I am a big fan of providing a superior customer experience. When your customers have a positive experience, they are willing to pay more and are more willing to tell their friends about you. The best understanding of how the customer experience affects the pricing on a product is to take a look at restaurants. The restaurants that understand the customer experience can almost always charge more for that experience.

Think of your favorite restaurant and how busy it might be. When you show up on a Friday night, is the line extra long? Are people always raving about how great it is? When people come in from out of town are they referred there?

Around the corner from my office is a little pizza restaurant called Flatbread Community Oven. They serve authentic Neapolitan pizza. I eat there regularly. I also notice that their dining room is typically very full. In fact, when they are full with guests, you can walk around the corner to another local restaurant that has received national exposure on the Food Network and notice that other restaurant has an empty dining room.

What’s the difference? What makes one restaurant successful and the restaurant around the corner on the verge of failure?

It’s a combination of many things but they all culminate in a positive customer experience. Great food, great atmosphere and great staff all contribute to the experience of the customer. All contribute to long-term success. In fact, if the experience is superior, the pricing becomes much more flexible.

In marketing, you look at the four Ps when developing a marketing plan. Product, price, promotion and place. When you find the right mix, you have optimized the customer experience.

Just because your product costs less, it doesn’t naturally mean you’ll get more clients. And, just because you have a better product, doesn’t naturally mean that you can charge more. The mixture needs to be right.

This mixture is different for every company but one thing that goes further than anything is providing more than the customer is expecting. When you give them more than they ask for, you can never go wrong.

Consider the experience your customers are having when they do business with you. Are you giving them exactly what they want or much more? Are you even giving them the minimum of what they are paying for?

A few years ago I was at a conference in Orlando, Florida and happened to stay across the street from Downtown Disney. I spent each of my nights there walking around, riding the water taxi, eating dinner and just relaxing. Usually when I travel for work, it’s all about work. Rarely do I find the time to enjoy my surroundings.

I started thinking a bit about what Disney knows how to do right… and that is to provide the customer experience. As I sat one evening eating dinner I realized that my reality was suspended for a short while.

Think about Las Vegas. Every so often, a casino will be blown up so that there can be room made for a new one. The casinos get bigger and better. Moreover, they are all designed to give the visitors an experience that is otherworldly. It’s a design that is meant to suspend reality.

Now, I can understand that people want different experiences, but which experience do you think fosters a sense of excitement? Which experience do you think causes people to tell their friends? Which experience is worth more to the consumer?

It doesn’t matter if you are a grocery store, an oil change shop or a toothbrush specialist. If you create an experience that your target audience will love, they will continue to come back and buy more from you.

If we try to make the experience appeal to everyone and not focus on a particular group, then we’ll find that we really don’t make anyone happy. We need to focus on those that we can make happy.

It is not just about selling a product or a service, it is about selling an experience. If you can capture the experience your customers want, you will be able to create an experience that not only will they come back for, but they will bring their friends for you.

A few years ago I went to a technical conference where there were various vendors in booths showing off their products. On the last morning of the event, it was a little quiet in the show and as I walked to one vendor’s booth, I commented, “Pretty quiet this morning, isn’t it?”

The response from the vendor was, “Nice, isn’t it?”

My first thought was, How can you pay the money for the booth, your hotel and other expenses and be happy that it is quiet? It makes me think of the hotel manager that says the best hotel room is an empty one. You don’t have to deal with the problems that are associated with the people. You don’t have to worry about complaints. You don’t have to worry about messy rooms. You don’t have to worry about towels being stolen.

You don’t have to worry about the revenue those people bring.

Isn’t it interesting how often we forget that the very people that frustrate us are the people that make it possible for us to make a living? How often does your phone ring and you complain? How often does a customer complain and you simply don’t want to do anything about it.

It is about the customer experience… not the company’s experience.

You should be far more concerned about people not wanting to be around you than the extra time you get because it is a little slow. So, foster an experience that will cause your customers to want to be around you. Better yet, foster an experience that will cause your customers to want to spread the word for you. Isn’t that at the heart of word of mouth marketing?