Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience

Customer Experience is something that has become more and more popular as we move away from the “Sleazy Salesman” tactics of the late 90s and early 2000s.

Customer Experience is now a major factor in a business whether it be B2C or B2B.

An effective Customer Experience strategy can make your small or medium business look like an enterprise organization.

If you really want to get ahead of your competition by creating loads of happy customers, you should create a CX strategy.

At its base, a CX strategy is a foundation you can rely on to ensure your organization is providing the absolute best service across all customer touchpoints.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX, is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.  

CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you. Everything you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so a great customer experience is your key to success.

Why is CX important for your business?

Delivering a great customer experience is hugely important for any business. The better experience and more positive experience customers have, the more repeat custom and positive reviews you’ll receive, while simultaneously reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns.  

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

• increased customer loyalty
• increased customer satisfaction
• better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience: subscription businesses can increase customer retention and reduce customer churn, e-commerce marketplaces can increase repeat customers and reduce returns, and service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints.

In fact, we challenge you to think up a type of business that doesn’t benefit from providing a great customer experience.

Is Customer Experience the same as Customer Service?

No. And here’s why.

In most cases, a customer’s first point of contact with a company is usually by interacting with an employee (either by visiting a store or by speaking on the phone). This gives your business an opportunity to deliver great customer service.

However, customer service is only one aspect of the entire customer experience.

For example, if you book a vacation on the phone and the person you are speaking with is friendly and helpful, that’s good customer service. Yet, if your tickets arrive early and the hotel upgrades your room, then that’s a great customer experience!

That’s how the two are different!

Like most things in today’s market place, CX has changed – it’s more than person-to-person service and thanks to technology, companies can connect with their customers in new and exciting ways.

For example, using CRM software, you can view customer purchase history and to predict future needs even before the customer knows they need it. Having the ability to predict a future need will let you be proactive and attentive and, it means you can do things like;

• Provide related products based on purchase history
• Create and deliver targeted email marketing campaigns
• Understand the 360 degree view of the customer

Customer service is still as important as ever, but it’s no longer the sole focus of the customer experience. Now, the customer experience brings new ways to strengthen customer relationships through technological breakthroughs.

The table below explains the key differences between customer service and customer experience: 

	Customer service	Customer experience
Interaction	When a problem occurs	Throughout the entire customer journey map
Approach	Reactive	Proactive
Metrics	CSAT	NPS
Triggers	An event	A feeling
Relationship	Transactional	Experiential
Responsibility	Department	Company

How important is CX?

A business cannot exist without its customers, and this is why companies are focusing on how to win new business and, perhaps more importantly, retain existing customers.

A survey by Bloomberg Businessweek found that “delivering a great customer experience” has become a top strategic objective.

And a sruvey by Customer Management IQ survey that 75% of customer experience management executives and leaders rated customer experience a ‘5’ on a scale of 1-5 (5 being of the highest importance).

The challenge here is that even though it’s a high priority, most companies are failing to deliver a good customer experience.

When Bain & Company asked organizations to rate their quality of customer experience, 80% believe they are delivering a superior experience. This is compared to only 8% of customers who believe they are receiving a great customer experience.

So how many brands are truly delivering an excellent customer experience?

Surprisingly, not too many.

In fact, less than half of all companies deliver a good (or excellent) customer experience.

Customer expectations are rising, faster than the speed that companies can improve their customer experience. Customers expect every interaction, end-to-end, to be the best experience they have with any company – not just yours!

What is a good Customer Experience?

There is no single universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience: your business is unique and so are your customers. However, we’ve found a number of common principles by polling 2000 CX professionals across many industries. You can read the full results of our survey here, but we’ve included some of the key takeaways below.

In short, good customer experience can be achieved if you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
• Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly
• Reduce friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges

It’s not rocket science: a good CX comes from asking your customers questions, listening to their responses, and actioning their feedback.

6 things that cause bad Customer Experiences

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes, but we noticed a number of commonly-reported issues in our customer experience stats.

Bad customer experience is primarily caused by:

• Long wait times
• Employees who do not understand customer needs
• Unresolved issues/questions
• Too much automation/not enough of a human touch
• Service that is not personalized
• Rude/angry employees

If you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer—it’s quite likely that one (or more) of the above was the cause. 

Ultimately, though, what counts as poor customer experiences in your business will be unique—and you’ll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback, then working to minimize the impact of factors that cause a bad experience for your them.

Impact of bad Customer Experiences

If a great customer experience is focused on ensuring all interactions and touchpoints with your business is easy, enjoyable, and seamless, then the exact opposite is true when it comes to a bad customer experience.

More than $62 billion is lost each year to bad customer service. Meanwhile, another study found 91% of unhappy customers leave a brand without complaining. 

It doesn’t get any better. Only 10% of consumers say brands meet expectations for a good experience. 

Some of the most common causes for bad customer experiences involve: 

• Difficult purchasing processes
• Negative experiences with customer support
• Compromising a customer’s personal security
• Waiting too long on hold
• Ignoring customer feedback

How to Measure and Analyze Customer Experience

From what we wrote so far, customer experience can look like a subjective concept that’s difficult to measure. That’s why you need to rely on a number of different CX metrics that can be used individually or together to get an indication of customer experience in your business.

By having a measurable indicator of CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use it to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might be affecting your customers. Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals to track customer experience over time:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Time To Resolution (TTR)

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score measures the experience with a product or service in terms of how ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ it is for your customers to complete an action.

CES surveys are usually sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as ‘How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?’ and a rating scale going from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’. They also work well after customers reach important milestones in their journey (for example, after they sign up for a free product trial or after they successfully concluded a transaction).

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty score that is derived from asking customers a simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”. 

You can choose to adapt the question slightly to better suit your business and use a follow-up NPS question to get more insight, but the point of NPS is to get a simple numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience and shows loyal customers.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They can be expressed with a 5- or 7-point scale (where 1: very unsatisfied and 7: very satisfied), or through binary yes/no answers.

Unlike the Net Promoter Score, which asks customers to consider their overall feeling towards the brand (and thus, their likelihood of recommending it or not), CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on specific touchpoints they were satisfied or dissatisfied with.

Time to resolution (TTR)

TTR is the average length of time it takes customer service teams to resolve an issue or ticket after it’s been opened by a customer. It can be measured in days or business hours, and is calculated by adding up all times to resolution and dividing the result by the number of cases solved.

In our CX stats and trends, we found that the leading cause of customer frustration is a long wait/response time. For that, TTR is a crucial metric to track and improve: the shorter your TTR, the higher the chances your customers will not experience frustration when they reach out for help.

How to Develop a Customer Experience Strategy

Understand your audience and create buyer personas

Understand your customers. Who are they? What are their motivations? This information will allow you to build customer personas that you’ll later use to shape your strategy.

For example, categorize the types of customers your customer support team speaks with and note their needs. Also, collect data from your CRM or customer experience management platform.

Once you have enough information, create buyer personas and use them in marketing campaigns.

Analyze your business objectives

What your business goals? New customers? Entering a new market?

Perhaps you are launching products or services into a current marketplace? Review brand studies and identify the barriers. How can they be overcome?

Ask yourself: how can your customer experience strategy framework help you achieve your long term goals?

Then try to find the answer to these questions:

• What technology, people or processes do we need?
• What gaps exist between customer expectation and actual experiences?
• Where do we stand now in terms of a customer centric experience?

The answers to these questions will help you better shape your cx strategy.

Reverse-engineer the experience you want to deliver

Steve Jobs was an advocate of “beginning with the customer experience and working backward to the technology”. This approach could work for your company, too.

For example, you can start by listing your brand’s customer experience stages. Where are the opportunities to make an impression? (For Amazon, for example, it’s early delivery.) Start from there and ask: what do we need to make sure customers go through this stage seamlessly?

And of course, you can start from customer expectations. Meeting and exceeding them is the ultimate goal after all, so knowing what your customers want you to do can help you figure out how.

Hire team players and get them invested in the process

Employees are key to deliver great customer experience. Damien Peillon, from Logogenie, trains employees to really pay attention to customers. If a customer mentions a birthday when making a reservation, the manager will come over to wish them well at the table.

What can we learn from this? Hire people who have a customer experience mindset, even if they’re not in customer-facing roles. Then, pay attention to the details. Knowing customer likes and dislikes gives the chance to act on them, personalizing the experience.

Eliminate bad design early in the game

User experience (UX) is key when it comes to creating a customer experience strategy. That’s because UX design is essential for the main points where customers enter their relationship with your brand, namely your product and/or your website.

Three design tips to improve customer experience:

• Create a consistent brand experience across channels – your website, apps, email, and social media channels. Take inspiration from Etsy’s orange and white theme.
• Eliminate unnecessary hurdles and streamline the process to purchase. Make it easy to find the right information or service.
• Factor in emotion. Wufoo included emoji faces in their app, ranging from super smiley to mega grumpy. Customers were asked to rate how they were feeling based on this scale.

Pay attention to customer feedback

According to research from Bain & Company, 80 percent of companies believe they are providing great customer service, but only eight percent of customers agree with them.

Asking for customer feedback is the best way to close this gap. Here’s how:

• Use post-customer interaction and real-time feedback surveys. Follow up with customers over the phone or email to get clarifications.
• Practice social listening. Social media is where customers are usually the most honest and vocal.

Research your competitors

Analyze competitors and market trends to get a clear picture. What are they doing to service your target audience?

Sometimes you can play catchup with what your competitors are doing to avoid being left behind. Other times, you can identify gaps, such as CX tactics no one is using.

This will help you stand out.

Build systems for quick and effective resolutions

Customer support can be the pillar of your customer experience strategy plan. There’s nothing more frustrating than looking for a solution to a problem and not having a clear and fast way to get it.

Thankfully, there are a lot of tech options that can help you build an effective support process. For example, live chat is super convenient for customers browsing your website. It’s easy to access when needed without being distracting. It can be integrated with video chat and chatbots for even higher-quality support.

Incorporate a memorable brand personality

A unique brand personality can result in a massive, loyal customer base. Apple, Amazon, Target, and so many other companies are trusted to provide memorable experiences to their customers because they build their brands around them.

Create a unified brand identity by getting feedback from your employee experience, analyzing the market, and brainstorming ideas about what your business wants to be to your customers.

Apply AI technology

More than 6 out of 10 Australian customers prefer a digital self-service tool (website, mobile app or online tutorial) over a call or video chat for resolving issues. This experience can be enhanced by AI tech.

Here are some benefits of AI:

• Enable auto-responses to routine customer queries, guiding your audiences with carefully curated content.
• Customer service interactions run by AI reduce the need to attend every customer conversation, freeing up your agents to focus on more complex issues.
• Segment your user base and increase personalization. With records of a subscriber’s email browsing data, web pages visited and past interactions, AI can auto-send personalized messages and even track their response.
• Draw on past interactions, making sure that the customer gets the most relevant experience.
• Starting with an AI chatbot on your website can help you provide more personalized experiences and faster, automated service.

Redefine your marketing

Digitalization has drastically shifted customers’ decision-making processes. Now they’re not waiting for your ads, your emails, or salespeople to make their purchases. They’re actively researching their options and are more well-informed than ever before.

That’s why you need to enable proactive and educational marketing in addition to traditional campaigns as part of your digital transformation efforts. Content, reviews, word-of-mouth marketing, and more can be key to creating the best customer experience before purchase.

Understand your Customer Experience Metrics

Failing to measure your customer experience means missing out on valuable information that can boost your customer experience strategy. Remember, if it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved.

There’s plenty of data out there. Average response and resolution time, for example.

Make use of the right technology and tools

In the era of digital customer experience, no customer experience strategy would be possible without the right technology. With a robust customer experience platform, for example, you can:

• Engage customers across multiple channels all in one place.
• Increase customer engagement with automated messages and faster support.
• Reduce churn with predictive analytics.
• Personalize interactions.

And more. Do your research and find solutions that allow you to build unified customer profiles, offer omnichannel service, and automate workflows for increased efficiency.

Optimize your CX strategy

A customer experience strategy is an ongoing process. Adopt a continuous improvement approach. Measure, optimize, repeat.

Remember: customer experience provides a massive opportunity to boost customer loyalty. With the right strategy in place, the sky’s the limit.

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