How To Improve Customer Experience

Today, around 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience.

Customer Experience is crucial for businesses that want to continue to be competitive. It can be the difference between a company with a strong base of brand advocates, and one that constantly loses business to customer churn.

So, what is customer experience? Is it just customer service? And how can you go about improving it, especially if you don’t know where you’re going wrong in the first place?

In this blog, we explain what customer experience is, why it’s important, and what companies can do to improve it.

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is the view that customers have of their entire experience with your business. That means every single contact a customer has with your brand and its products or services.

The contacts – “or touchpoints” – can include advertising, customer service, purchasing, or after-sales support.

The cumulative effect of these interactions will create a customer’s perception of your company, and determine if they will continue to do business with you in the future.

Why Is Customer Experience Important?

Great customer experience generates a whole host of benefits:

140% – Customers are likely to spend 140% more following positive experiences compared to negative.

60% – Happy customers are more likely to return, and, on average, loyal customers spend 60% more per transaction than first time buyers.

64% – Customer experience is more important than price for 64% of consumers.

72% – A satisfied customer is more likely to become a brand advocate, as 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.

80% – Overall, it has been estimated that investing in CX can lead to an 80% increase in revenue.

By contrast, neglecting customer experience can be devastating:

92% – One in three customers will leave a business they love after just one bad experience, and 92% would do so after two or three.

$1.6 Trillion – In the USA, customer churn is estimated to account for $1.6 Trillion in lost business each year.

32% – Almost a third of customers will no longer do business with a brand they love after receiving negative CX.

15 – 13% of unhappy customers will tell 15 or more people about their bad experience. Compare that to the 6 who would be told about a good experience.

A company that provides poor customer experience doesn’t just risk losing their current customers. Negative online reviews and word of mouth can prevent new customers from ever considering doing business with them.

How to Analyze Customer Experience.

The first step toward making improvements is understanding where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Adjusting your strategy is wasted effort if you don’t know how your customers feel about your current approach. Plotting a route is impossible if you don’t know your start point or destination.

According to Bain & Company, 80% of brands believe they are delivering an excellent customer experience. Sadly, only 8% of customers believe they are receiving a great experience.

This disconnect proves that, no matter how good your intentions, it’s impossible to evaluate the experience you provide when looking from the inside. Thankfully, there are now many tools available to companies looking to gain an outside perspective.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Maps take all of the stages in a customer journey – from learning about a brand, to making a purchase and beyond – and plot them as a visual representation. This allows you to see every possible point of contact between company and customer.

Once you have established your expectations for each point of contact, Mystery Shoppers can be tasked with evaluating the brand’s performance at each stage.

This approach is useful for identifying any specific points in which the brand is failing its customers or missing opportunities to convert. For example, if there is significant customer drop-off at the website stage of the journey, this could indicate that something in the web functionality – such as a faulty link – is dissuading customers from completing purchases.

Journey mapping also allows companies to see any misalignment in their “brand experience” – essentially, where a customer’s experience doesn’t align with the brand’s identity, values and personality.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

An NPS survey presents your customers a single question, “On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” People who return a score of 0-6 are considered “detractors”, 7-8 are “passives”, and 9-10 are “promoters”. By ignoring the passives, and subtracting your detractors from your promoters, you can calculate your Net Promoter Score.

As a rough guide, scores above 0 are good, above 20 are great, and above 50 are excellent.

NPS can be a useful first step in establishing whether CX is a matter of concern for your company, and also for tracking customer loyalty. However, NPS as a metric is limited, and complementary research will be needed in order to inform strategy decisions and identify areas for improvement.

While surveys such as NPS give you a direct line to customer experiences, customers who have had a notably good or bad experience are more likely to respond than those whose experience was just OK. It is also just as important – if not more so – to gauge the experience of those customers who did not make a purchase after taking the time and trouble to visit your physical or digital site.

Mystery Shopping

Mystery Shopping agencies can measure if there is any discrepancy between the CX you have designed for your customers and the CX that they actually receive.

Agencies can provide feedback on every point in the customer journey and on every factor related to customer experience, helping brands to identify any areas of improvement. Brand identity

These factors include, but are not limited to:

Customer Service
Product Knowledge
Communication Skills
Sales Process
Brand Image Alignment
Compliance
Website Usability
After-Sales Care
Environment

Agencies can also perform visits to examine the customer experience your industry rivals provide. The information produced by these audits helps brands to identify areas for improvement, and capitalize on points of relative strength.

How To Improve Your Customer Experience

To create exceptional CX, you need a clear vision and ongoing efforts to measure, refine and personalize those experiences. Here are some steps businesses can take to make lasting improvements.

Communicate your vision for customer experience

It’s impossible to deliver memorable customer experiences without a clearly defined vision of what that experience should look and feel like.

Brand identity, values, mission, and personality should be effectively communicated to all employees and stakeholders, so that they guide and inform all interactions. This will ensure consistency across all locations and channels.

Regularly monitor customer sentiment at each touchpoint

Collecting feedback at every stage of the customer journey allows companies to judge if each interaction is delivering on their overall CX goals. Companies can use live-chat tools and follow up emails to gather customer opinions, or use mystery shopping reports as an evaluation tool. This data can then be used to identify points where the company is exceeding expectations, or areas in need of improvement.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback helps brands to understand consumer motivations, pain points and desired outcomes. Regular monitoring allows companies to assess whether their customer experiences are becoming more attuned to buyer needs.

Get feedback from employees

Customer service has a sizable bearing on the overall experience, and so it’s important to regularly solicit feedback from the employees who will actually deliver it. Frontline employees are often best-placed to report back on sources of customer satisfaction or frustration as they are first-hand witnesses.

This could take the form of call center employees suggesting improvements in call scripts, or retail staff identifying confusing labeling.

Acting on employee suggestions not only encourages problem-solving, it also makes employees feel appreciated and strengthens their emotional investment in the brand’s success.

Give your customers omnichannel experiences

90% of all customers now expect their interactions with brands to be consistent across all channels, and modern brands are expected to provide seamless omnichannel experiences.

For example, when a customer uses a website and places items in their basket, they expect to find those same items in their basket when they open a smartphone application for the same company.

Internal records should also register all interactions a customer has with a company. This allows for greater personalization of interaction. For instance, if a customer makes a complaint via one channel (e.g. phone), then this negative experience should inform any following interactions, regardless of where they take place.

All customer-facing staff should be aware of the values the company wants to embody, and the brand voice it aims to speak with. This ensures that interactions are consistent with the brand personality.

Nurture emotional connections with your customers

An estimated 95% of purchase decisions are formed in our subconscious, and are heavily influenced by the emotional connections that we form about brands. The values a customer associates with a brand can have a direct influence over whether they will make a purchase, and so it is important that brands communicate these values effectively to their target audience.

There are many ways a company can shape customer experiences to reinforce emotional connections, such as choice of brand imagery, the atmosphere of customer-facing areas, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and even decisions regarding influencer partnerships or celebrity endorsements.

Ensure employee experiences align with CX

The working environment should be a reflection of the desired customer experience. For luxury sectors, if customer-facing staff are expected to make consumers feel valued, they are more likely to deliver on this expectation if they feel valued themselves. Contrastingly, clothing brands aimed at a younger audience may favor faster and more dynamic interactions, and therefore the working environment should be more lively and upbeat.

Make experiences personal

Personalized experiences make customers feel seen and heard, and according to a McKinsey study, 76% of customers are more likely to purchase from a company that personalizes.

Personalized content may include product recommendations, highlighting repurchasing needs, abandoned cart reminders, customer reward schemes, special birthday offers, exclusive event invites.

Final Thoughts

As you might expect, this blog is only scratching the surface of the changes you can make to your brand to improve the experience you give your customers. There are many factors that make up your CX, and improving it is just as complex.

If we had to pin down one starting point for any brand that wanted to make improvements, it would always be to examine the experience you currently provide, from the perspective of the customer. This gives you a solid foundation to work from when making future strategy or planning decisions.

At Service Evaluation Concepts, we have helped businesses from mom and pop stores to multinational corporations to inspect what they expect, and gain a clear picture of their customer experience as it stands.

If you are interested in getting a clearer picture of your customer experience, and how you can improve it, complete the form below.

Arcadio Roselli

CEO & Managing Director of Service Evaluation Concepts. Dedicated to driving brand experience forward with the tools that ensure the reality in the the customer corridor is aligned with the promoted brand value proposition.

How To Improve Customer Experience