The goal: to make the customer experience as positive as possible.
Learn about the importance of customer experience, ways to measure it and how to optimize it in this article.
So how can you succeed in inspiring the customer at all possible points of contact with your brand? Quite simply, if your products or services exceed the customer’s expectations, this leads to customer enthusiasm. And that’s the key to creating the most positive customer experience possible.
To put it briefly: If you create great customer experiences, you contribute to customer enthusiasm. On the one hand, that increases customer loyalty, and on the other, it increases sales. And best of all, your customers become promoters of your brand. Learn more about customer satisfaction, customer enthusiasm and promoters in this article on Customer Engagement. A proven way to make your brand better known is word of mouth.
Word-of-mouth works for many businesses. We keep mentioning companies like Uber or Airbnb and their success and growth due to word-of-mouth popularity. At the same time, a negative customer experience can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation – even when it may only come from a single customer.
Customers who have had one or more negative touchpoints with your brand will have little good to say. It’s not just the customer’s personal experience that can damage your company’s image. A bad review on the Internet describing the customer’s experience can reach a lot of people through publication. This can have a knock-on effect.
It is therefore all the more important to make the customer experience as positive as possible. This is not only a declared goal in the management of large corporations, but can also be taken into account in start-ups. Customer experience management (CEM) does not have to be carried out on a grand scale. It is often enough to take individual optimizations and measures.
In order to achieve sustainable and long-term growth, every business needs to focus on a customer experience strategy so that customers feel affinity and loyalty to their brand. Satisfied customers will leave positive reviews – and that will increase trust in your brand and thus your brand reputation.
Impressed customers will not only leave a positive review, they will also recommend your brand to others and actively talk about their positive experience. This is extremely important, especially in a world where customers feel like they have every option open to them.
After all, customers can easily switch from one brand to another. They have many options and will not hesitate to report a negative customer experience on social media or on Google. So what does this mean for you and many other companies?
The importance of customer satisfaction and customer excitement is greater today than ever before.
As shown in the infographic below, there are 4 areas you can build a successful modern customer experience on. These are: People, Operations, Technology and Strategy.
Networking between different business areas is elementary. Only when this is in place does internal company communication work. And no matter at which touchpoint your customer meets your business – they will receive competent advice or an expert response to their request.
Check regularly whether you are getting closer to the goal of the best possible customer experience with individual optimizations. But can you make customer experience measurable?
Businesses can take many measures and steps to record and analyze customer journeys and experiences through the sales funnel and after a sale.
Many companies use the NPS, Net Promoter Score, to analyze the customer journey and touchpoints with their brand. This Net Promoter Score can be done using tools & software solutions (examples of tools are SurveyMonkey, Hotjar for website or whole CX management solutions like Wootric or qualtrics).
It measures how likely it is that your customers would recommend your brand to their family and friends. There are other numerous tool providers that help with the grunt work of optimizing your customer experience. However, please remember: no tool & software in CX replaces people and their application & penetration skills in the enterprise.
An NPS score above 50 is excellent. Interestingly, consumers in the USA are more likely to give a company a higher rating than consumers in Europe. A poor NPS score, however, is not a catastrophe, but rather a setback. It is a reason to rethink one’s own strategy: There are numerous opportunities to improve the Net Promoter Score with targeted measures.
The fundamental rule is that even successful companies can have a poor NPS. Although success and NPS are related, they are not directly equivalent. Nevertheless, the measurement instrument shows that there is potential for optimization in order to increase the customer experience with your brand.
It all starts with the customers, their lives and their needs. Next, there need to be employees whose values and personalities match the company. And then technology needs to be used to help employees create memories so precious that customers want to repeat them. This is how companies become successful and irreplaceable.
So how do you act when the NPS score could be better? The declared goal is to analyze what makes your customer experience poor or below average. Usually, leverage can be found in customer communication by improving the accessibility of customer support or scheduling more time for a customer phone call.
It is important to find out, for example, whether there are any technical problems or performance weaknesses in your product, whether your product does not meet users’ requirements, or whether users would like to see improvements. Users may have ideas that could help improve your product – just ask them!
NPS surveys can show you what your customers need and want from your brand. The Net Promoter Score should therefore not be taken lightly, as it is an indicator of customer satisfaction, customer enthusiasm, and the success and reputation of your brand. In addition, the score also determines the future viability of your business based on your customer experience. If you improve the NPS, you improve the customer relationship and customer retention.
Customer experience managers can also take into account the churn rate, which indicates how likely it is that your customers will stop doing business with you. If the churn rate is increasing, you should find out why it is increasing and what you can do to prevent it
Ask your customers on social media, in feedback forums, in Facebook groups and surveys what kind of improvement they want to see in your products and services. Customer suggestions give you insight into what your customers want, what their ideas are, and what the evolving trends are.
Asking for customer feedback throughout the customer journey is important, but it doesn’t mean you should bombard your customers with excessive surveys. Get customer feedback at every touchpoint, if possible. You don’t always need a standardized survey to do this.
A service provider with a focus on customer experience management (CEM) can be deployed as part of comprehensive optimization measures. But it is also possible to entrust certain employees with improving the customer experience within a company. Being a customer experience consultant requires analytical and communication skills.
A consultant analyzes Customer Support / Customer Success, the support tickets sent, and how often and how quickly the issues were resolved. Digging into the Customer Support team’s ticket system can give you insight into what problem customers are experiencing and what has been done about it or will be done about it in the future. This is especially true if the problem is occurring more often and on a regular basis.
This ensures not only reactive, but proactive customer experience design. Because when the process is successively optimized and aligned with the customer experience, you can already take preventive action – and set all the course for great customer experiences in the future
Customer experience in the course of the customer experience journey expresses the perception people have with your brand. A company could be strong in product management, for example, but perform horribly and underperform in customer service. As a result, bad customer experiences with support staff will ruin a great product.
This is why it’s very important to invest in your Customer Success area and upskill your team here as well. For companies today, the customer journey and experience is a very important indicator of success. For companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, excellent customer experience marketing is a stable pillar of their success. In the field of digital marketing, companies also consider UX (user experience) as a perfect opportunity to learn more about users and their interactions in order to ideally optimize the website and channels according to the users’ requirements and needs.
No matter what size, every company needs a customer experience strategy (sometimes referred to as customer user experience strategy), as customer expectations and sensitivity are massively increasing in times of digitalization and will continue to do so.
And by the way: Around 70% of customers are willing to pay more for a unique and customer-centric customer experience.
Customer Experience im Zeitalter des Kunden; Andreas Rusnjak, Daniel Daniel ; Springer Gabler Verlag; 2018
As a growth marketing expert and customer developer, I experience the importance of a customer-centric corporate culture on a daily basis.
In combination with agile testing and optimization processes, you will bring your growth fully on track.
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