There may not be a bigger buzzword than "Customer Experience.''

Today, we live in a world driven by customer experiences. Excellent customer experiences determine the success or failure of businesses, which is why customer experience is everything. There is no industry in which customer experiences are not important. We often hear about customer experience related to B2C businesses, but it is also an equally important focus for B2B SaaS businesses, something that is often overlooked.

After my time as CEO at Datacenter.com, I had many conversations with founders, investors and executives of Tech / Service companies about the growth of the company and the impact of Customer Experience - Something that I think goes hand in hand in the current economy.

Delivering an excellent customer experience isn't just about friendly people in your customer service and instructing them to treat the customer like royalty. Creating great customer experiences is all about the strategy it takes to be part of your company's DNA. What is the identity of your organization? What experiences do you want your customers to have? How do you transform your organization into a customer-oriented organization? By a very thoroughly defined customer experience strategy, because great customer experiences do not just happen by accident.

“Customer experience, is your customers' holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. Customer Experience is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you.”

My five take-aways to improve your Customer Experience

1. Create a clear Customer Experience vision for your organization
2. Understand who your Customers (and prospects) are
3. Create an emotional connection with your (potential) Customers
4. Act upon employee feedback
5. Measure the ROI

1. Create a clear Customer Experience vision for your organization

The first step in your customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-centric vision that you can communicate with your organization.The easiest way to define this vision is to make a series of statements to guide you (core values, mission statement, vision). Once these principles are in place, they will guide the behavior of your organization. Each member of your team must know these principles by heart and they must be embedded in all areas of training and development.

2. Understand who your Customers (and prospects) are

As with all changes in your organization, there should be a firm strategy as a starting point to deliver customer centric services. Start with the question, “I am the founder/CEO/VP/Director/Manager at my company, what do we stand for when it comes to Customers? What is our Why? What do we promise, where do we make the difference?”

“Having a strong brand stems from the quintessential question: WHY?”

3. Create an emotional connection with your (potential) Customers

Do you know the phrase “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it”?

Well, the best customer experiences are achieved when you or a member of your team creates an emotional connection with a customer. Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is based on an emotion of an experience is based on an emotion as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions. Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached and they remember how they feel when they use a product or service. A business that optimizes for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by over 80% in revenue growth.

4. Act upon employee feedback

Most organizations have an annual survey process in which they capture the overall feedback from your team; how committed they are and the ability of companies to deliver exceptional service.

Why only once a year (if at all)?

Feedback from employees is crucial to achieve a good Customer Experience. Besides the fact that the employees can share crucial information about the customers and what your customers experience, it also gives a good representation of how your staff feels about your company (after all, your staff is the business card of the company).

5. Measure the ROI

And finally, how do you know if all of these investments in your teams, processes and technology are working and paying off? The answer is in the business results. Measuring customer experience is one of the biggest challenges organizations face. That's why many companies use the "Net Promoter Score" or NPS, which gathers valuable information by asking a single simple question:

"Would you recommend this company to a friend or relative?"

Take your time

Improving your customer experience strategy is a marathon, not a race. It's about taking informed and consistent action every step of the way and in every part of your business to become a customer-centric company. You can't improve your customer experience metrics just by focusing on customizing customer facing services, it starts much deeper than this.

This means taking a holistic approach to becoming obsessed with the customer. If you want to improve customer experiences, don't forget that you also improve employee experiences (these are all influencers). Leave nothing to chance, every decision you make requires thorough planning and team collaboration.

By Jochem Steman