Let’s Talk About Customer Experience

5 min readDec 1, 2020

Great “Customer Experience”(CX) requires a customer-centric mindset… and a lot of careful work to ensure the success of your business because a happy customer is likely to become a loyal customer.

CX encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering, the quality of customer care, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability.

A company could be good in one area but struggle in others, which could prompt an overall poor experience. Consider what would happen if a company hired employees for its stores and call centers, who were apathetic about the service and didn’t want to be there. They would likely have poor interactions with customers, which would lead customers to perceive that the brand is lazy and doesn’t care about their business.

On the other hand, a company that hires passionate people and trains them to love the product will shine. Employees will likely help customers have a great experience and develop a strong perception of the brand amongst customers.

Many things can contribute to the overall perception, including the quality of the product, the cleanliness of the store, or the ease of navigating the website. Taking the time to make sure every step of a customer’s journey is strong will create good perceptions and make it more likely for customers to come back and tell their friends about your brand/company.

Customer belief is fragile and may change with every interaction, so continuously retaining a robust customer experience is of extreme importance. With that being said, the best marketing money can buy is a customer who will promote your business for you, one who’s loyal to your company, promotes your business via word-of-mouth, and advocates for your brand and product or service.

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” — Chip Bell

Why is Customer Experience important?

In today’s world, customers have the power, not the sellers.

Customers have a plethora of alternatives to pick from at their fingertips plus the resources necessary to teach themselves and make purchases on their own. That’s why delivering a wonderful customer experience is highly crucial for any business.

The better experience customers have, the greater repeated customers and positive remarks/reviews you’ll receive, while simultaneously lowering the friction of customer complaints and returns.

The benefits of delivering great CX include:

Increased customer loyalty
Increased customer satisfaction
Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendation
Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention
Reduced Cost of Service and Marketing
Better Customer Engagement
More Customer Acquisitions

All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience: subscription-based businesses can increase retention and reduce churn, eCommerce marketplaces can increase recurring customers and reduced returns, while service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints.

“Customer service is part of a holistic customer experience that is capable of providing a critical competitive advantage in today’s increasingly cluttered and commoditized marketplace.” — Joseph Jaffeu

So, how can you measure your customer experience to determine where you’re doing well and what needs improvement?

How do you measure them?

Analyze customer satisfaction survey results:

A great way to measure customer experience is through Net Promoter Score (NPS) or through Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This measures how likely your customers are to promote you to their friends, family, and colleagues based on their experiences with your company.

NPS:

NPS is calculated by asking customers one question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” Data from this question helps businesses improve upon service, support, delivery, etc. for increased customer loyalty.

Analyzing NPS from multiple touchpoints across the customer journey will tell you what you need to improve and where you’re providing an excellent experience already while showing customers you’re listening to them and care about what they have to say.

CSAT:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a basic measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a brand’s product and/or services. Marketers and brands can use CSAT to determine a customer’s level of satisfaction at key interaction times, such as the moment of purchase, the onboarding process, a support ticket exchange, and a phone or digital conversation with customer service.

Identify the rate and reasons for customer churn.

“Churn happens!” — it’s part of doing business. But you must learn from it. so you can prevent it from happening again. Make sure you’re doing regular analysis of your churned customers so you can determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing. Find out the reasons for churn, and plan actions for your teams to avoid churn in the future.

Ask customers for product or feature requests.

Create a forum for your customers to request new products or features to make your offerings more useful and helpful for the problems they’re trying to solve.

Whether that forum is shared via email survey, social media, or a community page.

Appointing a Customer Advisory Board(CAB) or also known as Product Advisory Council is a hand-picked collection of customers who gather regularly to lend their insights to the product development process for a particular company or product. CAB members may also be tapped to serve as alpha or beta testers of products, as well as being asked to offer feedback on potential changes or additions to the product. The insight you gain from these meetings helps you understand yourself from an outside perspective. Armed with that perspective and insight, you can better understand customers’ needs, pain points, and interests. This allows you to form a forward-looking strategy in a way that aligns with what your customers need and want. This, in turn, empowers you to more easily maintain satisfied customers who are loyal to your brand.

Analyze customer support ticket trends.

You should also analyze the customer support tickets your support reps are working to resolve every day. If there are recurring issues among tickets, review possible reasons for those hiccups and how you can provide solutions across the board.

This will allow you to decrease the total number of tickets reps receive while providing a streamlined and enjoyable experience for customers.

Conclusion:

Customer dissatisfaction is widespread because customer empowerment is becoming increasingly popular. Although companies know a lot about customers’ buying habits, incomes, and other characteristics used to classify them, they know little about the thoughts, emotions, and states of mind when customers interact with products, services, and brands. Yet, unless companies know about these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them, fails. Customer satisfaction becomes more of a slogan than an attainable goal. Fix your Customer Experience game today for a better tomorrow.