A great customer experience takes a great deal of thought and care.
This guide will introduce you to the fundamentals of customer experience. We’ll look at why it’s so important to focus on the customer experience, and how you can improve it using feedback and surveys.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is how your customers perceive their experience when they interact with your business or brand.
Customer experience is the feeling and the outcome of every interaction a customer has with your business – from navigating your website to speaking with customer service and receiving the product or service they purchased. Every interaction, good or bad, influences whether the customer decides to come back. That’s why a great customer experience is the key to success.
Why Does Customer Experience Matter for Every Business?
Delivering a good customer experience is the key to any business’s success. The better your customers’ experience, the more positive reviews you’ll get – and the fewer complaints.
The main benefits of focusing on customer experience are:
- Stronger customer loyalty to the brand.
- Higher customer satisfaction.
- Better word-of-mouth marketing, with more positive reviews and recommendations.
Every business, whatever its field, can benefit from improving its customer experience.
Subscription-based businesses can focus on growing their customer base rather than just retaining existing customers; e-commerce stores can increase repeat customers and actually cut marketing costs; and industrial and service businesses can earn warm recommendations from satisfied customers.
What’s the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?
How does customer experience differ from customer service? Broadly speaking, customer service is just one part of the overall customer experience – one cog in a complete, complex system meant to give the customer a good experience.
In general, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the customer experience where the customer asks for and receives help or information – for example, requesting a refund or changing a shipping address.
In other words, customer experience is the parent category, and customer service is just one of its operational arms. Customer experience reflects the bigger picture of the customer-business relationship – from reading an article on your website all the way to payment at the end of the process.
What Makes a Good Customer Experience Strategy?
Unfortunately, there’s no magic checklist – every business is unique, and so are its customers.
That said, there are several guiding principles that can improve the experience:
- Make listening to customers and gathering their feedback a top priority.
- Use feedback to develop a deeper understanding of how customers perceive your business.
- Implement a system for collecting experience feedback, and analyze it regularly.
- Reduce friction and solve people’s specific problems.
What Can Harm the Customer Experience
A poor customer experience comes in all shapes and sizes. But there are several common problems you can address early on.
A poor customer experience is most often caused by:
- Excessively long wait times.
- Employees who don’t understand the customer’s needs.
- Unresolved issues or questions.
- Too much automation and not enough human touch.
- Service that isn’t personalized to the customer.
- Rude or unpleasant staff, or staff who don’t know the material well enough.
If you need more ideas, think about yourself. When was the last time you walked away from a business with a bad feeling, and why?
At the end of the day, improving the customer experience is a unique process for every business. The only way to find out what isn’t working – and to improve – is to open the door to customer feedback. That way, we can analyze our customers’ insights in depth and act on them.
Why It’s Important to Use Feedback
We may be familiar with the theories behind customer experience. But to develop those theories and put them into practice, we need a reliable method for gathering customer insights.
Customer feedback is the information we collect from our customers about their experience with the product, the service, the website or the business as a whole. This feedback lets us improve by addressing pain points and highlighting what works well.
Chances are, we’re already collecting customer feedback without realizing it. When a customer sends an email, calls support or leaves a review, that’s feedback. The problem is that if this feedback isn’t measured and analyzed, we miss opportunities to improve the customer experience.
How Do You Measure and Analyze Customer Experience?
So far, customer experience may seem like a subjective concept that’s hard to measure. That’s why we need to rely on a number of customer experience metrics that give us a clear indication for any business.
By measuring the right data over time, you can track whether the experience is improving or declining. This data lets you assess the success or failure of changes you make that affect the customer. Here are four leading metrics professionals use to track customer experience over time:
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Time to Resolution (TTR)
Customer Effort Score CES
The Customer Effort Score measures the customer’s experience with a product or service in terms of how easy or difficult it is to complete an action.
CES surveys are usually sent to customers after an interaction with customer service. The questionnaire includes questions such as “How easy was it to resolve your issue today?” with a rating scale from 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy).
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty questionnaire built around a simple, closed question such as: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or colleague?”.
You can of course tailor the question to your business to gain deeper tracking and insights. But the goal of NPS is to produce a simple numerical score on a 0-100 scale that represents the customer experience.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT surveys measure how satisfied customers are with the service they receive. These surveys use a 7- or 5-point scale (where 1 = very dissatisfied and 7 = very satisfied), or a simple yes/no answer.
Unlike NPS, where the customer is asked for overall feedback about the brand, CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on a specific touchpoint and asks specifically about their experience at that point.
CI Meida Shivuki – Israel’s largest and leading research firm for customer experience research and consulting services
With over 30 years of experience in market research, customer experience and service experience, and using the world’s most innovative research methodologies, CI Meida Shivuki helps Israel’s largest companies leverage customer experience for growth, differentiation and innovation – offering a complete solution from data collection, through insight generation, to hands-on consulting.
