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.
Positive customer experience is vital for your business success because satisfied customers convert to be loyal ones who help in boosting revenue. While it may seem like extra effort to focus solely on customer experience, it is worth it.
HBR study found out that customers who had previous best experience spent 140% more compared to those who have a bad experience. Having a satisfying brand experience results in higher customer lifetime value (CLTV).
Acquiring a new customer costs 7 times more than maintaining an existing one. Hence, creating a good experience delights your customers and ensures that they will keep doing business with you in the future. A superior experience becomes a valued asset for any type of business.
Delivering prompt service boosts customer satisfaction and encourages them to retain with your business. With an increase in customer experience, customer support issues reduce significantly. Satisfied customers choose to be associated with a brand for a lifetime.
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 $64 billion is lost each year to bad customer service. Meanwhile, another study found 93% 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:
So, the question remains, how can your organization create a great customer experience strategy?
This may seem backwards, but companies that win at CX start with their employees.
There’s an important connection between empowered employees and happy customers. Think about it – you’ve been speaking to a customer service agent for 10 minutes and you ask for a discount. The agent wants to resolve your issue, but they need to approve it with their manager. You’re already tired and just want to be finished with the conversation. It would be much easier if the agent could use their judgment, approve the discount (or take other appropriate action) and solve your issue on the spot.
Take action:
Find out what’s blocking your employees from delivering a great customer experience. Use an employee pulse survey to uncover any common pain points in the employee experience, and use those insights to review systematic processes such as contact center protocols and CRM software.
Consider your company culture, too. Are leaders, managers and employees all on the same page, with clearly understood shared values that support good customer experiences? Can you do more to build a customer-centric culture in your organization?
Customer service should be customer focused – not company focused. In order to enhance client experience, you need to evaluate every moment your customer interacts with your company.
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
Good customer service levels up customer satisfaction. Happy customers create positive word of mouth about you. One of the best ways to adopt an excellent customer engagement strategy to provide real time support.
By using digital customer engagement tools, you can make conversation interactive and increase client experience.
You’ve heard the phrase “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it”?
Well, the best customer experiences are achieved when a member of your team creates an emotional connection with a customer.
Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is based on an emotion as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions.
Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached and they remember how they feel when they use a product or service. A business that optimizes for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85% in sales growth.
And, according to a recent Harvard Business Review study titled “The New Science of Customer Emotions“, emotionally engaged customers are:
From chatbots that are there for customers 24/7, to natural language processing that allows you to understand what people mean in free-form text messages, the latest digital technology has made time-to-insights faster and new levels of personalization and service both scalable and affordable.
The value of these technologies are reflected by the increasing numbers of big businesses using them. For example, Dominos lets customers order pizza through the Domino’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, and eBay helps customers search the entire eBay marketplace for the best deals out there just like a personal shopper. There’s no doubt AI and related tech can make life easier for your customers and allow you to get creative with your products.
Take action:
A customer health score is always a work in progress. You may find that what works today isn’t relevant within six months’ time. Be prepared to change and respond to customer and employee feedback throughout the whole process.
If you need any help or would like to speak to one of our expert team regarding health score and other engagement metrics, please get in touch with us and book a free 1-hour session.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken over largely in order to deliver an improved customer experience. Deploying chatbots can help businesses to enhance their customer service experience strategy and achieve faster growth.
Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs and can help businesses by speeding up response time and answering up to 80% FAQs”. Bots are the best way to meet customer requests in real time. It reduces the customer frustration of being in long queues to get answers.
However, you cannot leave everything to AI. If there is a complex query there should be smooth handover to the human agent for effective resolution. Thus, you increase client experience with the chatbot managing the FAQs and live agents handling complex conversations.
Gone are the days of sitting down at a desktop computer to connect with a brand. With more than 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, multi-device digital journeys are now the standard.
But it’s not just about maintaining a consistent journey across different devices. Today’s CX leaders understand that customers use a range of offline and online channels to connect with brands, often switching multiple times, and that every part of the journey – however meandering and unpredictable – needs to be seamlessly joined-up and consistent.
Embracing omnichannel is one of the most important shifts you’ll make in your business thinking, and it’s one that goes hand in hand with prioritizing CX.
It’s no secret that engaging customers across the whole lifecycle are crucial to achieving increased sales and enhancing customer experience.
The six main stages of customer lifecycle are:
When talking about the customer lifecycle, we need to consider the main stages that take a buyer from the first acquaintance with your product or service through purchase, loyalty, and retention.
Most organizations have an annual survey process where they capture the overall feedback of your team; how engaged they are and the businesses ability to deliver an exceptional service.
But, what happens in the 11 months between these survey periods?
Usually, nothing happens. And this is where continuous employee feedback can play a role using tools that allow staff to share ideas on how to improve the customer experience and for managers to see how staff is feeling towards the business.
For example, using project management software or social media tools, you can create a closed environment where your organization can leave continuous feedback.
Customers today want personalized interactions. In fact 80% of consumers were more likely to make a purchase when brands offered CX, and 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them. Personalization, where the experience adapts based on what you know about the customer, makes customer journeys smoother and strengthens the bond between brand and customer. If you’ve ever received a marketing email filled with recommendations and vouchers based on your purchase history, or been able to set up which content you see on a website from your user profile, you’ve experienced the power of personalization.
Take action:
Here are some ways you can use personalization:
Changing the way you do business, case by case.
Detect which signups are most likely to buy. Sell more with less effort.
Automatically surface product qualified leads.
Prioritize PQLs call lists and engage with quick actions.
Add tasks and full PQL context to existing CRM and other engagement tools.
Automated sales playbooks and collaborative inbox.
Onboard. Monitor. Get expansion signals. Reduce churn, proactively.
Automatically detect churn & expansion candidates.
Accelerate onboarding and product adoption.
Align activities around 360° customer view, with health and onboarding scores.
Automated CS playbooks and collaborative inbox.
Build revenue workflows, based on how people use your product.
Use machine learning to uncover new sales opps.
Add slow accounts to nurturing campaigns.
Optimize engagement playbooks for maximum conversion.
Leverage any data without needing engineering.
See which impact your product features have on revenue, expansion and churn.
Analyse feature importance, usage and impact.
Build key product metrics without SQL, nor coding.
Easily create customer segments based on any product interaction.
Comply to GDPR and CCPA.
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