What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is an outcome of interactions between an organization and its customers. It is the perceptions or impressions that customers have from their interactions or throughout their journey with your organization.
Also known as CX, customer experience is the subjective response of customers to interactions, both direct and indirect, with your company. It stems from everything you do in your relationship with the customer.
CX is more than customer service, which is the support given prior to, during, and after making a purchase. It encompasses every customer touchpoints with a company, including advertising and marketing. It also includes packaging, usability, and reliability.
Why Customer Experience Matter?
CX can be linked to customer empathy. If you assume yourself being in the position of the user, you’re more likely to provide a better experience. You can also link customer experience to customer satisfaction. The quality of interaction during their journey will determine whether a customer does up happy or displeased.
A great experience can help greatly in improving a company’s upside. It not only wins you more customers but enables you to retain their business. A customer that had a great experience is likely to live an excellent review online or tell friends and neighbors. There’s arguably no better way to market your product more effectively than through word-of-mouth, and it’s free.
Customer Experience isn’t Just About Features
Features are among those things that influence customer experience. However, they are not really defining factors.
Having too many features in your product might even suggest a company that doesn’t care about CX. Marketing and Sales would often come with feature requests, but these don’t necessarily guarantee a superior experience. Too many features than what an average customer needs may complicate CX.
What Makes for a Great Customer Experience?
CX embraces several things. It includes all aspects of a customer’s journey. However, it is not unlikely for organizations to put more emphasis on some aspects than others. The approach to take for promoting a great customer experience will often vary between businesses. The type of customers an organization relates to will inform how best to go about this.
Hotjar notes from a survey of some 2000 professionals working in this domain that the following are some of what makes for a good customer experience:
- Making the gathering of user feedback a priority – giving the customer a voice
- Taking time to fully comprehend what customers say
- Having a system that simplifies the gathering and analysis of feedback and guides action-taking
- Ensuring that customers’ problems get due attention and the right solutions
As can be deduced from the foregoing, customer feedback is a key piece in the CX strategy. It is what drives what you need to do better to make your customers happy.
What Causes Bad Experience?
There are several reasons why CX may suffer. Hotjar notes that the common ones reported by professionals included:
- Less human touch and excessive automation
- Non-personalized service
- Lengthy wait times
- Rude or angry staff
- Unresolved complaints or queries
- Poor understanding of customers’ needs
Other possible reasons for poor customer experience include investment considerations. Having invested a lot in customer relationship management, executives may deem investment in CX as unnecessary.
However, CRM isn’t the same as customer experience management (CEM). While the former helps to tell who the customer is and their needs, the latter is concerned with their response or perception of interactions with the company.
Concerns about what it might find out could also keep a company from thinking too much about CX. Will it be able to deliver to expectations and with minimal tradeoffs?
Stand Out from the Crowd
CX is about showing care for the customer. The interesting thing here is that while many companies believe they take user experience seriously consumers think otherwise. Just about 30 percent of customers believe that organizations care about the experience they get, according to a report by Capgemini.
Your customers, at least the majority, won’t give a verdict on CX based on interactions with you only. They’d usually come to a conclusion going by what they got from other organizations, which may not even be in the same industry.
Careful thoughts must be given to ensure that every touchpoint leaves a lasting, positive impression. This requires a good dose of customer empathy. To stand out from the competition, you’ll not only need to measure and analyze customer feedback but also CX. Key metrics that can show how well you are doing in delivering a great experience include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Time to Resolution (TTR), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
