility and I will have the phone back in few days. I seeked a replacement or a spare handset for those few days but they refused. This was first bad experience with the company, as a premium service provider I expected a replacement for few days so that my usage is not hampered during that period. After three promised days I went to the store enquiring about the phone and they still had no update for me. I realised that company’s selling store and its service centre are at the same place and this is not the case with other companies. After 14 days I received an update from there customer representative seeking information on how the phone got damaged. It was an appalling experience as I was expecting my phone in a week’s time, however after 14 days they were asking how the damage occurred. Finally after 27 days in which I kept enquiring and continuous bad customer experience, with misinformation spelled all across, I was given my phone after repair. The whole experience was in complete bad taste, and the fact that I paid for extra period of warranty was a serious misrepresentation by the company.

Poor Customer Experience

As in the customer journey map, it is my usage experience where they lost me as a customer. The experience overall was not bad when the product was with me. It is definitely a nice product and can keep competitors at bay, but it is the period of service where the company is doing very bad. As the alignment model of customer journey map would suggest, the customer lost it with the company during the product-service stage (Johnson, 2018).

The three point where Samsung Incoporation loses are no customer focus, bad customer service and experience and no focus to retain customer.

After the bad experience I had with Samsung, few years later I bought the latest iphone launched by Apple Incorporation. The buying process was easy as I booked it with my network provider who in turn delivered the product at my place. The product itself is the best in industry and hence expectation of better customer experience was expected. For the first seven months I had lovely experience with the phone and didn’t even reached out to service centre of the company.

However in the eight month of usage, the phone started facing heating issues. I reached out to service centre, and to my amazement they provided with some really quality experience. First of all the service centre was at different place compared to the store, they even offered a pickup service for the damaged product. The whole premium feel is easily visible in the service centre too. They received the phone and asked me to wait for half an hour in the service lounge. This was not a bad experience, the waiting lounge had a good multimedia facility and one can get entertained in some way or the other. In exact 25 minutes, they reached out to me stating that product is having heating issue because motherboard has faced some strong charging from a wrong charger or being overheated due to faulty charging point. I told them I have been using the charger provided, so it must be because of charging point. They said it is not important, as they will provide a complete new replacement and all my data would be shifted to the phone. This was a real good experience, they offered that am I am willing to wait for few hours, and if not so they would deliver the phone to my home place. I said please deliver the phone to my place, they even offered me a spare handset for my usage (Rosenbaum, 2017).

Proto Personas Diagram of the Situation

This was a good experience after Samsung incorporation experience. In spot 4 hours I had the completely replaced handset with me in my home comfort. The service delivered was of stupendous quality and my experience overall was awesome (Bernard, 2017). On the customer journey map I am currently using my second Apple phone as I upgraded when the new iphone was launched. On the customer journey map, from the company’s perspective I am on the repeat purchase segment.

Conclusion-Compare & Contrast Options

In both my experience, one can see how the two companies’ differed. If I didn’t have a bad experience at Samsung Incorporation, I may have never moved towards Apple Incorporation. In the same industry with similar priced tow premium products the difference ended up being on the service side. The basic areas covered in this cycle are on boarding, purchase, service issues during the lifecycle of the product, customer retention policy and finally any closure if it happens. It also looks into the fact whether customer remains a loyal customer post the first experience (Bernard, 2017). The customer journey map model highlights on how one company lost me while the other gained me in the same time frame (Harbich, 2017).

If ones compare and see what happened in both the occasions one can visualise that customer service, customer focus and business acquisition modes are completely different in both the options and this is one of the biggest differentiating factors in the business. On one side at Samsung there was no focus on customer service, there was no customer focus post sale; however there was huge thrust on business acquisition. When one contrast this with Apple Incorporation, the brand premia exist and hence no focus on business acquisition, however to retain customer the complete focus is on customer service.

References:

Bernard, G., & Andritsos, P. (2017). A process mining based model for customer journey mapping. In Proceedings of the Forum and Doctoral Consortium Papers Presented at the 29th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2017)

Bernard, G., & Andritsos, P. (2017). CJM-ex: goal-oriented exploration of customer journey maps using event logs and data analytics. In 15th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2017)

Canfield, D. D. S., & Basso, K. (2017). Integrating satisfaction and cultural background in the customer journey: A method development and test. Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 29(2), 104-117

Harbich, M., Bernard, G., Berkes, P., Garbinato, B., & Andritsos, P. (2017). Discovering customer journey maps using a mixture of Markov models

Johnson, K. (2018). When It’s Not Actually About the Tech: Simple Design-Focused Insight & Planning Tools for Technology-Based Library Services

Rosenbaum, M. S., Otalora, M. L., & Ramírez, G. C. (2017). How to create a realistic customer journey map. Business Horizons, 60(1), 143-150