The tremendous opportunity to win, if you get the customer experience right.

A totally satisfied customer contributes 14 times as much revenue as a dissatisfied customer. In other words: there is a proven ROI in turning your customers into advocates for your brand and the way to create advocates is to offer superior customer experience.

A lot of experts believe that customer experience is going to be the biggest brand differentiator, not a product or price. Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how the company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviors and build memories and feelings and drive their loyalty. if they had a great experience before they buy to after sales, the chances are high that they are going to do business with you and recommend you to the others.

Today, 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010. But while 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences,” only 8% of customers agree.

Increasingly companies are recognizing the importance of delivering an experience that makes them stand out from their competition. There is tremendous opportunity to disrupt a competitor or gain market share in an industry if you get the customer experience right. And that means you need to create a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints to meet or even exceed your customers’ expectations.

Everything a brand does – the way it appears in Google search or on a website, agent offices, claims, advertising and more – all play a role in shaping the customer’s experience. Focusing on customer experience management is in my eyes the single most important investment a brand can make in today’s competitive business environment.

The customer revolution

The Internet has triggered a revolution in how consumers can search for information and make purchases. Consumers are now routinely using the Internet to look for products online, to compare different prices and offers and to investigate the quality of a specific product or service before purchase.

They focus mostly on results at the top of the search results, even more so on mobile: studies suggest that, across different digital channels such as search engines and price comparison websites, consumers disproportionately focus their attention, clicks and purchases on links at the top of returned search results.

On mobile devices, this is even more accentuated and smartphones are increasingly the way people interact with friends and brands. The way they look at content is shifting to small screen and successful companies will be able to create a more personalized experience with consumers also on their mobile.

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback has become an invaluable tool. 88% of consumers read reviews to determine the quality of a business and other customer experiences.

When organizations understand the importance of customer experience, they often start tracking satisfaction. The most common tools are online and offline surveys, or the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in particular, with a lot of companies asking “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company and it allows you to monitor improvements in a product, service or organization.

Take Apple as example: the NPS score is one of their key performance indicators and the minute a customer gives them a bad rating, the store manager has to talk to the customer.

As customers are given the experiences they want, satisfaction naturally increases.

Moreover, as problems within the company are fixed and services are improved, employee confidence increases as well.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping has become a preferred tool for visualizing the customer’s experience. One of the key facets of good customer experience is consistency and that means that it is important to look at the overall customer satisfaction than measuring satisfaction for each individual interaction.

One of the main benefits of a customer journey map is that it provides clear information on how customers move through the sales funnel. Maximizing the efficiency of that path means more sales at a quicker pace.

It can also highlight gaps or pain points, including channels conflicts, where the experience of going from social media to the website could be better or challenges when user switch devices and their experience doesn′t match their expectations.

By optimizing and improving the experiences along the journey, companies are able to build a more solid, long-term relationships with their customers.

Challenges for organizations

It seems obvious that focusing on customer experience along their journey is crucial for the long-term success of a company.

So, what are some of the key hurdles in many organizations they need to overcome?

Organizational units have been constructed around functions that make sense to the company, with tools and processes that support to understand, track, and manage these functions and optimize them within “their silo” and from the company’s perspective. The customer′s perspective might be taken into consideration but not as a whole but at certain touch-points e.g. for complaints. Those units are often incentivized to work inside their silos and to become more efficient from year to year.

Another factor in the insurance industry for example is the fact that the relationship to the customer has been mostly delegated to agents and broker. The concept of customer has been discussed, but it hasn’t been at the center of marketing activities. The focus was more on keeping the sales reps happy organizing events and incentive travels.

As the concept of focusing on customer experience is relatively new, the question is how to change the culture of the company to focus more on the customer and demonstrate that there is a correlation between a positive customer experience and business results.

More and more people within the organization are starting to understand how valuable the customer experience is to the business, but it’s a journey and many changes need to take place including changing the incentive system of a company.

Employee engagement drives CX success

It is also important to connect the dots between employee engagement and customer experience. It’s impossible to have a seamless end-to-end experience if your employees don’t have a customer-centric mindset and don’t have the motivation to keep them happ

Employees are an important factor in improving customer experience. Not only does their level of engagement drive customer experience, but they can also be a critical source of gaining customer insights. And engaged employees are extremely valuable for the company as there almost 5 times more likely to do something good for the company even if it is not expected of them.

Conclusion

The digital revolution has changed customer expectations dramatically and word of mouth travels fast.

In the future there will have to be a big focus on customer experience along the journey including metrics to collect feedback from your customers and act upon it.

Give customers a great experience and they’ll buy more, be more loyal and share their experience with friends.

Customer experience and employee engagement go hand in hand. And this needs to be closely connected to a cultural change programme and a different way of working to overcome organisational challenges like for example silo optimisation.

The goal of a successful organisation is to create a consistent customer experience across all touch-points to ideally exceed customer expectations and have all employees fully on board and motivated to achieve this goal.