Customer Experience-The Winning Ace!!

What would you do when you experience a bad customer service?

Not sure? Let me take an example: Your app is hanging and you use the live chat support support, explain everything to them. You get a reply that they will check and get back to you. You wait for 3 days, but did not get a reply. You write an email to the support id. Auto reply of acknowledgement comes to you. You did not hear back for next 48 hours. You call the support number. Again you had to explain everything as they did not have an idea about your complaint. This already took 6 days. This resulted in bad customer experience. What will be the impact?

Most of the customers will try to switch to some other brand, which can give them a better experience. They will write a bad review on their social media handles. They will tell their friends and families about the bad experience and will advice them not to buy from your brand.

Ouch!! This is too bad to hear!

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer Experience is about leaving people with a good?feeling about your business!

Customer has many choices available for every purchase they want to make. How can you make sure that they purchase your product again and again? The answer is by creating meaningful, personalized experience that sets you apart and makes people want to become repeat customers. Customer experience impacts the perception of the customer about your brand and their decision to become a repeat customer.

Customer experience is how your users feel after every interaction with your business. This does not mean only the interactions with the customer support team but this goes way beyond. The overall customer experience is the result of the journey of the customer throughout the customer lifecycle. The experience they have with the customer support team form a part of CX. Other examples of having customer experience can be- consuming your marketing campaigns, navigating the website, using the mobile app and directly using the product. So, it is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.?

Everything you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not. Establishing and maintaining a good relationship with your customers and giving them a great customer experience is?your key to success.

Why Customer Experience is important for your business?

Successful organizations understand that they need to invest in providing a great customer experience, in order to improve brand loyalty. Customer experience?is the number one brand differentiator for an organization. The customers are ready to leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. I hope this makes you understand how good customer experience is important for the success of your business. Improving CX will reap many benefits for your business:

??It helps you with clear awareness about your customers needs and what makes them satisfied

??It results in customer loyalty and retention. They will come back to you for the repurchase and will also bring their friends along

??It results in increased customer satisfaction, which in turn results in more revenue and positive word of mouth publicity

??It strengthens your brand value and makes it easy for the new customers to choose your brand over other available options

??It is the magnet to attract new customers. When the new customer reads good reviews and gets recommendations from their friends, they will land to your brand

??It curtails your expenditure on acquiring new customers. It also reduces the spend done on marketing and brand building

??It turns down customer grievances which is a good sign for any business to succeed. Low customer complaints also results in boosting up the employee confidence and they are able to manage the genuine issues

??It converts customers into loyal advocates, which is visible in better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations. This helps to acquire more customers

Which business model can benefit from customer experience?

The things that makes a customer choose between your business and a competitor has nothing to do with what you sell or what business model you follow. Customer Experience rises above everything else. All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience:

??Subscription business: Good customer experience can increase retention and reduce churn in case of subscription business.

??E-Commerce marketplaces: Excellent Customer Experience can increase repeat customers and reduce returns in E-commerce model.

??Service industries: The major motive of service organizations is to gain recommendations and reduce complaints. This can be possible through phenomenal Customer Experience.

What are the key components of a positive Customer Experience?

There are six key components to give you a clearer picture of the quality of your customer interactions and how to improve them.

??Customer centric culture: This is a company wide culture which needs to be inculcated in every employee. HR can help in achieving this through various trainings and team meetings.

??Speed of response and resolution: Time to value is a very important metrics when it comes to measure the customer satisfaction score. They want answers and resolutions quickly and cannot wait for a long period.

??Convenience of reaching out: A clear direction and mention of the support email ids, phone numbers, chatbot. This also means the direct communication channel between the customer and the CSM

??Providing accurate information: This is possible when the internal team members have the required product knowledge and can confidently answer the raised concerns

??Warmth and friendliness: Business means dealing with humans. So, these basic human requirements need to be acknowledged and taken care of. The business needs to be friendly at every touchpoint with the customer

??Commit to quality and project requirements: This ensures that the customer trusts you. When the business delivers as promised and is committed towards the quality of the product, the customer gets a good experience and will surely come back.

What are the types of Customer Experience?

The customer gets to experience your product and services in various ways. The interactions with your product or your team, can be either initiated by the customer or initiated by the campaign run by your marketing team. This means, the customer experience can be of three types:

• Straight Customer experience?Any interaction with your brand which is initiated by the customer themselves, fall under this category. When the customer wants to purchase the product, when they are using the product or service directly, they can reach out to your team for any queries/doubts or support required in the process. This leads to straight customer experience.
• Ancillary Customer experience?Any customer interaction with your business which is not initiated by the customer but may be a result of your marketing campaigns, media coverage etc. Sometimes this may start with a word of mouth communication between the customer and a direct user, or through an exchange of comments on a review posted by a user of your product.
• Onlooking Customer experience In today’s world of social media, the opinion about your company and product is formed in a future customer’s mind by reading about the reviews, comments and communications shared by your existing customers on their social accounts. They can know a lot about the product and services by onlooking at the conversations on social media. This knowledge impacts their decision about purchasing your product in the future.

What is Customer Experience Strategy?

When customer experience is that important, you of course need a plan to make sure that the customers are getting positive and high quality customer experiences.?Customer Experience strategy defines the goals and plans to make sure that the employees are able to exceed the customer expectations.

Great customer service and experience starts with those delivering it: your employees. When employees are happy, so will your customers.

A customer lifecycle is the building block of the customer experience strategy. It defines every touchpoint starting from pre sales till the recent interaction. The Customer experience strategy includes the company’s vision, culture, customer lifecycle milestones, customer goals, data collection from every possible interaction, data analysis and feedback.

Your organization needs the right mix of people, processes and tools in order to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Customer experience strategy, can be termed as the roadmap which clearly defines when and how of delivering good customer experience. When you define the strategy and are in sync with the agreed approach, the destination of customer satisfaction is bound to be reached.

Customer Experience Principles:

??It is not possible to provide quality CX without learning about your customers’ interactions at each step of their journey.

??Obtaining feedback from your customers, is the best way to learn about their expectations and how they perceive your organization.

??Only collecting feedback does not serve the purpose, it is important to make a plan and take action based on customer feedback.

??Understanding the persona of your customer can help in providing personalized experiences and can also prepare the team to handle them as per their expected behavior.

What leads to bad customer experience?

The most common causes of bad experience for customers are:

• Long wait or response times from business
• Employees not understanding their queries
• Issues that could not be resolved for long
• Lack of human touch and more automation
• Impolite responses from employees

Is CX and Customer service same?

No. And here's why.

Customer Experience is larger than Customer Service. But Customer service forms a major part of Customer experience. In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As you know, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Most of the customer interactions happen with the customer service team, over the phone call or by raising the mail queries, so it is a crucial touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. Now a days, technology has made it possible that the customer support team has an advance idea about the previous interactions and can deal with the customer accordingly. This will result in good customer experience.

How to measure Customer Experience?

Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals to track customer experience over time:

??Customer Effort Score (CES)

??Net Promoter Score (NPS)

??Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)??

??Time To Resolution (TTR)??

Conclusion

There is new role of Customer Experience specialists, opened up by many successful organizations. Customer experience specialists?provide potential and existing customers with exceptional services. They identify customer needs, respond to customer queries, and collaborate with internal departments to optimize customer services and brand awareness.

What’s the best tool to improve customer experience?

Your ears, for listening!