Nowadays, only a few products are absolutely unique. Most can be offered by multiple companies at almost the same price. When choices are so many, customer experience matters the most.
A great customer experience builds loyalty. Happy customers will talk about your business, and 92% of people claim they trust word of mouth more than ads. So, what makes a great customer experience? Keep reading to discover what you need to know and some tips you can use today.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is usually defined as the perception of customers about experiences with your brand or business. It’s the result of every touch point that a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to speaking to customer service and receiving the product/service bought from you.
Every customer-facing thing you do influences the perception of your customers and their decision to either keep coming back or not. Whether it is providing responsive real-time support, or maintaining seamless omnichannel experiences with messaging, a great customer experience is the key to success.
Why is Customer Experience Important?
The benefits of a great customer experience (CX) include:
- Increased customer loyalty
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Better customer engagement
- More positive word-of-mouth marketing, reviews, and recommendations
A good customer experience is crucial for any business and the route to loyal customers and positive reviews with minimum complaints and returns. Also, good CX provides you with the competitive advantage against those who do not perform well in this aspect.
- Every type of business can be improved with the development of customer experience:
- Subscription businesses retain customers longer and reduce churn
- E-commerce marketplaces help customers make decisions, trigger repeat purchases, and avoid returns
- Service industries enhance interactions, gain recommendations, and cut complaints
How to Measure Customer Experience
There isn’t one magic metric that can help you measure customer experience as it comes on a wide spectrum. The more data you get, the clearer your picture of the ideal CX is going to be. Here are a few methods to gather that data so you can hone in on your ideal CX.
Send Surveys
Surveys allow you to gather insights on specific touchpoints, satisfaction levels, and customer expectations, or to identify areas for improvement. Many surveys use numerical ratings and popular metrics, such as:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Other important customer experience key performance indicators (KPIs)
These types of tools help to uncover where your customers are satisfied and where your business needs to improve.
Analyze Quantitative Information
Measurable data will make it possible to see helpful and harmful patterns, customer pain points, and customer behavior and interaction with your business.
Measurable data includes churn rates, customer lifetime value, ticket reopen rates, and time-to-resolution metrics. With this approach, you’ll understand exactly where the pain points are and how your customers are interacting with your business. You’ll then have actionable insights that you can use to make useful changes to improve customer experience.
Run A/B Tests
Although A/B testing is often applied to sales and marketing, it also works great for improving customer experience. You can test variations of web pages, emails, and any other form of customer-facing assets to figure out which helps gain better engagement and satisfaction.
A great starting point can be to send target A/B test emails, targeting CX, to small segments of your customer base. This could be highly informative on their performance for new CX assets and be predictive as to whether any adjustments would be required prior to the general release of such a piece.
Use Community Forums
Forums are a great way to gain insight into customer experiences. Customers usually post feedback on pain points, feature requests, and which tool they find most useful. In the business world, forums are important in enhancing the understanding of customers and the improvement of CX.
Engage Staff that Faces Customers
No one knows customers better than the employees who interact with them daily. Customer-facing staff usually know firsthand the results of customer feedback. Collecting information from people who come into daily contact with your customers will provide you with more insight into customer experience and areas needing attention. Collect their observations and use them to improve the overall experience.
How to Improve Customer Experience
You can enhance your customer experience (CX) by focusing on the customer in your business decisions. Here are simple tips to improve your CX strategy.
Gather Feedback
Use customer feedback to improve your products and services. This helps you see what works and what doesn’t. Asking for feedback shows customers you care about their opinions.
Build an Omnichannel Experience
Customers don’t want to repeat their issues to different support agents. Create a seamless experience across all channels. Keep track of customer history and preferences to provide consistent support. Use customer service software to route inquiries to the right team members based on their availability and the urgency of the issue.
Provide Personalization
Personalization is key to a good CX. Offer tailored product recommendations, send personalized emails, and engage with customers in their preferred way. Understand your customers’ preferences and habits to help your team provide customized support. Conduct user experience research to find ways to improve personalization.
Deliver Proactive Experiences
A great CX anticipates customer needs and addresses issues before they arise. For example, a chatbot on a checkout page can answer last-minute questions, or an internet provider may send a text to notify customers of an upcoming outage. Being proactive builds trust and loyalty.
Use Data and Analytics
Data and analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior and satisfaction. Analyze this data to understand customer pain points and needs. Use these insights to refine your products and processes, ultimately improving the CX.
Customer Experience KPIs
There isn’t a simple list of the best key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring customer experience success. The KPIs you choose depend on your business, customers, and industry.
For example, if you don’t have a field service team, you don’t need to track on-site service calls. However, since customer experience aims to boost satisfaction, there are some general KPIs worth mentioning. These include:
- Revenue growth
- Customer retention
- Customer churn
- Cross-sell and upsell amounts
- Customer service costs
- Changes in net promoter score (NPS)
- Various digital metrics, such as pages visited, time spent on-site, and conversion rates, which indicate visitor satisfaction on your online platforms.
Use Supportbench to Enhance Your Customer Experience
Supportbench helps you manage your customer support effort more easily and at a higher level. That means an all-in-one customer support platform including ticket management, workflow automation, SLA management, and many other features that enhance your support teams’ productivity.
Supportbench also comes with extended capabilities around in-depth analytics, escalation handling, and multi-channel communication to perform seamlessly for the customers.
Whether it’s a large scale or small business enterprise, Supportbench software is the best to simplify customer service and improve their satisfaction due to its highly customizable portals with integrations to other business tools.
Get started with Supportbench to learn more and take the first step toward transforming your customer experience!
Conclusion
Improving the customer experience isn’t just about collecting feedback; it’s about understanding what drives customer satisfaction and using that knowledge to create a seamless, tailor-made experience.
By using methods like surveys, quantifiable data analytics, A/B testing, and even customer-facing employee insights, businesses will be able to grasp exactly what the customers need.
As you continue to refine your approach to creating a better customer experience, keep in mind that the right tool or platform can make quite a difference. That is what Supportbench does for you: helping your company, regardless of size, to easily manage customer interactions, enhance process smoothing, and working on improving customer satisfaction.
FAQs
1- What are the components of customer service?
A good CX is composed of many different components, including ease of use, speed of delivery, quality of customer support, and personalization along with consistency at all touchpoints.
2- What makes a good customer experience?
Customers love CX which resonates with them on an emotional level, which means being proactive, empathetic, going that extra mile, and making CX personal and easy.
3- How to boost customer experience?
- Identify what problems customers face.
- Tailor experiences to meet individual needs.
- Review and assess how customers interact with your business.
- Create a visual map of the customer’s experience.
- Enhance the support you provide to customers.
- Use technology to make experiences better.
- Create new ideas to exceed what customers expect.
- Develop a plan that connects all customer communication channels.
