Cutting through CX confusion

If you google customer experience you'll get on average 2,450,00 results with articles, YouTube videos, resources and eBooks with in-depth information about how to reach the solution to deliver an exceptional #customerexperience

But... that one right solution is actually different depending on the source. This leaves you with more uncertainty about customer experience than you had at the start of your research.

So what is customer experience?

This one’s easy, customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company right?

So what is great customer experience?

This one is not so easy to define. In fact, you’ll find many research articles and professionals dance around this question, but for now, here is our definition: Great customer experience means meeting or exceeding the expectations of your customer during all interactions with your company.

So why is the customer experience so important? Short answer is it determines whether your company succeeds or fails. Think about the last time you had a great experience with a brand. Now think about the last time you had a really bad experience with a brand. 

If you’re like most, you probably had a much easier time recalling a poor experience than a good one. That’s because a bad customer experience interrupts our day. We don’t expect it as customers —we anticipate that brands will always meet our needs and wants. So when bad customer experiences happen, the news of it spreads on social channels and by word-of-mouth and people spend much more time and effort leaving a bad review than a good one.

On the other hand, if customers feel they have a good relationship with your brand, they’ll stick around. Satisfied customers don’t look elsewhere for services or products, and they will surely miss you if one day you suddenly disappear. In other words, delivering great customer experience makes you irreplaceable. And being irreplaceable helps your company’s bottom line.

For CX strategy to be successful, you need two components: real-time feedback (across the entire customer journey) and data analytics to close the gap between what customers expect and their perception of the experience that is currently being delivered.

Before you launch a CX strategy, you’ve got to know which CX maturity level stage you’re currently in. Similar to other topics in the CX space, you’ll find different interpretations of CX maturity levels based on the source. However, below is the most commonly used scale:

Stage 1—Ignore: Your company doesn’t view CX as a crucial competitive differentiator.

Stage 2—Explore: Senior Executives in your company are keen on understanding how CX can improve your business. They start investigating what the organisation needs to do to improve its customer experience.

Stage 3—Mobilise: Senior Executives are on board with improving experience and begin to build a CX coalition team. At this level, you’re also working on developing a customer journey map.

Stage 4—Operationalizs: You begin to re-design your company’s operational processes based on customer insight and other customer experience metrics. At this stage, the cross-functional CX coalition team is also working on engaging the entire workforce in the strategy.

Stage 5—Align: Being customer-centric is the norm in your company at this stage. You’ve set structures in place to reinforce and maintain this CX priority. You do this through the hiring process, performance management, and incentives. Overall, your CX program is performing well, but you’re still running into some bumps on the road. 

Stage 6—Embed: Your company is delivering great customer experiences. This is possible because CX has been integrated into everyday decisions and practices. This is the Northern Star for CX professionals.

Demonstrating economic value for a customer experience program will vary by industry and individual company. But there are two major benefits that any CX leader can demonstrate: Increase in revenue, reduced costs. You can prove an increase in revenue through customer retention and sales optimisation.

What this actually looks like will vary by company, but the goal of CX is always to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand advocacy while cutting costs.