The expectations of customers from businesses are increasing, and why shouldn't they increase? Customers today have plenty of choices to choose from. So, they can quickly switch to the other business if they have a bad experience with one business. In fact, 73% of consumers highlight customer experience as a crucial fact in their purchasing decisions. Moreover, 61% of consumers are willing to pay around 5% extra if they are aware they will get a good CX.
Considering the importance of customer experience in 2024, we have designed this comprehensive guide to clear your concepts about customer experience, highlight its importance, and shed light on some key strategies. So, let's get started.
- What is Customer Experience?
- The Importance of Customer Experience
- How to Measure Customer Experience?
- What is a Good & Bad Customer Experience?
- Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: Key Differences
- 8 Strategies to Improve Customer Experience
- Wrapping Up
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience (CX) refers to all the interactions a customer has with a business from the start of the customer journey to the post-purchase phase. It encompasses all the touchpoints, communication, and emotional connections between the customer and the company.
Customer experience can also refer to a singular activity like calling customer service, observing an ad, paying a bill, and similar others. In short, customer experience incorporates every minor to major aspect of customer interaction with the company, which shapes their perception, loyalty, and satisfaction with the brand.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Customer experience is important for businesses because every interaction between the business and the customer has the potential to make or break the relationship. For example, a conversation between the customer and a sales representative can convince the customer to make a purchase.
There are many statistical points that also validate the importance of customer experience. Some of the key ones are as follows:
- ·86% of customers are willing to pay extra for an exceptional customer experience.
- ·72% of customers share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
- ·49% of customers have made impulse purchases after getting a personalized experience.
- ·80% of organizations are expecting to compete primarily based on customer experience.
From the above statistics, it is evident that customer experience (CX) is directly related to customer lifetime value, retention, and brand loyalty. On top of that, customer experience also gives a competitive edge, which is crucial in today's competitive era. In fact, 81% of organizations have cited customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
How to Measure Customer Experience?
There isn't a single standardized way to measure customer experience. The measurement depends on how much data you have. In fact, the more data you have, the more accurate CX you can calculate.
Some of the ways you can use to measure customer experience are as follows:
- Send Surveys: You can send surveys to directly ask customers to give feedback about the different touchpoints throughout the customer journey. You can use different surveys like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and similar others.
- Analyze Data: You can analyze the existing data you have about customers, such as ticket reopen rates, churn rates, customer lifetime value, time-to-resolution, and similar others.
- Use Community Forum: A community forum is also an excellent way to measure CX. Customers are seen to openly share their thoughts in forums which can be about feature requests, product/process pain points, and more. So, a smart use of a community forum can help to measure CX effectively.
- Get Insights from Customer-facing Team Members: Employees who interact with customers also have valuable insights about customer experience. Therefore, ask them to share their thoughts about CX.
In short, there are multiple ways to measure customer experience. So, you must deploy those ways and get valuable insights about CX to improve your products and processes.
Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: Key Differences
Customer experience and customer service are two commonly used terms in the corporate space. Therefore, it is important to clarify their differences to avoid misconceptions.
As mentioned earlier, customer experience is all the interactions between the business and the customer. It can be impersonal interactions, like a customer viewing a social media post, or it can be interpersonal interactions, like a customer interacting with a customer support representative.
On the other hand, customer service is more like a subset of customer experience. It refers to the support customers get when they have questions or want to troubleshoot issues. Usually, there is a dedicated customer service team that offers customer service. Good customer service is linked with good customer experience.
What is a Good & Bad Customer Experience?
A good customer experience offers customers a streamlined way to fulfill their goals. They experience a flawless way to achieve their desired objectives.
A good customer experience can have:
- Self-service resources.
- Responsive and comprehensive customer support.
- Personalized service experience
- Ease of use in products, services, and processes.
- Proactive communication
- Emotional connection.
In contrast, a bad customer experience can have:
- Long wait times for support
- Unfriendly or complicated products/services
- Lack of self-service resources.
- Lack of responsive and friendly customer support
- Low-quality products/services
A bad customer experience can trigger dissatisfaction, frustration, and loss of potential customers. Therefore, the long-term sustainability of a business highly depends on the good customer experience.
8 Strategies to Improve Customer Experience
Now that we are clear with the vitality of the customer experience for the business success, let's shed light on a few of the best strategies that can help improve customer experience:
- Map Customer Journey: Map out all the direct and indirect interactions with the customer. This involves analyzing every touchpoint, pain points, and more. Based on that, you can reduce friction, optimize touchpoints, and offer seamless services.
- Trigger Personalization: Customers love personalized experiences. So, try to tailor your products, services, and interactions personalized for customers. For instance, offer recommendations based on previous purchases, provide personalized services based on geolocation, and similar others.
- Improve Customer Service: Offer customers the best, fastest, and responsive customer service. One way is to deploy an AI chatbot like VOC AI Agent that can offer personalized and automated customer support.
- Deliver Value: Make it a priority to deliver value to customers. Whether its products, services, customer support, or any touchpoint, make it the best and most valuable experience for customers.
- Proactive Communication: Predict customer needs smartly and reach out to them with the right offers, updates, or information they need.
- Gather Feedback and Improve Continuously: Gather feedback from customers through your preferred means, learn from the feedback, and improve your processes accordingly.
- Community Building: Trigger a sense of community among customers by setting up forums or groups on social media to let them openly share about their experiences.
- Create Metrics and Track ROI: Set up metrics and tracking mechanisms to measure CX effectiveness.
Overall, improving customer experience is an ongoing process and requires dedication and a strategic mindset to fix loopholes and optimize all interactions with customers.
Wrapping Up
The 2024 year demands businesses to become agile in their customer experience management. The fast-paced era with rapid technological advancements and growing competition requires businesses to be up-to-date with their customer-centric strategies. Therefore, emphasizing and optimizing customer experience is more important than ever before. To wrap up, keep working on enhancing customer experience to have more loyal customers and business growth.
