CX, or customer experience, encompasses all of the actions taken by a company or organization to prioritize its clients’ needs and experiences.
You may have a natural ability to distinguish between positive and negative client experiences. For example, suppose you’d like a latte. Is the staff attentive when you visit the coffee shop? Do they use your name to greet you if you are a regular? Was the store’s layout intuitive? Do they grin when they take your order and give you your cup? Is your issue fixed quickly, or is someone sent to assist you? Do they make an effort to learn more about your experience in general?
Customer experience is touched upon in each of those inquiries. Price, service, product, and brand are the four elements that makeup CX.
This article offers a brief overview of customer experience-related topics and answers questions such as:
1. What are customer journeys?
2. How to measure customer experience?
3. How to improve customer experience?
What are customer journeys?
Instead of describing the client’s pleasure at several individual transactions or touchpoints, a customer journey describes the customer’s entire experience. These can comprise a variety of events that take place prior to, during, or following a customer’s use of a certain good or service. Getting a new customer, fixing a technical problem, or improving a product are a few examples of customer journeys. Think about integrating a new client.
This process, at one company, took almost three months and involved, on average, nine phone calls, a technician visit, and correspondence via mail and the Internet. Average customer satisfaction decreased by over 40% during the journey, even though there was a 90% likelihood that the encounter would go smoothly at any given touchpoint. Rethinking service operations around the most essential CX journeys was more significant than resolving problems at the level of individual touchpoints.
Observe: Imagine yourself in the position of your clients. What do they perceive? Employee mobilization and organization around client demands may benefit from this. Along with recognizing and comprehending the customer journey, you must also quantify the things that are important to customers and establish a clear goal and shared purpose.
Shape: It is necessary to rearrange interactions into distinct sequences while designing client experiences. Even a modest initial effort can quickly grow into a much larger one that involves process digitization, company culture reorientation, and quick field improvements.
Execute: Everyone in the organization, from front-line employees to corporate leaders, must be deeply involved in the process of shifting to prioritize journeys, which might take years.
How to measure customer experience?
You might have a hard time imagining how you measure something as ephemeral as the magic your company creates for customers. But it can be done. Best practice calls for three guiding principles to help optimize customer-experience measurement:
* Assess customer satisfaction and experience at the journey level instead of touchpoints or overall satisfaction.
* Make a hardwired technology investment that gathers daily feedback from many channels and incorporates survey findings and other data into extensive dashboards.
* Encourage a mindset of constant development on all fronts.
Consider the power of CX prediction, which can help you keep ahead of customer attrition and discontent, depending on the degree of CX adoption within a business. Why? Because survey-based systems are constrained, reactive, unclear, and unfocused, they may not be sufficient to satisfy the demands of modern businesses. More potent insights to enhance customer experiences might be revealed via predictive customer insight.
How to improve customer experience?
Three building blocks are essential in transforming or improving customer experience throughout your organization:
- Create a sense of purpose and aspiration. Your company’s mission and brand promise should be fulfilled via a well-defined CX objective. Have you created a customer-focused vision and goal, connected it to value, and turned it into a tangible plan of action?
- Make the company a different place. This is the place to identify client needs, create solutions, and make an impact—whether through business models, products, services, or customer experiences.
- Turn the transformation on. After offering a novel experience to clients, your business must think about how to continue its work. Developing capabilities, changing employee mindsets, leveraging technology, data, and analytics, implementing cross-functional governance and an agile operating model, and putting in place mechanisms to monitor and control performance are all part of this.
Enhancing the client experience can have a significant impact. Approaches based on these building blocks have helped more than 900 companies create and execute enterprise-wide CX programs for more than ten years. These approaches have resulted in 15–20% increases in sales conversion rates, 20–50% decreases in service costs, and 10–20% increases in customer satisfaction.
Additionally, it’s critical to remain aware of customer experience issues so that your company can steer clear of them. Don’t miss the examples of how other firms have avoided these problems in their transformation of CX. These include failing to connect CX to value, adopting a limited perspective on CX, and using limited creativity.
