What Is Customer Experience (CX) and How Can You Reimagine It?
Have you ever wondered what CX is? The term used a lot in the customer service industry stands for “customer experience.” And in this blog, you will learn why creating an exceptional customer experience is one of the most important things you can do for your business.
A bad experience can cause you to lose customers. According to Acquia, 76% of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one negative experience.
Read on to learn how you can reimagine your customer experience to exceed expectations and encourage customer loyalty.
Key Takeaways
- CX is the customer’s perception of a brand throughout the entire customer journey.
- Improving the customer experience is critical to earning loyal customers and creating good brand ambassadors.
- Businesses can use KPI metrics to gather data on customer experience and use that data to transform key processes.
What Is CX?
CX includes every interaction a customer has with a brand, its products, and its services. It focuses on the customers’ feelings and perceptions of the brand. The complete customer experience lifeline starts once a consumer becomes aware of a brand or product and spans through product use and possible repeat purchases.
The ideal customer experience will be enjoyable and valuable for every customer, on every platform, and through each touchpoint. While a brand may claim to offer superior products or excellent customer service, the customer is the final arbiter in judging their experience.
The customer experience can be difficult to control because you never know how individual consumers will act or perceive something your company does. The best thing your company can do is to evaluate every step along the customer journey and find ways to improve trouble spots.
Importance of Customer Experience
The goal of your company or brand should be to meet or exceed each customer’s expectations. When you fail to do that, your customers will not have a good experience and your business will suffer.
The State of the Connected Customer report from 2020 shows some important customer experience trends. One of those is that companies are falling short of meeting customer expectations.
As with many other things, 2020 brought to light the disparities between companies that have excellent CX and those that don’t. Adobe’s Digital Trends 2021 highlighted that discrepancy. The report showed that more than 70% of companies that made CX a priority “significantly outpaced” the competition that did not focus on CX.
If your customers have a positive experience with your brand, they are much more likely to come back and share their experiences with others.
Customer Experience vs. Customer Service
While customer experience and customer service are related, they are not interchangeable. Customer service is one part of the customer experience, while customer experience encompasses the entire customer journey.
Customer service is the interactions a customer has with your employees, typically before, during, and after buying your products. It may also include automated services like chatbots and email. Getting customer service right is an important part of improving the overall customer experience.
How to Manage and Improve the Customer Experience
To fully understand your customer experience, you need to measure, track, and manage it. This is called customer experience management (CEM).
The companies with the best CX have optimized their CEM and are consumer centric. This means that every decision they make is focused solely on the customer. Before making any decision, a customer-focused business will ask something like “Will this change improve the customer experience?” If the answer is no, then they will not make the change.
The way you use CEM will depend on your employees, products, and services. No matter the size of your company, you will have both direct and indirect customer interactions. Every department and every employee will have an impact on how customers perceive your business.
Common CX KPIs You Should Track
To manage and improve your customer experience, you will need to measure it. Here are some common KPIs that many businesses track:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): You can use the Net Promoter Score to track how likely a customer is to recommend a company or service to their friends and family.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): CES measures how difficult it was for a customer to reach their goal with your business. This could be making a purchase, returning a product, or resolving an issue.
- Cart abandonment rate: This calculates how many customers add items to their cart but do not complete their purchase.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This KPI uses a Likert scale to gauge how satisfied a customer was with a specific experience.
Ways to Reimagine CX
Once you measure the KPIs, you then must act on the data and start the process of reimagining your customer experience. The best way to do this is by going through each step of the customer journey.
To see your company from your customers’ perspectives, here are a few things to try:
- Meet your customers where they are: You need an omnichannel approach to reach your full customer base. While you can optimize your website for PC browsers, does it still operate smoothly on mobile devices? Do you have a well-managed presence on social media platforms?
- Pay attention to your employees: If you treat your employees well, they are more likely to treat your customers well. The employee experience (EX) plays a major role in CX. Ask your employees for feedback and keep them informed of any pertinent changes. Be willing to take their advice on needed changes.
- Use thoughtful automated processes to expand business access: Customers want to be able to get the help they need when they need it. Automated AI systems like chatbots can typically take care of high-volume, simple customer-related tasks, such as starting a return or resetting a password. When customers can get instant help, they will be much happier.
This video has even more steps you can take to improve your CEM.
Televerde Can Help You Improve Your CX
Now that you understand what CX is and how important it is to your business, it is time to put customers at the center of every decision. Televerde can help you get there.
We consider ourselves experts in revenue growth. We bring together sales, marketing, and the customer experience. Our goal is to help you grow happy, loyal customers.
Are you ready to reimagine the customer experience? Contact us today and learn how to transform your business.
