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Understanding and Implementing Customer Experience programs

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Customer sentiment has the power to influence your brand’s future. Customers are spoilt for choice in almost every market sector these days. Focusing on customer experience will help businesses provide a value proposition which customers will find hard to refuse.

What is Customer Experience?

Your customers’ perception of their experience at one or more touchpoints, and their view of your business or brand can be termed as Customer Experience (CX). It is the sum total of every interaction a customer has with your organization. This can include navigating your website, dealing with your customer support or service, receipt of your product or service. 

Virtually everything your brand does has an impact on your customers, and all these actions comprise their CX.

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Why do you need to manage Customer Experience?

As mentioned earlier, virtually every industry is saturated with options for the customer. The presence of social media has made it possible for customers to amplify their voice after a negative experience with your brand. Now a positive customer experience may not negate these issues entirely, but it does help mitigate them. A positive CX helps you manage customer feedback more effectively, and helps you design a customer journey that improves your brand image. However, that’s not the only benefit you can expect from a positive customer experience. A holistic CX results in:

  • Improved customer satisfaction

Better customer experience is key to ensuring that your customers are satisfied after any interaction with your brand. This includes satisfaction with your products, their interactions with your customer support, and satisfaction with resolutions to conflicts.

  • Improved customer loyalty

Take a look at Apple or Tesla: Their single minded devotion to CX has won them loyal customers who refuse to switch brands. Apple’s walled garden looks intimidating from the outside to those unfamiliar with it, but Apple’s customers’ swear by its customer experience. 

  • Better customer advocacy

A comprehensive CX program will result in your customers turning into brand advocates. They will be the first to recommend your brand to prospective buyers within their circle and can be part of countering negative opinions about your brand on social media as well.

  • Lower Churn

It stands to reason that with better customer satisfaction, your customer retention rates will improve as well. Along with increased word of mouth marketing, better CX will be more profitable for your business as well. 

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Metrics which track Customer Experience

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There’s no single survey or metric which can track your CX. Depending on the touchpoint in question and your requirements from the survey, you can use several metrics to gauge your customer experience. These surveys can be used to augment one another and help uncover actionable insights to improve your CX.

NPS®

  • Net Promoter Score®, or NPS® is a metric which helps measure customer loyalty and brand advocacy. It asks the respondent a simple question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product/service/brand to a friend or a colleague?”
  • Respondents can choose their answer from a scale of 0-10. After choosing their response, they are then asked why they left that score. This follow up question can be a great source of insights into improving your services/products, and can give you important information into customer pain points.

CSAT

  • Customer Satisfaction or CSAT Surveys are excellent indicators of important aspects of your Customer Experience. They are measured with a 5 or 7 point scale, ranging from “Very satisfied” to “Very Unsatisfied”
  • CSAT surveys are usually implemented in a manner which asks respondents to focus on their satisfaction levels at specific touchpoints with your brand.

CES

  • Customer Effort Score or CES Surveys helps measure how much effort customers had to exert at specific touchpoints or interactions with your business. CES surveys are usually dispatched after customers have interacted with your customer service.
  • Respondents are given a statement or a question inquiring about how much effort they had to expend, and can choose their response from a rating scale ranging from “Very easy” to “very difficult”.

What is a good Customer Experience?

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There’s no universal methodology or checklist to determine how good your CX is. It can vary for different products, industries and services. However, there are a few tenets common to all organizations which are considered to be providing excellent customer experience.

Listening to customers across all touchpoints

Companies with good CX listen. They take customer feedback into account, and their customers feel that their voice is acknowledged. Implementing a policy to listen to your customer base across your organization is an important factor for good customer experience.

Implementing an efficient system to collect feedback

Customer feedback and acting on it is a constant process. Businesses need to equip themselves with an omnichannel customer experience survey software to be able to gather insights into customer thinking across multiple channels. This must be followed up by acting on customer feedback and notifying them of the same.

Factors which make for poor Customer Experience

There are factors which can universally be deemed as attributes of a poor CX. These issues can lead to negative word of mouth about your brand and are a leading contributor to customer churn. 

Unprofessional employees in customer facing roles

No matter how unreasonable customers’ get, it’s important for your employees to not lose their cool. They are the face of your brand and must act accordingly. Customers tend to remember bad experiences with an employee, and there’s no telling how public opinion might swing. 

Unresolved issues

Customers are already agitated when faced with issues. Not everything is an easy fix and could require time. In the meanwhile it’s best to keep your customers informed of progress. If possible, brands need to defer to their customers even if the customer is the one responsible for issues. 

The lack of a human touch

Automation, Machine learning, and AI are essentials but businesses need to ensure they don’t lose their human touch in the pursuit for profitability. The key to a memorable and positive customer experience is marrying automation with a human touch. Your brands’ image and messaging needs to be warm and welcoming, and should customers have to interact with your support teams, the process should ideally have a person involved as soon as possible.

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