Why is Customer Experience Important?
The exemplary customer experience (CX) is a way of standing out from other companies. As more brands compete for attention and more options become readily available, CX provides a way to put your brand at the forefront. Brands that want to increase customer acquisition, loyalty, and engagement while driving growth need to think about delivering more exceptional customer experiences and connecting with customers in more dynamic ways.
Companies that have an exceptional customer experience foster a culture of customer champions. This results in a complete circle of customer loyalty. Customers not only promote the brand, but they return for more. Excellent customer service allows you to keep tabs on your existing clients while serving as a point of distinction for potential new customers.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is how your users or potential users receive and interact with every touchpoint of your business. This goes way beyond their interactions with your contact center or support team. The overall customer experience includes their perception of your brand, their experiences interacting with your digital touchpoints, and their entire journey through the customer lifecycle.
The Benefits: How Customer Experience Fuels Growth
Being aware of CX from an end-to-end viewpoint and ensuring buyers’ needs are prioritized every step of the way is critical to creating a good customer experience. Customers have many options at their fingertips plus the resources necessary to educate themselves and make purchase decisions on their own. This is why it’s so important to provide a remarkable experience and make them want to continue doing business with you.
So, how can you measure your customer experience to determine what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement? There are several ways to look at it:
Increased Revenue
You don’t have to incorporate expensive software or time-consuming processes to boost your company’s sales strategies. Instead, it can be as simple as improving the customer experience. When buying a product or service, customers have a lot of options. Their purchasing behaviors are no longer solely driven by advertisements. They have access reviews, testimonials, and comments on social media to influence their choices too.
This is why providing customers with a positive experience across every touchpoint is so essential. Doing so promotes loyalty and encourages them to share your business with their network, which increases sales. In fact, 84% of companies that strive to improve their customer experience have reported a significant increase in their revenue. Additionally, companies that put the customer at the center of their operations are 60% more profitable than those that do not.
Exemplary One-To-One Interaction
Whether you’re a small business or a global company, one-to-one customer service is essential for keeping your customers happy. It gives your customers a personal touch and allows you to learn about their concerns and resolve problems quickly. Having a one-to-one conversation or meeting with a client will enable you to show that their business is essential to you and that the matters you are discussing are worth your time and theirs. Your focus will get people’s attention and increase the potential for your message or view to be heard. When you are one-to-one, you can see and respond to people’s reactions – like facial expressions and body language – as well as their tone of voice. When communicating through emails and text messages, there is no way to interpret what somebody else means, as all these key indicators can get lost in translation. The truth is technology can only get you so far. Face-to-face customer service is more important than ever.
Growth in Brand Awareness
Happy customers will not only be loyal to you but also become your company’s best brand ambassadors. They’re likely to leave good reviews about your products, share their positive experiences on social media, and tell their friends, family, and coworkers about your company too. Customer feedback is a combination of the insights, issues, and input your customers share about their experiences with your company and its offerings. This information guides customer experience improvements and can drive impactful change in any business.
Customer feedback is crucial because it guides the improvements of your customer’s experience at every touchpoint — whether through an ad, interacting with your website, or during purchase. With positive and negative feedback, you can continually adapt the customer experience over time and keep your community at the center of everything you do.
Immersed Staff
The customer-first mentality should be a collective effort involving your entire organization, with everyone aligning with the same set of goals and best practices. Align leaders who advocate and practice these values company-wide and empower employees to keep an eye on the future while paying persistent attention to the present. As a result, you can reach more people through your employees, potentially increasing your customer base and sales. Think about the type of customer service insights you could receive if every single employee genuinely adopted the same company mission, vision, and passion as you. Educating employees about your company’s short- and long-term goals and how their job makes that happen empowers them with a sense of purpose. That purpose mobilizes them to be more engaged with their work responsibilities, ultimately meeting customers’ needs and efficiently solving any problems they might have.
To be customer-centric, you must first be employee-centric. When employees feel cared for, respected, supported, and happy with the way they are treated at work, it is much easier for them to treat their customers in the same way. In fact, they will become your biggest brand advocates, and you will begin to develop a competitive advantage that contributes to a competitive employee and customer experience.
Loyal Customers
Consistently delivering a positive customer experience is one of the most critical pieces in the business strategy to create customer loyalty. It establishes a solid customer base that continues to buy from your business. Customer loyalty is a customer’s likelihood of doing repeat business with you. This stems from customer satisfaction and outweighs availability, pricing, and other factors that typically impact buying decisions. When customers are loyal to a product, service, or brand, they are willing to wait for a restock or spend a little extra money.
It takes time to build customer loyalty to your brand, but you have a customer for life once you have it. Doing so takes dedication and care to ensure your customers feel valued, appreciated, and met their needs. Regularly consider the customer experience and how to improve it further to encourage more customers to return to your business. After all, it’s repeat business that keeps most small companies profitable.
Examples of Brands with High Quality Customer Experience
Slack is a prime example of a company that builds up the excellent customer experience. Slack is a communication app for colleagues and teams in the workplace, born out of frustrating internal communication such as endless CC’s and email chains. It’s a relatively simple concept, but its success is because it puts the customer first. They focus on the customer’s needs instead of how many people use their products. When they released the product in 2013, they only shared it with ten companies, which allowed them to concentrate on just a few use cases. As they shared Slack with more people, they still ensured they built the product based on real-world customer feedback. As a result, they recently earned the name “fastest-growing business app in history” with over 3 million paid users active daily.
Beauty brand Sephora is another good example of customer centricity leading to great success. The research technologies their customers find useful. Their goal is to make life easy for customers, so all their digital innovation is focused on what customers want, with features such as their virtual makeup try-on and app. In addition, Sephora’s ‘Beauty Insider Loyalty Program’ is a strong example of putting customers first. It is a leveled program giving customers answers to burning questions and recommendations. While the higher levels get free shipping and receive invites to VIP events.
Today, customer experience is one factor that provides a competitive advantage to your brand. Your brand can create an unbeatable impression on customers with smooth interactions that elevate the customer experience.
Improve Your Organization's Customer Experience with Experience Dynamic
Are you looking for a partner to drive your entire CX transformation journey? Experience Dynamic’s proven methodology delivers end-to-end support to guide you from the first mile of CX research and strategy to your day-to-day marketing execution. Our collective of companies (LaneTerralever and Convince & Convert) can help you establish a competitive advantage that differentiates your organization in the market and drive profitable customer experience results. Whether you need guidance and strategy to chart a winning path forward or a hands-on partnership throughout an entire CX transformation journey, we are here to help.
To learn more about these marketing insights and how to improve the customer experience, download our latest national study, “The State of Customer Experience in 2023” which uncovered the hidden drivers and expectations of today’s consumers, from Generation Z to Baby Boomers.
