Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences during their experience. A good customer experience means that the individual’s experience during all points of contact matches the individual’s expectations. Gartner asserts the importance of managing the customer’s experience.

Customer experience implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual. Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company. Direct contact usually occurs when the purchase or use is initiated by the customer. Indirect contact often involves advertising, news reports, unplanned encounters with sales representatives, word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms.

Customer experience encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering the quality of customer care, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability. Creating direct relationships in the place where customers buy, use and receive services by a business intended for customers such as instore or face to face contact with the customer which could be seen through interacting with the customer through the retail staff. We then have indirect relationships which can take the form of unexpected interactions through a company’s product representative, certain services or brands and positive recommendations or it could even take the form of “criticism, advertising, news, reports” and many more along that line.

Customer experience is created by the contribution of not only the customers’ values but also by the contribution of the company providing the experience.

All of the events experienced by customers before and after a purchase are part of the customer experience. What a customer experiences is personal and may involve sensory, emotional, rational and physical aspects to create a memorable experiencer. In the retail industry, both company and customers play a big role in creating a customer experience.

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As we mentioned, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help for example, calling an operator to request a refund or interacting via email with a service provider.

In other words: CX is larger than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with your company, whether it’s the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your customer service team to complain about your product (and hopefully get a prompt response).

What is a good customer experience?

In short, good customer experience can be achieved if you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
• Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly
• Reduce friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges

Importance of Customer Experience

A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.

Today, customers have the power, not the sellers.

Customers have a plethora of options to choose from at their fingertips plus the resources necessary to educate themselves and make purchases on the own.

This is why it’s so important to provide a remarkable experience and make them want to continue doing business with you customers are your best resource for growing your brand awareness in a positive way.

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

Measure Customer Experience

1. Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.

Using customer satisfaction surveys (which you can easily create in HubSpot) on a regular basis and after meaningful moments throughout the customer journey provides insight into your customers’ experience with your brand and product or service.

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

When measuring NPS, consider data in aggregate across teams. Since multiple teams impact your overall customer experience, you’ll need a clear picture of performance and that comes from multiple data points. For example, what is the NPS for in-product usage? What is the NPS for customer service teams across communication channels (phone, email, chat, etc.)? What is the NPS for sales? What is the NPS for attending a marketing webinar?

Analyzing NPS from multiple touch points 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.

With your NPS score, dive into your team-by-team performance to ensure you’re performing well across the board. Also, you may choose to follow up on customer feedback whether it’s positive or negative to connect with customers, deepen your relationship with them, and improve your retention and loyalty.

2. Identify rate and reasons for customer churn.

Churn happens: it’s part of doing business. But it’s important that you learn from churn when it happens so you can prevent it from happening again.

Make sure you’re doing a regular analysis of your churned customers so you can determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing, reasons for churn, and actions your team may take in the future to prevent a similar situation.

3. 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, give customers the opportunity to proactively offer suggestions. This doesn’t mean you must implement all of the suggestions you receive but if there are recurring trends popping up, they might be worth investing time in to.

4. 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 total number or tickets reps receive while providing a streamlined and enjoyable experience for customers.