Lately, you must have probably heard people talking about the concept of Customer Experience (CX). Even though the idea has recently become more popular in the daily lexicon among companies, the truth is that Customer Experience is not that new in the corporate world.
In fact, even in smaller companies, it’s been a while since the focus is put on the need for the consumers to get good service as it has always been said that “happy clients will tell their good purchasing experience to one person, but unhappy ones will retell their bad experience to ten people”. What is known as bad press.
Unhappy clients
By the way, the ratio of 1:10 is partly true. In 1981, one of the main market research firms in the United States, TARP, performed a study with Coca-Cola and discovered that an average of 10 people first learned about a bad experience by the person who underwent it.
However, later studies showed that the magnitude of the word of mouth varies depending on the product, the price, and the industry (people would tell 16 other people about a negative experience in car repair). The truth is that, in the end, a general rule has been developed in the market circles which indicates that an unhappy client will tell 10 people about the bad service received.
Defining CX
Even though there are different definitions and approaches to what the CX is, we could summarize it as the total sum of the customer’s perceptions and feelings that come from the interactions with products and services from a certain brand.
Therefore, customers’ experience entails the lifetime of their relations with your brand. It begins before the purchase; it continues with active use until the purchase is renewed or repeated.
It is essential to understand that the CX is not an option but a condition. Any company with clients will have its consequent customer experience, whether the brand is aware of it or not. The experience is based on the customer’s perceptions and opinions. You can say that your company sells a top-notch product or that it provides an excellent service, but the clients will have the final word.
In the last couple of years, with the fast development of a digital ecosystem in which users coexist together with the brands on equal terms, customers’ experience might be hard to control as clients can act, answer, and react in unpredictable ways.
Identifying the touchpoints
The best way to improve your CX is to evaluate and optimize each touchpoint in order to maximize the chances of having satisfied clients.
Customer experience covers all the touchpoints your consumers have with the brand. Some examples of touchpoints include opening the product, reading the manual, talking to the Customer Service team, fixing the product, or exchanging it for a different one.
Consumers experience different feelings and emotions at every touchpoint on which they base their thoughts and statements. Feelings may vary from joy to apathy and deception.
Statements are positive if your clients understand that your company is useful and it provides them with efficient attention. They are negative when clients regard it as inefficient because the service is slow and frustrating. Emotions and judgments may vary from one touchpoint to another one.
Managing your client's expectations
In this way, your brand must provide an experience that lives up to or exceeds the client's expectations. Brands that provide a bad experience do not make it. If you provide an excellent CX, you will have more satisfied and loyal clients who will choose you again. Plus, they can turn into advocates who recommend your products and services to friends and colleagues.
Several brands use customer experience as a competitive perk and manage to earn market share by providing a better customer experience than the competition.
In this context, as we have already mentioned, the CX’s role is gaining more importance, especially in digital companies.
In the e-commerce and software industries, for instance, the competition is only a few clicks away from the computer mouse. Digital companies must work to generate loyalty and trust even before the prospects become clients. Otherwise, they run the risk of the clients looking for something “easier”.
Customer Experience Manager
Achieving this requires special attention from the very first impression of the brand to the purchase and use. Therefore, lately, companies have started to empower the role of the CX Manager. It is a key role for the companies that assume the responsibility of reading the market and connecting with the clients through a positive experience with their brand online, from the first touchpoint to the last one.
Paradoxically, the role of the CX Manager becomes successful when its job stops being required. If the company counts with 100% of satisfied customers in all touchpoints, then it does not need the position of a Customer Experience Manager.
How to improve Customer Experience
So, what can you do to improve the Customer’s Experience? HubSpot, the software developer, has recently published in its blog an article in which it deals with some of the foundations on which it is essential to hold the CX. The following are some of the most relevant ones.
1. Visually map your client’s journey
The first thing you need to do to improve your customer’s experience is to develop a plan or a customer journey, a diagram with each touchpoint and a register of the client’s interactions with the company. This resource goes beyond the evaluation and purchase of the product, and it includes touchpoints such as contacts with the company’s posts on social media, online advertisement, and customer service experiences.
Relying on a customer will allow your employees to visualize the general experience of your clients and improve the understanding of their needs and expectations.
Your employees identify exactly where their work will influence the customer’s journey. You can choose from various ways of doing the customer journey. We highly recommend using online surveys. For example, once you identify all the touchpoints, you can take a sample group of clients and ask them to complete an online questionnaire on their experience at that particular moment.
Then, with another group, you can include an online survey on another touchpoint to take a record of the feeling at that particular moment and so on. The sum of the surveys will show whether your clients are happy, unhappy, or apathetic.
2. Audit customer’s experience from multiple internal perspectives
According to HubSpot, as the Customer Journey is affected by all the aspects of the business, it is important for the CX’s audit not to be focused on one single area. The clients interact in some way with each part of the company, so in order to get a full image of the CX you should make sure to include all of them in a unique perspective. You could begin by working with the teams on the following areas:
- Marketing: as the focus is put on getting clients, they have the best perspective on the knowledge of the brand and the user’s expectations.
- Sales: it contains the information on the first stages of the relationship with the client, it knows the challenges they cope with on a daily basis and on how they expect your product or service to tackle these obstacles.
- Customer service: it receives comments made constantly by the consumers, so it manages the valuable data on what is generating problems with the clients.
The audit might include online questionnaires for the different members of each key area of the company to fill in. By processing the collected information through internal online surveys, you can provide valuable data for a CX Manager to make decisions on the company’s client’s experience.
3. Be “honest” to manage expectations
In this third point, the article owns up to the fact that you will not be able to change customers’ experience overnight, but it’s important that you show what you have achieved and you indicate the path to follow.
How do you achieve this? For instance, by involving another person, preferably one from the customer service area, in the execution plans of the customer’s experience supervised by the CX Manager. The job will be to communicate the changes, facilitate the operations, organize the analysis of the investigation, and carry out necessary actions to guarantee the new CX approach is coherent in all the departments of the company.
In this stage, the CX Manager is held responsible for encouraging not just the executives but all the members of the company to keep on working to improve customer experience.
4. Show the CX data to the entire team
If you wish your whole company to be involved in the customer’s experience plan, you should make sure everyone has access to the insights.
Thus, we recommend keeping your employees updated on the conclusions found during the investigation. For example, as regards meeting the client's needs faster, knowing where it’s likely the consumers face obstacles will help the team avoid the user’s frustration and improve the weak or confusing points in the Customer Journey.
Another perk of sharing results has to do with the opportunities to generate additional upselling. In this way, the sales team will find it easier to identify opportunities for upselling as they will better understand the best method to reach clients.
5. Learn the churn or clients’ desertion
An excellent way of improving sales is to analyze the areas of customer experience where there is little engagement, and the client is reluctant to interact.
If your level of engagement is low in certain touchpoints, we suggest being especially on the alert as it is a sign of churn. Creating a participation correlation might help you identify which clients have the highest risk of desertion.
Use the CX analysis to determine what percentage of participation will lead to the highest chance of abandonment and then draft a monitoring system to establish alerts if a client gets close to the number. This will give you the chance of communicating in a proactive way to solve a problem before it’s too late.
We also recommend finding out what happened to the clients that stopped purchasing your product or using your service. If your company is really interested in creating a better experience for the client, then you should aim at knowing the cases in which the consumers decided to desert.
That’s why you should establish channels where they can post comments that are then used to improve the CX. When somebody unsubscribes, make the most of it by asking the Customer Service team to find out the reason or reasons for their decision.
As it has been previously mentioned, if you’ve ever experienced an increase in your churn rate, we suggest you send the clients a survey with a series of questions that will help you find out the reasons for their decision.
You can even include other functions such as the Logic Jump that will allow you to design customized paths to be able to act in consequence and include on the end page of the survey a discount to retain the client.
To sum up, customer’s experience is a key matter to any organization nowadays. Remember: the CX is not an option but a condition. That’s why, never stop working to provide a consistent experience that increases satisfaction and loyalty. We hope this article helps you accomplish your company’s goals!