The best way to increase customer loyalty and retention rates is by providing an outstanding customer experience. You should collect and analyze customer data to find ways to enhance the customer journey. Here, in this blog, we will provide you with the definition of customer experience and why is it important.
Key points
- By focusing on customer experience, you can increase your customer loyalty and retention rates.
- The key elements of the customer experience are a customer-centric culture, well-defined touchpoints, quality, and customer satisfaction.
- To provide a good customer experience, you must listen to your customers. You should create a system to gather and analyze customer feedback. By taking customer feedback into consideration, you can make significant changes that boost your results.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is abbreviated as CX or UX to use in different business interactions. The experience that your customers have with your support representatives is part of CX but not the overall customer experience. It consists of even the slightest interaction of a customer navigating through your website or mobile app for a few seconds.
CX is about how the customer perceives their overall experiences with your brand and the brand image they have. Positive user experiences lead customers to choose you over other competitors again and again. It increases their affinity toward your brand and encourages them to refer it to their friends and family.
There are two types of customer experiences that we have explained below.
- Direct customer experience: This is the interaction initiated by the customer with the brand. It includes the experience of them using your product or service, the purchasing pattern, or any interaction they have with your customer support teams.
- Indirect customer experience: This includes the indirect interactions of customers with your brand. It can be through different marketing channels, external media, word of mouth, and reviews.
Customer experience vs customer Service
Many times people get confused between customer experience vs customer service. They use both these terms interchangeably. However, they are completely different and customer service is just a part of the customer experience.
Customer service refers to the interactions that happen between the customers and your support representatives. This happens when a customer requires help and assistance with your product. They contact you through the different communication channels from which you provide support such as on social media, email, chatbots, on-call, or website support pages.
To offer a good customer experience you should provide robust customer support. Nonetheless, it is not just limited to customer service, it inculcates every aspect of your business. It’s more than how your teams deal with the customer query and manage it successfully. It’s about how your customers see your product design, its utility, and the reviews they write about your brand.
Importance of customer experience
Nowadays, companies have started focusing on what they provide users and how users experience it. In this era where customers have got so many options to choose from, customer experience has become a competitive differentiator. According to a report by Dimension Data, businesses that offer great customer experiences report a 92% increase in loyal customers, an 84% increase in revenue, and 79% cost savings.
Enhancing customer experience has many benefits for a business that we have mentioned here:
- Helps you better understand your customers: For improving customer experience, you first need to understand your users’ needs, wants, and expectations. You need to see how they interact and engage with your product. Dig deeper into your customer’s behavioral patterns and trends to discover ways of improving their experience. Use this in-depth information to offer personalized experiences across multiple customer touchpoints.
- Increases customer loyalty and retention: An awesome user experience can make customers stick to your business for a long time. The higher the retention rate, the more there is room for your business to grow. According to a Zendesk report, 61% of customers end their engagement with a company after a bad customer experience.
- Increases your brand value: When people like their experience with your brand, they form a positive perception. This aids in increasing your brand value. The higher the reputation of your brand, the more will be it’s worth. By understanding how users think about your brand, you can make changes to improve their perceptions.
- Drives new customers: Customers often talk about their product experiences either in person or via different review platforms. When they have a good experience they act as your brand ambassador and promote your brand to others. This way you can drive many new customers to your business. A good net promoter score is an indicator that your users are likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family.
- Helps in making the right investments: By gaining insights into CX, you can know what’s working and what’s not working for your business. You can evaluate different marketing campaigns and find out where you don’t need to put investments. You can know what’s helping you to meet customers’ needs, pain points, and expectations. This way you can make the right investments that drive revenue to your business.
- Reduces customer complaints: When customers are happy and satisfied with your service, they are less likely to report or complaint. Lesser queries and complaints also mean reduced customer churn. Your customer support teams can then focus on nurturing quality customer relationships than putting efforts into resolving queries.
What are the components of customer experience?
In this section, we will tell you about the components of customer experience. These components can help you get a comprehensive view of your customer interactions. You can identify the loopholes in your strategy and make alterations to improve your customer experience.
- Customer-centric: Ensure that the focus of your business is customers. Not only your customer service center should prioritize customers but every team of your company. Create a sense of ownership and responsibility in your team members toward building positive customer experiences. Make your employees feel valued so they work together towards your organizational goals.
- Well-defined touchpoints: Understand and see how customers go through the different steps of the customer journey. Try to comprehend what customers think at distinct steps and what are the touchpoints. Optimize the different touchpoints to ensure that your customers’ needs are met. This comprises ensuring user-friendly web design and good customer service. Improving your customer journey is an ongoing process that can help you boost your customer retention rate.
- Quality: Delivering quality CX should be the priority of your company. A bad customer experience can lead you to lose your brand reputation and customers. You should consistently focus on providing quality CX to bring new customers and retain the existing ones.
- Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction can help you know how good is your customer experience. You can measure customer satisfaction at different touchpoints and after every interaction. This way you can know what type of experience your customer had in real-time. Make sure the method you use for customer satisfaction should provide accurate insights.
How you can offer a quality customer experience?
To provide an exceptional customer experience, you need to understand your users’ needs, pain points, and expectations.
Below we have given the best ways utilizing which you can offer a quality customer experience:
- Listen to your customers: To provide quality CX it’s important that you know what quality experience means to your customers. You must understand and learn what they expect from you at the different steps of the customer journey.
- Use customer feedback: Customer feedback can help you get a lot of information about your customers. You can know who they are, what they need, and how they see your brand. You can take customers’ suggestions and make significant changes.
- Establish systems to collect, analyze, and utilize customer feedback: You should make sure that you receive customer feedback on a regular basis. Implement a system that collects and reports customer feedback consistently and accurately.
- Find ways to reduce churn throughout the customer journey: By creating buyer personas and relating them with their experiences, you can know where they’re abandoning their journey. Then, you can take the right steps to eliminate the points of friction and provide a quality customer experience.
Factors that define a bad customer experience
A bad CX can affect your business in many different ways. You should try to find out what’s going wrong and improve it to avoid a bad customer experience. Here, we have mentioned some of the common reasons that make customers leave with frustration.
- Long waiting time for queries.
- Customer support representatives not understanding their problem.
- Excessive automation in the different processes.
- An impersonalized approach of customer service.
- Rude replies of employees.
It’s important that you are aware of customers’ problems because if they go ignored, you’re likely to continue providing bad CX. This you definitely don’t want as it might lead you to lose more customers.
Nowadays, most customers interact with brands on different digital touchpoints. Therefore, it is vital that you know the factors that might be affecting customer experience like:
- Slow loading times.
- Inconsistent messaging across different channels.
- Unresponsive and slow mobile app design.
- Email overloading.
- Irrelevant notifications.
- Too much automation.
Why companies aren’t able to tackle bad CX?
Sometimes, companies don’t want to do hard work to tackle bad CX. The problem is not with denial but the approach they take to solve. There are many reasons for companies not taking steps to solve the bad CX that we have explained here.
- Thinking CRM is enough. Many businesses invest a lot of money in a CRM thinking that it will solve all their CX issues. However, that is not the case as CRMs can provide you with information about your customers but not about their experience. Here, the customer experience management platform comes into play. A CEM is focused on providing information about the customer experience in real-time.
- Data collection process. Many businessmen think that collecting and analyzing data is a difficult task. Therefore, they avoid it altogether which leads to further consequences. Not gathering data on customer experience can make them avoid complex issues of which they’re unaware.
- Not using the right tools to gather CX data. When it comes to improving your customer experience, data is an important aspect. You should use the right data analysis tools that collect accurate customer data and insights.
The Bottom Line
In this blog, we have given a customer experience definition and different ways you can improve it. WebMaxy Analyzer is a user behavior analytics tool that can help you to understand your customer experience. You can see through your users’ perspectives and know where you’re lacking in terms of providing a better experience.
WebMaxy Analyzer comes with live session recordings, heatmaps, surveys & polls, funnel view, form analytics, feedback, user insights, push notifications, segmentation, block IP, and many advanced integrations. For more information and details, connect with our experts on call or email us at info@webmaxy.co.
Improving the Customer Experience: Strategies for Success
“Delivering an exceptional customer experience every time, one interaction at a time.”