Gone are the days of produce, sell, repeat. In today’s global village, where there are plenty of substitutes, customer satisfaction essentially boils down to a great customer experience. Shifting from the “product speaks for itself” approach, it’s all about creating an emotional connection between the consumer and the brand. To achieve that, it’s necessary to invest in customer experience software to create and deliver customer-centric experiences that compel your audience to stay.

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Like Tamagotchis in the 90s, customer experience is all the rage right now! But what exactly is it? And how do you ensure a positive customer experience?

Let’s find out!

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

• What Is Customer Experience?
• Primary Benefits
• Customer Experience Management
• CX Strategy
• Measuring Customer Experience

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What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience, abbreviated as CX, can be defined as the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your company. It’s the culmination of every point of contact a customer has had, from website navigation and interaction with support personnel to product delivery.

Don’t let the technical jargon confuse you (or worse, bore you). Customer experience is precisely what it seems — it encompasses anything and everything a customer experiences with your brand.

Have you been annoyed listening to the automated voice on the other end of the call, waiting for a human being to take over? Or have you felt ecstatic when a restaurant gives you a complimentary ice cream? Those were your experiences as a customer (ergo: customer experience).

To quote any spiritual guru, “your destiny is in your hands.” It’s your actions as a company that shape the audience’s perception. And it makes a world of difference to your customer base and revenue.

Did your customers find what they’re looking for on your website? Did they receive prompt support for their queries? Did they find your new ad delightful? These are some of the factors that influence customer experiences.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Like sweet lime and oranges, customer experience and customer service are completely different.

Customer service is the assistance or support you offer your customers before or after a purchase. It is merely a small aspect of the entire customer experience.

While customer experience is a holistic process encompassing the entire customer journey that involves several touchpoints and multiple departments, customer service is one specific interaction. It’s difficult to pin down CX to a single interaction, but customer service is quantifiable as they’re most likely one-off incidents.

Another difference is that CX involves anticipating and meeting customer needs through journey mapping and feedback analysis. It proactively works on achieving customer satisfaction and ensuring there’s no snag. Customer service, on the other hand, is reactionary in nature. Customers are primarily the ones who reach out to a support service if they run into a problem.

To put it in context: Supposedly, you book a flight ticket via phone, and the airline agent is friendly, helpful and cordial. That’s good customer service. If the airline bumps you up to first-class or provides a delicious in-flight meal, or if you simply had a very smooth flight, then that’s a positive customer experience.

The way Captain America: The Civil War sets the Endgame movies, a good customer experience paves the way for an overall positive customer experience. As support agents are likely to be the first human point of contact between the customer and the business, it becomes imperative to deliver great customer service to ensure an extraordinary customer experience.

Good vs. Bad Customer Experience

A good customer experience leaves the customer feeling valued, satisfied and more likely to return. Some of the elements of a positive customer experience include:

• Easy-to-navigate websites and mobile apps
• Quick and easy access to a relevant company representative
• Self-service options
• Multi-channel engagement
• 24/7 live support
• Shorter wait time during calls

A bad customer experience results from customer disappointment — either you couldn’t meet their expectations or provided an inadequate response to their queries. These are some of the indicators of a negative customer experience:

• Confusing websites
• Slow issue resolution
• Irrelevant campaign outreach
• Long wait time
• Lack of human touch
• Hard to reach or arrogant customer service
• Ignoring customer feedback
• Single-channel for customer service
• Failure to offer real-time support

Customer Relationship Management

CX also plays a vital role in customer relationship management (CRM) because continuous positive customer experiences translate into long-standing, loyal customers.

CRM software analyzes customer data to help you anticipate customer needs in advance. And that’s exactly what consumers want. According to Salesforce, 66% of buyers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, according to Salesforce.

Here’s how CRM systems can help you improve customer experience:

• Provide upselling and cross-selling recommendations to customers based on their purchase history.
• Analyze customer profiles to deliver personalized campaigns.
• Send automated thank-you notes or feedback forms to customers.
• Gain a 360-degree customer view for targeted messages.

Aside from customer relationship management systems, CX software caters to your customer-centric endeavors. It helps manage, track and analyze customer interactions through real-time insights, feedback management and sentiment analysis.

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Primary Benefits

What SATs are to college admissions, customer experience is to business growth. Delivering positive, memorable and personalized interactions proves beneficial to all business models, irrespective of their size. The more remarkable the experience, the higher the chances of you winning new clients and retaining existing ones.

Customer expectations are burgeoning — faster than you can say Jack Robinson! And if you can’t live up to these needs, finding an alternative is a Google search away. Precisely why, delivering a remarkable experience is the need of the hour.

The 2022 ACA Study reaffirms the importance of a good customer experience. Here’s what the report found:

• 74% of customers are willing to go through the trouble of switching companies if they find out they’ll get a better customer experience.
• 83% of customers are likely to trust a brand more if they provide a stellar customer service experience.
• 74% of the respondents emphasized the importance of a personalized customer experience from the company’s agent.
• 80% of Americans are likely to recommend a brand to peers if they provide a convenient customer experience.

However, catering to customer needs isn’t as easy as it was a few decades ago. You can easily get lost in the sea of homogenous products and services. With a plethora of alternatives readily available a click away, customers don’t have to solely base their decision on product quality. Now, they also need to feel connected to your brand.

The “connection” can be through your ads, product packaging, support quality or even any social or political stance you take. Yes, you read that right. According to JobSage, over 4 in 5 Gen Z adults want companies to take a public stance on social issues.

Even a single unpleasant experience at any customer touchpoint can derail your efforts. Organizations are increasingly realizing the importance of chasing after critical CX metrics and their association with customer retention and brand loyalty.

A positive customer experience can help you in the following ways:

• Increase revenue
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Boost brand loyalty and advocacy
• Gain a competitive advantage
• Reduce churn rate
• Increase the customer lifetime value
• Minimize costs
• Improve word-of-mouth marketing through positive reviews, comments and recommendations

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Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management (CXM) is the process of monitoring, analyzing and enhancing customer interactions. It’s a fundamental part of a customer-first strategy that puts customers at the heart of the business. It helps companies improve their brand image, increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

The CXM approach goes beyond traditional marketing to deliver a highly personalized and engaging customer experience across all digital channels.

Customer experience management lets you:

• Evaluate customer behavior and needs.
• Segment customers for highly relevant experiences.
• Build a long-lasting relationship with customers via loyalty programs, AI-enabled services and intelligent product recommendations.
• Collect, store and analyze large volumes of data to get detailed insights into customers’ wants and make data-driven decisions.

Incorporating CXM software into your arsenal helps you gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions. It centralizes customer information and allows seamless data flow from one department to another. Access to relevant client data helps you deploy marketing campaigns, enhance lead qualification and improve support quality.

CX Strategy

Like any sport, your customer experience initiatives need a game plan to succeed. A customer experience strategy lists actionable plans required to deliver unique, positive and engaging customer experiences at every touchpoint. It should consider factors like competitive insight, company-specific vision, and market and consumer research.

Customer engagement is paramount to any business and requires a sound customer experience strategy to create meaningful experiences.

Here are some of the core components of a good CX strategy:

Buyer Personas and Customer Journey Mapping

Customers are the heart of any business. That’s why you need to understand their needs, wants and preferences. Creating buyer personas or customer profiles allows you to segment customers based on their personalities. Personas help your customer-facing teams understand who your clients are to serve them better.

Customer profiles help answer several key questions like:

• What motivates the customers?
• What do they want to accomplish?
• What elements satisfy them?

On the other hand, customer journey mapping helps you understand customer experiences at every touchpoint, channel and interaction. Viewing the journey enables you to get the customer’s perspective and look through any pain points in their experience.

Artificial Intelligence

Implementing AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants allows you to hand over rudimentary tasks and engage customers 24/7.

In a survey conducted by Userlike, 68% of respondents said they liked that a chatbot answered them quickly. You can use them to handle common customer queries and FAQs. The bot can route customers to a human agent for complex tasks.

Automated bots can provide real-time answers to your customer’s queries, reducing the number of tickets raised. It can also collect generic customer details like their name, location, email id and more.

Omnichannel Experience

This component lets customers conveniently interact with you on their preferred mode of communication. Your agents can use the contextual information while switching between channels to deliver a consistent experience.

Feedback Management

To create an effective, customer-first CX strategy, you need to identify where your business is lacking and succeeding. Collecting real-time feedback across multiple touchpoints helps you determine what areas you need to improve.

It’s also crucial to gather input from customer-facing teams to gain insights into their challenges. Resolving these impediments translates into quicker issue resolution time.

Personalized Communication

Implementing the right tools to your CX strategy can help you optimize communication. Live chat tools, customer feedback software and even survey-based solutions can provide valuable insights, monitor customer interactions and personalize the experience.

Cross-functional Collaboration

Siloed business operations can hinder consistency. For an impactful customer experience, all departments need to be on the same page, including those who don’t interact with customers. For example, even though the finance team doesn’t interact with buyers, difficulty processing fees or bills on the buyer’s part could result in you losing out on a customer.

You also need to equip your team with proper training and update them on any product upgrades, so they’re up to date. Fostering inter-departmental communications ensures your agents relay the correct information to clients.

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Measuring Customer Experience

After you have a foolproof customer experience strategy in place, you’d want to know whether it’s working. Here’s where CX metrics come into the picture. These metrics help you track progress, calculate the ROI of your CX program and identify areas for improvement.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

One of the most common CX metrics, NPS, measures customer loyalty based on one survey question: “How likely are you to recommend our brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Responding on a 0-10 scale, you can group customers into:

• Promoters (score 9-10) — loyal customers who will expand growth.
• Passives (score 7-8) — satisfied but not enthusiastic enough and could switch to competitors.
• Detractors (0-6) — displeased customers who won’t come around for repeat purchases and could dissuade potential customers.

To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

It measures customer satisfaction levels with your business after purchase or interaction.

The survey question, “How satisfied were you with your experience?” can be answered on a scale of 1-3, 1-5 or 1-10.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Derived from a CSAT survey, the Customer Effort Score reflects the effort exerted by a customer to complete any task like finding a product, looking for information or getting an issue resolved. It helps you understand the functionality of your products and services and their relevance to customers’ needs.

Others

Aside from the metrics mentioned above, you can also gauge the effectiveness of your program through these methods:

1. Analyzing churn rates and expansion rates.
2. Creating a customer forum for suggestions and product or feature requests.
3. Analyzing support tickets, reopen rate and issue resolution time.
4. A/B testing your CX initiatives.
5. Talking to customer-facing staff to identify common pain points.

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Wrapping It Up

Customer experience is an evolving topic prone to constant modifications. Customers are hyper-connected and hyper-vigilant about their needs, now more than ever. Delivering exceptional customer experience isn’t going the extra mile anymore — it’s the need of the hour. Companies that are adapting to it are already reaping the awards.

Implementing a foolproof CX strategy could be the push your business needs to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. And through customer experience management, you can segment customers to deliver precise, hyper-personalized experiences. Moreover, measuring your CX endeavors gives you a sense of whether you’re heading in the right direction.

Have you implemented a customer experience strategy yet? Has it affected your business growth? Let us know in the comments!