What is CX? - Customer Experience in Marketing & Why it’s Important

Customer experience (CX) refers to the interaction between customers and businesses at every point in their journey and includes marketing, support, and everything in between.?

What’s more, it involves the all-important emotional element - in that CX not only relates to the initial interactions a customer has with a company, but how it makes them feel afterward too.

CX is a vital part of modern business, and this article runs through everything you need to know. Feel free to scroll through the article at your leisure or alternatively click on nay of the questions below to jump to the answer you’re looking for.?

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience - otherwise known as CX - is the perception that customers have of a company.?

They’ll form this based on how they feel throughout the various interactions they have with you - from the initial advertisement they see to post-sales support, and all the various marketing touch points in between.

What is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?

Customer service is the direct one-to-one support that you offer to customers before, during, and after they purchase a product or service, and represents one small part of the full customer journey.?

By contrast, customer experience encompasses all the interactions that they have with your brand.

How is Digital Transformation Driving Customer Experience?

Digital transformation refers to the incorporation of the internet and its related technologies into everything a business does.?

Simply put, the internet is central to modern life and this forces all companies to adapt their business models accordingly.?

Customer experience is an essential part of this process and is actually driving digital transformation - rather than the other way around.?

This is because the nature of the digital world actually puts the customer firmly in control, and it’s up to companies to keep up with their expectations if they’re to remain competitive.?

Ultimately, they expect an excellent CX or they’ll look somewhere else.?

Just look at the internet today and you’ll understand that people expect relevant content in relation to whatever they’re doing online, on whatever device or platform they’re using. They expect data security, immediate replies from customer support, next-day doorstep delivery - the list is endless.

Furthermore, digital transformation enables companies to better understand what customers want and this helps them meet their expectations. When done right, success online drives down operating costs and gives companies a distinct competitive edge.

What Are the Three Main Components of Customer Experience?

While CX can be divided in any number of ways, it is generally broken down into three main components:

1. Success - is the customer able to get what they want from each specific interaction they have with you?
2. Ease - how much effort did the customer have to invest into each specific interaction?
3. Positivity - how did the customer feel emotionally after each specific interaction?
4. ?

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management, often referred to as CXM or CEM, is a marketing strategy that prioritizes customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience.?

Ultimately, this comes down to surveying, analyzing, and enhancing customer interactions with your business.

How to Measure and Analyze Customer Experience

In order to effectively analyze the customer experience you provide, you’ll want to complete the following 4-step process

1. Pinpoint the best customers that you want to focus on

The best customers are those that, if they experience an amazing CX, are most likely to return to you again and again.?

You can find out who they are by using surveys and other customer contact tools to assess who your website visitors are, what they do, and what they would use your products for.?

You can then improve this list further by focusing on the most active internet users -?or those that have been active most recently - and then use this information to create the user personas that you will need for the two steps that follow.

2. Decide which journey touchpoints you want to focus on

Once you’ve created your user personas, you’ll then want to decide what exactly you want to focus on in terms of your CX optimization work.?

To this end, you could focus on users that are appropriate to touchpoints that warrant special attention, such as those that:

• Have just visited your website for the first time
• Recently purchased a product from you
• Failed to onboard after sign-up, or asked for a refund after purchase
• Frequently contacted customer support?
• Regularly referred friends to your company

3. Collect the customer feedback and insights you need

Now that you have segmented your customer base in a way that will make your analysis useful, you’ll want to collect the customer feedback you need and this can be done in a number of ways:

• Website data analysis
• Surveys and/or polls
• Unscripted interviews
• Track user sentiment

4. Analyze your collected data

Once you’ve completed these steps and have collected the data you want, you’ll then want to analyze it effectively - both in terms of individual customer issues, and any broader issues with your company’s policies, processes, products, and so forth.?

You can analyze this data by using any of the following CX metrics:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) - this takes the form of a single survey question, and asks customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your company to people around them
• Customer Effort Score (CES) - this measures how easy it is for a customer to do business with you, and is done through a CES survey
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) - this tracks how satisfied customers are with your company’s products and/or services
• Response time - this is the amount of time it takes for a customer to get a response from your support team
• Sentiment - this uses machine learning to analyze social media posts to determine how people feel about your company

Why you Should Use Customer Feedback as Part of Your CX Strategy

You no doubt understand what distinguishes a good customer experience from a bad one, but implementing an effective strategy requires that you have reliable access to what improvements your customers actually want.

This is where customer feedback, or visitor communication, comes in.?

Beyond getting the information you need, it shows that you value their opinion, they feel more attached to your company, and they’ll be more likely to forgive any mistakes, buy from you again, and advocate on your company’s behalf.

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