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What is Customer Experience Primary Market Research

What is Customer Experience?

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Customer experience (CX) is the holistic perception that customers have about a brand as a whole based on the overall experiences of their journey. It is the outcome of every interaction that customers have with your business, starting from reviewing the website to getting in touch with the customer service team and buying a product or service from your company. The way you treat your customers impacts their views about your brand and their decision to come back or not – thereby affecting your bottom line!

Watch the video below to learn how Voxco can help you can enhance your overall customer experience.

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Why Customer Experience matters to your business?

Being a critical factor behind the sustained growth of a company, an exceptional customer experience helps to promote customer loyalty while encouraging brand advocacy. In today’s ultra-competitive business environment where customers have more power than sellers, delivering a positive experience reduces churn and increase their lifetime value. As 52 % of customers are ready to go out of their way to shop from brands they’re loyal to, delivering a seamless and effective customer experience matters more than ever! Moreover, 86% of customers are willing to pay extra money for great CX, making the customer experience a key differentiator for business success in 2020 & beyond. According to research, brands earning $1 billion a year can expect an average gain of $700 million within 36 months by investing in CX. Delivering a great customer experience can help you to: 

  • Reduce customer churn 
  • Boost revenue 
  • Increase customer satisfaction 
  • Reinforce your brand presence 

Customer Experience vs Customer Service

When a customer tries to get in touch with a company, the first point of contact is an employee (from the customer service team) who interacts and resolves the client’s concerns to deliver a great service. So, customer service comes into play when a customer seeks assistance at specific touchpoints across the journey. For instance, calling an operator to understand the functioning of a recently purchased washing machine. However, Customer Experience (CX) is the overall perception of a brand based on the sum of all interactions that a client has with it. In simple words, customer service is just one aspect of the whole gamut of CX.

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What makes a good customer experience?

There are no universal standards to follow for ensuring a good customer experience. As every business is unique, so are the perceptions of their customers. However, it is believed that your brand can deliver a great customer experience if it: 

  • Listens to the customers and make them a top priority 
  • Gathers customer feedback to understand them and delve deeper into their needs
  • Implements a system to analyze customer feedback and acts on it 
  • Solves the customers’ issues and address their challenges quickly 

What causes a bad customer experience?

A bad customer experience can occur due to a myriad of reasons, some of which include:

  • Unresolved concerns or issues 
  • Unfulfilled customer needs
  • Unnecessary long wait times
  • Lack of personalized services
  • Rude or frustrated employees
  • No human intervention or too much automation

Measuring Customer Experience the right way

Use surveys to track customer satisfaction: Using surveys can help you gain insights into the customer journeys and analyze their experience with your brand. Being a measurable indicator of CX, it enables you to track the success or failure of your product or service from your customer’s point of view. Voxco offers best-in-class omnichannel CX surveys that transform every touchpoint into a positive experience. Here are some surveys that you should use:

  • Net Promoter Score® : Net Promoter Score® Survey (NPS® Survey) is widely used by brands to measure customer experience as well as satisfaction. Intending to predict the growth trajectory of a business and revitalize the CX, this survey asks the respondents one primary question:

“On a scale ranging from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to your friends or colleagues?”

This is followed by another open-ended question: “Why did you give us that score?” This question propels the customers to write their feedback in an attached dialog box.

As the scale of the NPS® survey ranges from 0 (Not at all likely) to 10 (Extremely likely), the respondents can be distinguished as follows:

      • Promoters: Customers who give you a rating of 9 or 10.
      • Detractors: Customers who give you a rating between 0-6.
      • Passives: Customers who give you a rating between 7 and 8.

To know more about NPS® , click here. To improve your Net Promoter Score® and effortlessly stack up against industry competition, you can use Voxco’s free NPS® Calculator.

  • Customer Satisfaction Score: Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are used by businesses to understand how satisfied (or dissatisfied) their customers are with their products or services. These surveys play a key role in tracking customers’ reactions to recent updates made by your brand, or how they feel about the quality or effectiveness of your products, services, etc. It involves asking the following question to the customers:

“On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with our product/service?”

The Customer Satisfaction surveys come up with a flexible scale as the responses can be in any form like numeric range (1-10 or 1-5) or Likert scale (from “Highly Dissatisfied” to “Highly Satisfied”). Also, the scores can vary from 0% to 100% depending on the customer responses.

  • Customer Effort Score: Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are used by companies to understand how easy or difficult it is for the customers to interact with them (& find a solution to their needs). This helps to identify if the customers are happy or annoyed with your brand. Usually, CES surveys include one question for gathering customer feedback:

“Please rate how easy was it for you to find a relevant solution on our website?”

For the answer options, you can either use rating scales (varying from “1-5” or “1-10”), graphic sliders (consisting of happy, neutral, and sad emojis), or Likert scales (ranging from “Not at all easy – Extremely easy”).

Discover the reasons behind customer churn: Every business experiences churn at some time. But it’s important to analyze the reasons behind it for preventing it from happening again. With regular analysis of churned customers, it gets easy to determine the current churn rate of your brand (i.e. if it has increased or decreased), and what actions need to be taken for dealing with it.

Analyze product or feature requests  Develop a forum that enables your customers to request new products or features for making your offerings more helpful and relatable to their concerns. No matter if this forum is shared via social media, emails, or some community page, encourage your customers to become proactive and offer their suggestions. If there are repetitive suggestions coming up, you should consider investing your time into it!  

Evaluate customer support tickets: Analyzing the customer support tickets can go a long way. By keeping a tab on the support tickets, you can discover the issues that your support reps are dealing with every day. In case there are recurring issues coming up, it’s important to review the possible reasons behind them and how you can offer solutions to resolve them. This will not only minimize the number of tickets that support reps receive but also elevate the overall experience of the customers.

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How to improve Customer Experience?

Build a customer-focused vision: The improve customer experience, it’s essential to create a customer-focused vision that can be communicated within your company. Creating a set of principles can help to define this vision. These principles should be implanted into all sections of training and development so every team member should adhere to them. In this way, it will help to drive your brand’s behavior. 

Know your customers well: If your company needs to elevate the experience of its customers, they need to understand customer needs and requirements first! In such scenarios, connecting with customers and empathizing with their situations is important. To do this, start by segmenting your customers and creating buyer personas. Try to give each persona a name and personality. Building personas empower your support reps to recognize the customers and understand their needs. This helps businesses to become customer-centric. 

Develop an emotional connection: According to Forrester, appealing to emotion is key to building superior customer experiences. You cannot deliver an exceptional customer experience without developing an emotional connection with your customer. As emotions play a pivotal role in driving purchase decisions, more than 50% of the experience is directly related to emotions (according to the Journal of Consumer Research). When customers are emotionally connected with a brand, they’re more likely to become loyal and contribute to the overall ROI. Moreover, optimizing for emotional connections can empower a brand to outperform its competitors by 85% in sales.  

Gather customer feedback in real-time: Want to deliver a brilliant customer experience? Well, capturing customer feedback in real-time is what you should consider. Leverage live chat to have conversations with your customers in real-time. Also, you can send follow-up emails to your customers post-interaction. This helps to gain more insightful data and boosts the overall CX.  

Take employee feedback seriously: Most brands focus solely on improving customer experience and end up forgetting the real driver behind the customer journey – their own employees. As employees play a pivotal role in delivering exceptional customer service, it’s important for the companies to gather their feedback at regular intervals. By conducting employee feedback surveys, your employees can share ideas on how they can improve the CX and what do they feel about the business!

Customer Experience Management

What is Customer Experience Primary Market Research

Customer experience management, sometimes referred to as CXM or CEM, refers to the practice of initiating strategic plans that facilitate a customer-centric culture within an organization to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. 

Customer experience management involves listening to the voice of customers (VoC) to gain a deeper understanding of customer wants, needs, and expectations. When customers needs are kept at the centre of all decision-making, brands are able to cater to their audience more effectively, enhancing customer experience and boosting sales. 

Introducing CEM into an Organization

In order to introduce customer experience management into an organization, you must take the top-down approach. This means that senior leadership must be fully committed to inspiring a customer-centric culture within their organization.

Siloed departments make it hard to implement customer experience management. When departments are not crossfunctional and instead operate in a ‘silo’ fashion, a customer-centric culture cannot be made pervasive across the organization. Therefore, CEM requires cross-functional involvement and brand alignment, which can be achieved with commitment from senior leadership. 

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Customer Experience Mapping

Customer experience mapping, or CX mapping, refers to the process of creating a visual representation of a customer’s journey with your business. It’s a kind of diagram that depicts the different interactions customers have with your brand at different stages and in through different channels. CX maps are often used to help identify gaps in CX and potential pain points. It is a very useful tool that can be leveraged by businesses to get a holistic view of CX across different channels so that strategies can then be developed to enhance it. 

The following are important components of customer experience maps:

  • Customer Profiles: Using customer personas in your CX map will allow you to see the experiences that different customers are having.
  • Stages of Customer Journey: Your map should clearly distinguish and break down the different phases/stages in the customer journey. 
  • Pain Points: It is pivotal to include pain points on your map as they outline where exactly customers are experiencing difficulties or issues within their journey. 
  • Positive Experiences: It is also important to include the areas where customers are having positive experiences so that stakeholders get an understanding of which activities contribute to shaping a positive customer experience. 
  • Channels within Customer Journey: Your CX map should clearly depict the different channels through which the customer has interacted with your brand as well as any changes in channels during the customer journey. 
  • Touchpoints within Customer Journey: The map should also provide information on each touchpoint a customer experienced throughout their journey, briefly outlining the interactions. 
  • Customer Goals: Including customer goals in your map will allow it to also depict how customer goals change at different stages of the customer journey. This can help identify opportunities and areas that require improvement at different stages. 
  • Customer Data: Combine customer data (such as customer satisfaction metrics or customer quotes) to elevate your CX map.

Customer Experience Map vs Customer Journey Map

Customer experience maps are very similar to customer journey maps but there are a few key differences. Customer journey maps depict the different touchpoints consumers experience throughout their journey with the brand, from first exposure to post-purchase. Customer experience maps also depict the different touchpoints consumers experience throughout their journey with a brand, while also examining the entire customer experience by depicting pain points, customer behaviour, positive experiences, and interactions across different channels. 

FAQs on Customer Experience

CX is an abbreviation for Customer Experience, a term that refers to the customers’ perception of a brand as a result of the cumulative customer-brand interactions within the customer journey.

The following are a few causes of bad customer experience;

  • Impolite, impatient, or frustrated employees
  • Too much automation; lack of human interaction
  • Long wait times
  • Unresolved customer concerns

There are three key metrics that are generally used to measure customer experience and they are;

  • NPS, or Net Promoter score
  • CES, or Customer Effort Score
  • CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score

 Some of the contributors to good customer experience are;

  • Being customer-centric; listening to customers and making their experience a priority
  • A strong understanding of customer sentiment by frequently collecting customer feedback 
  • Closing the feedback loop by addressing pain points
  • Quick resolution/response to customer issues or queries

Customer experience mapping refers to the process of creating a visual representation, or diagram, that depicts all the different touchpoints that a customer experiences while interacting with an organization. CX maps provide a comprehensive illustration of customer preferences and behaviour, allowing organizations to cater to customers needs more effectively.

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