What is customer experience?
Customer experience is a customer’s emotions towards a brand based on the totality of every interaction.
In other words, CX is your customer’s perception of your brand. It encompasses every touchpoint – in-store, online, browsing a website, customer support, product – and spans the entire relationship that a customer has with the company.
What do customers want when it comes to customer experience?
Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous focus on streamlining and removing friction from customer experiences. Everything that customer-obsessed companies like Amazon, Uber and Netflix do is through the lens of providing the most effortless customer experience possible.
Companies no longer compete with direct competitors on CX, but also these “customer-obsessed” brands, which have dramatically increased expectations across the board. So what exactly is a great customer experience? Good CX boils down to a few key things:
- Anticipating and removing points of friction; Making every interaction as simple and effortless as possible
- Being available whenever (24/7), and across multiple channels
- Minimizing wait or downtimes
- Eliminating anxiety by eliminating unnecessary steps and actions; minimizing decision-making
- Being proactive; not relying on the customer to take the first action
- Deeply understanding your customers’ usage of your product and website
Why is customer experience so important?
Loyalty is harder to earn than ever before: 54% of people said they’d switched providers in the past year, and 78% say they retract loyalty faster today than they did three years ago3.
In this environment, brands have to prioritize the customer experience. CX is now just as important in consumers’ eyes as price and quality. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience4. Companies that earn $1 billion annually can earn an additional $700 million within three years of investing in CX. On the flip side, customers switching companies due to poor CX costs U.S. companies a total of $1.6 trillion5.
Good CX is not just good for customers. It also makes for happier employees. Studies have revealed that companies with a great customer experience have employees who are 1.5X more engaged than less customer-centric companies. When employees are engaged, they work better and are less likely to turnover (resulting in even more cost-savings).
How do I improve customer experience?
Improving your customer experience comes down to removing friction (i.e., reducing effort), anticipating issues and making things as quick as possible. Here are a five strategies for improving your customer experience today:
Removing friction from every touchpoint: In the customer experience, friction refers to “anything that gets in the way of a customer completing a task6.” Essentially, anything overly complicated or something that takes a lot of time. Always choose the path of least resistance. This is critical because 81% of customers who report high effort during an experience will talk negatively about a company.
According to Kintan Brahmbhatt, who helped create the Amazon Music subscription services and music on Alexa: “The goal here is really about anticipating friction points in the customer’s mind — and if you can’t, then finding and alleviating them quickly. This isn’t easy.” Reducing friction requires a cross-functional effort from sales and website to support and product design.
Amazon, of course, is the poster child for removing friction from the customer journey. Free and fast shipping, one-click buying, saved payment methods, and access to reviews and comparisons in the same window. An article in Fortune talks about Amazon’s “War on Friction: “‘Amazon maintains an obsessive focus on removing every pain point from the buying process.’ To put it another way, Amazon is the world champion at taking out friction.7’”
Providing proactive and proactive experiences: Companies are also starting to anticipate issues before they exist and preemptively intervene before an issue becomes a bigger deal. By acting on behavioral, lifecycle or sensors from the physical world, companies can now anticipate the next contact and preemptively intervene with the right information or solution at the moment of relevance. HP, for instance, sends customers a message before they run out of printer ink and provides a seamless reorder experience.
Find ways to surprise and delight: One of my favorite customer experience stories is from Zappos. A support agent was on the phone with a customer and heard a crying baby in the background. The agent sent the customer a nice note and a baby blanket in the mail. It was a completely unexpected gesture that would make a significant impact on a customer’s perception. Empower your customer-facing team to be human and go above and beyond to delight your customers.
Track and act on reviews: Don’t ignore what your customers are saying about your company in reviews, social media and NPS surveys. You can identify friction points in the customer journey and be able to address any issues. According to Shan-Lyn Ma, Zola’s CEO and founder: “It’s tempting to listen to all the good stuff you get in your NPS surveys. But we know we’ve learned a lot more by being very focused on the not-so-good comments. We want to really understand the reasons certain couples aren’t promoters.”
The importance of CX is only growing
The implications of CX are not just with increasing brand loyalty and making customers happy. It’s not tied to the bottom line: brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience. Customer experience needs to be the top priority for every rough brand to thrive in increasingly competitive markets.
References
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/09/24/50-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-customer-experience/?sh=3f3deee34ef2
- https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/key-findings-from-the-gartner-customer-experience-survey
- https://capitolcommunicator.com/consumers-less-loyal-today-than-in-the-past/
- https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/
- https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/strategy-index
- https://review.firstround.com/amazons-friction-killing-tactics-to-make-products-more-seamless
- https://fortune.com/2017/02/02/jeff-bezoss-war-with-friction/
It is estimated that 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its existing customer base.
(1)Read on for reasons and methods that customer communication management strategies can improve consistency and reliability in your business.Upward CommunicationWhether your business is digging, lawn moving, or catering, customers will inevitably have ideas and opinions to share with you.
(2)Innovative above-mentioned communication initiatives can be woven into the business process in the form of feedback forms, surveys, and reports.
This prevents them, sometimes obscure, from spreading the diagnosis online or by word of mouth, areas over which we have little control.Downward communicationOf course, there is no good without evil, light without darkness, and so on.
These are largely professional qualities that distinguish between senior and subordinate employees in a company.This means that senior executives are more likely to see things in business that guarantee action.
It is unfair to keep subordinates in mind and expect improvement without communication.Setting up this formal chain of communication will ultimately lead to improvements and improvements in some areas: One is that, through more communication, the staff will learn how to adapt to change.
The changing trends create a dynamic platform where a business cannot properly track the behavior online aptly.Even if a business cannot clearly understand what the customers are thinking, developing a customer retention strategy by understanding their pulses can add an extra edge.
Another report tells us 68% of the customers will remain loyal to a business if the brand responses to their pain points, resolve issues, and provide an ideal user interface to find relevant products/services.
To develop such strategy, one has to feel the pulse of a target audience or an existing customer pool.
Here is what the top brands do and survive amidst all these diversities.Customer experience is the prime element to focusThe first and most important element that a company has to focus on is customer experience.
This perception leads to personification of a brand.
Leads converted to loyal customersNew leads will land on the online portals following the promotional content and referrals.
The customer’s feedback, opinion, and expectations for your products or services are described in the Voice of the Customer.
It helps you understand the feeling, connectivity, and perception your customers feel.
businesses use VoC to increase customer retention and build a legion of loyal customers.It is required for functions such as customer service, operations, and product analysis.
Organizations use this solution to identify and improve all stages of the customer journey by collaborating to improve their products and services.A positive customer experience can help you increase a customer’s lifetime value and retention rate by nearly 55 percent.Companies that implement a Voice of the Customer solution not only strengthen their relationships with their customers but also improve internal relations between departments.Positive customer sentiment can boost revenue by 4–8 percent and a customer’s lifetime value by 6–14 times.
The Benefit of Employing the Voice of Customer solution for your brandImprove retention of customersAssess new product ideas, concepts, and solutionsChange your products, services, add-ons, and features to satisfy your customers’ needs and requirementsFind potential brand crisis at the earliestBetter service to your clients Methods for Gathering Data for the Voice of the Customer ProgramOnline Customer SurveysConducting online customer surveys is also an excellent way to collect data.
These surveys assist you in better understanding your customers and addressing their concerns.You should ask the right questions using the right platform, you may never receive reliable answers.
Scaling customer support means making things better for your customer support team.
Scale Customer Support is the process of making your support team more efficient by refining existing practices, fixing customer support scaling issues, and empowering them!Scaling your customer support is a must!
And that’s exactly what this read is all about!
Automation is the great opportunity for the future of customer service businesses, so Let's have a quick overview of how automation is changing the face of customer service.
Tredence helps brands become truly customer-centric with AI-powered Customer Experience management and CX platforms.
