Customer experience (CX) is the customer’s perception of their interactions with your business, including all the actions, messages, and engagement you perform across all customer touchpoints. This includes visiting your website, buying and using your product, receiving marketing ads and emails, sales calls, dealing with customer support, and more.
“80% of brands think they deliver a superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree.” – Adweek and Accenture Interactive research
According to Forrester, a positive customer experience must be useful, usable, and enjoyable. It is believed that a positive customer experience is more important than your product, increasing retention and sales and building brand loyalty.
Who is Responsible for Customer Experience?
Many believe that marketing is responsible for customer experience. Some companies also adopted CX roles such as the Customer Experience Officer, Chief Experience Officer, or Chief Customer Officer. But the reality is that every person and department in the company has a role in customer experience, it is the foundation of customer centric business strategies. Being customer centric means every department and employee in the company must work with the customer’s needs top of mind.
Every action a person in your company takes that affects a customer influences the customer experience. Even one bad interaction can lead to the customer having a bad experience overall. According to a Zendesk survey, 50% of customers will switch to a competitor after one bad experience.
What Makes a Great Customer Experience?
A lot of things go into creating a great customer experience, including everything from the quality of the product to communications from marketing and sales to interactions with customer support.
Some examples of how to create a great customer experience include:
- Truthful marketing and communications related to the product.
- Creating a product that is intuitive and easy to use.
- Transparent pricing with no hidden costs to surprise customers.
- Access to self-help resources so customers can find answers to their questions quickly and easily.
- Consistent messaging and information across all touchpoints.
- Proactive communications to help customers use the product or make them aware of issues.
What Makes a Bad Customer Experience?
What makes a bad customer experience is subjective to each customer, but some common challenges include:
- A lack of personalization in marketing communications, such as sending generic emails and messages or messages that don’t align with the customer’s needs.
- Long wait times to speak with customer support, either on the phone or through chatbots. Also, making a customer repeat basic information as they get transferred to other departments or support staff.
- A lack of human interaction. While many customers want self-service, the need for personal, human interaction is still critical to a good experience.
- Forcing support through a single channel instead of offering customers multiple ways to get help, including phone, chat, and self-service.
How Can You Measure Customer Experience?
Delivering a great customer experience takes time and effort, and it’s an ongoing process. There are a few things you can do to know how well you are delivering on customer experience. These include:
- Conduct customer satisfaction surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).
- Analyze customer churn rates and why they churn.
- Analyze customer support tickets, as well as self-service usage to see where customers are facing problems.
- Directly interview customers, including those that churned to understand what is working and what isn’t.
- Review marketing communications and the impact of those communications.
