What is customer experience?

Same goes to the poor customer experience – you will come up with story about your experience, and feelings afterwards. You definitely were frustrated and disappointed.

Great and impressive customer experience makes your customer happy, but also it leads to the additional income to your company. Best marketing, that you can afford is the customers, because they will recommend you to their friends and family.

The way you think about customer experience has probably an overwhelming impact on how you look at your business as a whole. This just one of the many reasons, why creating and supporting over a great customer experience is important. But, if customer experience that you created isn’t so good, how to improve it?

Before we differentiate whether customer experience good or not, and how to improve it, let’s see, what Is an actual meaning of the Customer Experience.

Customer experience is the impression you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand. Multiple touchpoints factor into the customer experience.

Of course, main touchpoints that create the customer experience are people and product. The example of product touchpoint is your impression of a performance and quality of the product. Are you delighted by the attention of a customer support rep gives you to help solve your problem? That means you met with people touchpoint. There are general examples of what factors are at play when creating a great customer experience.

Since multiple teams impact the customer experience, let’s break down how to measure performance to see if you’re on the right track.

Importance of Customer Experience.

Customer experience is very important to provide a great growth of a business. It’s important to ensure a positive customer experience so customers build brand loyalty and affinity, advertise your product or service and recommend it to their friends, and leave you positive review that will help your business grow.

In XXI century capitalist relations developed so much, that customer finally plays the main role in whole economic system. Customers has power, not the sellers. But how did they gain this power? With the help of fast-developing digital communications. Nowadays, customers have more options than ever (your competitors), greater ease of switching power than ever (with so many subscription and freemium option), and more power to influence your business (using social media and online reviews)

But, definitely, this a change for the best. Customers became the main resource for stable and sustained growth of your business. They are telling about you to your friends, they are writing informative reviews on social media – this is the perfect and more reliable advertisement, than your marketing channels. 

Every businesses and brands have their black stripes, and when you will meet one – do not broadcast your feelings to the world. You have to take problems personally, and then they will resolve. 

How to measure Customer Experience

1. Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.
2. Identify rate and reasons for customer churn.
3. Ask customers for product or feature requests.
4. Analyze customer support ticket trends.

1. Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.

Using customer satisfaction surveys regularly or after meaningful moments on a customer journey will give you full picture of how do your customers think about your brand and of customer experience. 

A great way to measure customer experience is Net Promoter Score, or NPS. This thing measures how likely our customers are to evangelize your brand to colleagues, friends, and family, and that’s determined by experience you provide. You can measure NPS with a mobile app inBook – mobile feedback station.

When measuring NPS, you should consider multiple data points, since multiple teams impact the customer experience. Your customers probably want to leave a review, or to share their feedback, so let them. Analyzing NPS from multiple touchpoint across the customer journey will tell you your problems.

It’s easy to skew NPS results, so, be sure that you making this test personally, and you’re fully true to the data. If the results show a poor customer experience, be ready to making changes. If the results show a great customer experience, make sure you’re following up on customer feedback – whether it’s positive or negative, connecting with customers can deepen your relationship and improve your brand outcome.

2. Identify rate and reasons for customer churn.

Churn happens sometimes – there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a part of business lifespan, because everybody has their ups and downs. If you met churn – identify why it happened. 

If you’re analyzing reasons and rates of the churn, you can fully prevent churns in the future. 

3. Ask customers for product or feature requests.

Create some kind of forum, on which your customers can leave their requests. It can be everything you want – mobile survey, email survey, social media survey, or even separate website for requests. Be ready to take suggestions from you customers – if you wouldn’t, customers will dislike your brand.

4.  Analyze customer support ticket trends.

Analyzing tickets of customer support is a great way to improve your brand. View through all tickets, and find out, if there’s any recurring issue that never go away? Try to solve it. Solvation of customer’s problems leads to the great customer experience.

How to make a great customer experience

To make a great customer experience, you need to: build legible customer journey map so you can effectively understand and solve their challenges, build a reliable relationship between customer and seller, create helpful educational content, and build communities for your audience.

As we’ve discussed, there are plurality of touchpoints in the customer experience, so the first action required to improve the customer experience, is to identify which touchpoint to start with.

Poor Customer Experience Example

We all definitely endured a poor and crummy customer experience. Maybe one time, maybe many, but the idea is that we actually felt – how is it to be unsatisfied from the customer experience. The following example explaining everything.

Groupon – is the American coupon company that provides big discounts to many products. Blake Morgan wrote about Groupon and how complicated it is to delete an online account, and how that creates such a poor experience. Transparency is vital in creating a great customer experience, so it leads to an uneasy feeling of despair when company tries to keep you in «their chains». Probably everyone expects to be able to go online, and easily delete account, but that’s just impossible in this case.

Morgan explains that the rationale for this may be to inflate user metrics. Higher user numbers confirm to key stakeholders that their marketing strategies are working when in reality, they may just be preventing users from leaving on their own. Lack of transparency leads to the bad practices, and those practices translate into a poor experience.

Companies, that offer transparency, are trying to provide good customer experience.

Great Customer Experience example.

Let’s imagine some brand – like Blaze, pizza company in Boston.  On a Pi day (March 14^th), this company ran a promo – they were offering discounted pizza pies for only 3.14$. A man, named John received their promo.

Promo was sent by an email, but it was available at store, so you didn’t have to open your mobile app, or print out some coupons. The restaurant was packed out fully, but still, every employee was greeting John, and thanking him for coming. After eating a whole pizza pie, John was over satisfied with the experience Blaze offered. Later, he told about this offer to his friends, who came to Blaze, and made an additional income to company.

Let’s generalize the whole thing. Customer experience provided by Blaze was Great because of three factors.

1. John got an email from company, that there is an offer, so he could try discounted pizza as soon as he could.
2. Ease of the experience. John didn’t have to do extra actions just to confirm discount – it was automatic.
3. Everything was transparent, and all employees were benevolent.

This entire article proves, that customer experience is very important to your customers. Identifying key touchpoints, collecting customer feedback, improve customer sentiment above your company will help your brand grow.