Customer experience is an essential metric for any business, whether you’re seeking to grow your company or update your brand. If your customers aren’t happy with their experiences, they’re unlikely to make repeat purchases or recommend your brand to others, which can cause growth to stagnate or reverse. Here are six important things to know about customer experience.
1. You Can Track And Measure It
Customer experience (CX) needs to be tracked so you can appropriately analyze and incorporate your customers’ feedback into your strategy. There are several metrics you should track and many ways you can do so. Important metrics include recent individual experiences, patterns over time, market segmentation and issues or questions brought to customer support and service teams. You can collect this data by requesting feedback directly from customers in the form of sending them surveys, requesting reviews and inviting them to participate in user experience testing. You can also check social media and forums for customer opinions and discussion.
2. It Should Be One of Your Business’s Top Priorities
Because of how essential customer experience data is to the health of your business, you should make it one of your top priorities. Customer experience is unlikely to improve unless you put it on your employees’ and managers’ radars. Incorporate customer experience metrics into the workflows of each department, including IT, product development, marketing and service operations. Each employee in each department should be aware of how customer experience affects his or her work and his or her role in maintaining or improving customer experience.
3. There Is a Wide Array of Customer Experience Tools
You need different tools to measure, maintain and test customer experience, and there are many tools available to support your needs. Use the customer churn rate, customer satisfaction score and net promoter score as metrics of how often customers return and how satisfied they are with your brand or service. To develop insights, analyze the data you collect and develop your customer experience strategy, utilize Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs, develop a customer journey map and create customer or user personas.
4. Customer Experience Contains Four Key Concepts
While customer experience strategies vary between companies, there are some basic concepts that all strategies share. These four concepts relate to customer responses, including behavioral, cognitive, sensory and affective. Behavioral responses encompass how customers behave individually or in groups and how much of their behavior is planned. Cognitive responses include a customer’s intellectual understanding, such as attention and perception. A sensory response refers to the way a customer processes sensory input, such as the aesthetics of your brand or product. Affective responses are emotional responses and relate to how your brand or product makes your customers feel.
5. It’s Intrinsically Tied To User Experience And Customer Relationship Management
Customer experience does not exist in a vacuum. It can affect and be affected by many other aspects of running a business, but it’s most closely related to user experience (UX) and customer relationship management (CRM). You can use the customer experience data you collect to maintain, develop and optimize your customer relationships. UX is based on customer personas and journey maps in the same way customer experience is.
6. Improving Your Customer Experience Strategy Is Essential to Company Growth
If your customers don’t have good experiences with your company, then they are unlikely to develop loyalty to your brand. This can have a negative effect on your company’s growth and profits. You need to maintain a strong customer experience strategy to ensure the customer experience is positive and contributes to company growth and customer retention. Improving customer experience can also improve your company’s reputation and culture.
Your strategy for maintaining or improving your customer service will depend on several factors, including the industry your business is part of and its size. Whatever strategies and tools you use, make sure you incorporate your customers’ feedback, measure appropriate data and include concepts such as empathy and integrity.