Experience Management
Customer Experience
Experience is everything, so make it right! Here's your comprehensive guide to understanding customer experience.
What Is Customer Experience?
The customer experience (CX) is the total sum of impressions your clients or customers have of your organisation. It is a complex concept, including all customer journey aspects. Every interaction between the customer and your brand shapes the final customer experience, from a friend's initial recommendation to satisfaction with the purchased product or service.
Just Ask Your Real Customers!
To visualise the concept of CX better, imagine it as the result of the customer's journey. There are various touchpoints on this journey where the customer directly interacts with your brand. These touchpoints, including customer service, marketing activities such as ads or newsletters, or online purchases, define the overall customer experience.
Why is customer experience so important for companies at present? Today, price and product availability are no longer the most important value factors. Instead, experiences and the level of personalisation are what stands out in today's business world.
The Importance of Customer Experience
How exactly does good customer experience make a difference for your business? Well, mainly because we now know that delivering consistently excellent customer experience brings financial rewards.
Before, brands focused on increasing their satisfaction scores without linking it to business performance, but today, this is no longer the case. It's time to link CX data to business and revenue, and the world's leading brands are well aware of it. Instead of constant investments, brands have started better optimising what they have already invested in – employees and the processes they work with.
The key benefits of delivering a great customer experience
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1. Increased revenue & customer lifetime value |
Satisfied customers end up spending more money on your products and services. Besides, they are more likely to recommend you to potential customers.
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2. Reduced costs & higher advocacy |
Satisfied customers are likely to spread the good word about your business for free. Having a stable base of promoters can therefore lower your marketing expenses for advertising. |
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3. A loyal customer base |
Loyal customers are the most reliable, stable source of income. Did you know that new customer acquisition costs approximately 7 times more than maintaining an existing one? |
Why Do You Need a Customer Experience Management Strategy?
While you cannot really control social media, you can control your interactions with your customers. Your customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is how you manage these interactions.
If you imagine serving your customers is enough, think twice. Customer experience management is more than just knowing what brands your customers prefer while shopping. It is about creating personalised experiences for them based on collected customer insights.
Our client saves €200 000 annually
Need more proof that customer experience is vital for your business and revenue? Read about how a telecommunications company saved 200 000 € annually by identifying and saving churning customers who were about to leave for their competitors.
Customer Experience and Customer Service Are Not the Same
While the two have a common goal – to make customers satisfied – they are not synonymous. The better-known customer service is just one part of the holistic concept of customer experience. It is an individual touchpoint on the entire customer journey.
Customer Experience
Customer experience includes customer service but also other touchpoints such as advertising, product design, logistics, brand values, in-store or website aesthetics, opinions of third parties, and every other aspect of your business that affects your customers' choices.
Customer Service
Customer service is a crucial customer-facing role. It is how you handle your customers' issues or queries about your products or services. It can be delivered face-to-face, online or over the phone by shop assistants, customer service representatives, call centre agents, or self-service tools such as chatbots or FAQ pages. A polite, quick, and efficient problem-solving approach is key to excellent customer service.
How to Measure Customer Experience?
Gaining more profound knowledge about what makes your customers happy or angry does not happen overnight. It comes from collecting customer insights across all channels using various CX metrics and feedback tools. It's important to understand that measuring the metrics solely to increase them is not the goal.
Instead, the scores must be combined with business data to identify trends and improvements. This will help you understand the link between your scores and revenue and allow you to focus your efforts on increasing your return on customer experience.
These are the most widely used CX metrics:
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
This standard metric indicates whether a customer would recommend your company. The customers give ratings from 0 to 10, and the scale is usually accompanied by a text field where they can provide further explanations for their rating. This metric can help you identify loyal customers as well as reasons for churn.
On a scale from 0-10 how likely are you to recommend our company?
How would you rate your experience with our company?
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
The CSAT metric measures customer satisfaction with a service, a staff member, or another specific contact. This can provide detailed information on what channels need improvements.
CES (Customer Effort Score)
Using a 5-point scale, this metric shows how much effort a customer must put in resolving their request within a specific channel. It could be anything from purchase to setting their user account. Once you get a better idea about the processes that need improvements, you are one step closer to resolving the issues and increasing the conversion rate.
How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?
How to Improve Customer Experience?
Of course, everything depends on the type of your organisation and the level of CX management already implemented, but let us share with you some of the best practices to enhance customer experience.
1. Create your customer experience strategy
You first need to set up a unified CX strategy aligned with your business goals and values, which will create a sense of consistency that the customers expect from every brand.
2. Set a clear customer experience vision
Get a clear idea of how you want your customers to think about your brand and make this vision known to all employees across all touchpoints.
3. Measure your CX metrics
Measure your NPS, CSAT, and CES scores regularly to see how they change over time and compare them to your competition's scores.
4. Collect and analyse customer feedback
Instead of collecting solely spontaneous feedback, try soliciting it via emails, text messages, or phone calls. You will gain a deeper understanding of your customers and make them feel valued at the same time.
5. Act on the findings for continuous improvement
Analysing the feedback will help you determine what needs to be done. Go above and beyond to fix the issues. Meanwhile, maintain the human touch and respond promptly to all dissatisfied customers.
6. Invest in the right CXM tools
With an experience management platform such as Staffino, you can collect feedback from hundreds of your real customers daily, track the progress on personalised dashboards, and get professional advice on how to improve your CX.
7. Train your customer-facing staff
Notice if your staff gets mentioned often in a negative way. The customer-facing roles such as shop assistants or call centre agents might need further training to be able to solve customer issues professionally.
8. Use artificial intelligence
To make the process of solving queries faster and more efficient, try implementing a chatbot to improve the customer journey by responding quickly to frequent questions.
1. Create your customer experience strategy
You first need to set up a unified CX strategy aligned with your business goals and values, which will create a sense of consistency that the customers expect from every brand.
2. Set a clear customer experience vision
Get a clear idea of how you want your customers to think about your brand and make this vision known to all employees across all touchpoints.
3. Measure your CX metrics
Measure your NPS, CSAT, and CES scores regularly to see how they change over time and compare them to your competition's scores.
4. Collect and analyse customer feedback
Instead of collecting solely spontaneous feedback, try soliciting it via emails, text messages, or phone calls. You will gain a deeper understanding of your customers and make them feel valued at the same time.
5. Act on the findings for continuous improvement
Analysing the feedback will help you determine what needs to be done. Go above and beyond to fix the issues. Meanwhile, maintain the human touch and respond promptly to all dissatisfied customers.
6. Invest in the right CXM tools
With an experience management platform such as Staffino, you can collect feedback from hundreds of your real customers daily, track the progress on personalised dashboards, and get professional advice on how to improve your CX.
7. Train your customer-facing staff
Notice if your staff gets mentioned often in a negative way. The customer-facing roles such as shop assistants or call centre agents might need further training to be able to solve customer issues professionally.
8. Use artificial intelligence
To make the process of solving queries faster and more efficient, try implementing a chatbot to improve the customer journey by responding quickly to frequent questions.
Good Customer Experience Brings Money
Let's get back to where we started.
Enhancing customer experience should be your business imperative, as with improved customer experience comes a proportional increase in revenue. Knowing your customers better, offering them personalised services, and serving them more efficiently will reduce your CAC (Cost to Acquire) and CSC (Cost to Serve). Moreover, customer insights might uncover new revenue streams.
Improve your Customer Experience
Ready to take your customer experience to the next level?
Staffino can help you set up an effective CX strategy, measure your customer experience, collect actionable feedback, and much more.