CX matters enormously for marketing your services and products and for building your brand image and reputation. One of the best ways to do that is putting customer experience (CX) first.
Customer experience focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers. It takes in every interaction or communication with a customer, direct or indirect, even when the process ends without a purchase. When marketers optimize for customer experience, they emphasize the tasks that raise engagement at every touchpoint.
Note: Customer experience > user experience > page experience
These three subjects sit in a heavily symbiotic relationship with one another.
In this piece we go deep into why and how businesses should take a more customer focused approach, and we answer the questions people ask most often about customer experience. We covered user experience for you not long ago. You may want to look at that one after this.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the result of any interaction a person has with a brand. That includes marketing material, product design and quality, customer service, online interactions, sponsorships, the social responsibilities the brand takes on, how a store looks, suppliers and more. Everything identified with a brand falls inside customer experience, it shapes what customers think, and it has a direct effect on the bottom line.
Why Does Customer Experience Matter?
A good customer experience can grow your business enormously. It helps you hold on to the customers you have and encourages them to recommend your company to other people. Word of mouth is, after all, one of the strongest things driving purchase decisions today. In fact, according to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, 84% of customers say they trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Marketers began to see the benefits of customer experience design and strategy in growing numbers, particularly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Acquia’s Global Customer Experience Report, 94% of marketers changed and improved their digital customer experience strategy in the 18 months after the pandemic began. Data from Pointillist shows that the digital transformation of tools and strategies remains one of the most important CX priorities for brands.
Customer experience can lift your sales or sink them, so marketers would be wise to put money into the solutions that encourage positive interactions.
Selling the wrong product by misleading the consumer through faulty, aggressive marketing can produce bad outcomes even when your product is superb. I wanted to tell a small story here that we told on our SEO agency podcast. A customer experience memory: “In 2007 we had a client with a very strong website and a genuinely successful product. They wanted the site to show up on some searches that had nothing directly to do with the product, and we got the rankings. Over time people bought the wrong product, and the whole thing went badly. Customer experience fell through the floor.”
Examples of Good Customer Experience
Fundamentally, when your customers feel their needs have been understood and their expectations met, they are more likely to come back to your business. Listening to customer feedback and acting on it works in your favor here.
Some other examples of good customer experience:
- Intuitive website design.
- Realistic expectations about the products or services.
- Sales being transparent about pricing.
- Self help resources that are easy to reach.
- Live customer support always available, with a short wait.
- Proactive messaging about known problems.
- Using customer feedback to understand your audience properly.
- Smooth omnichannel experiences (website and mobile app integration, for instance)
Good customer experience covers more than the absence of disconnected parts. It requires brands to engage with their customers proactively, in inventive ways, to encourage more interaction.
What Does Proactive Mean?
Proactivity, or proactive communication, means self initiated behavior that tries to solve a problem before it appears. Proactive behavior is acting ahead of a future situation rather than reacting to it. It means taking control of a situation and making changes early, instead of adapting to it or waiting for something to happen.
Examples of Bad Customer Experience
A bad customer experience can do serious damage to your brand’s reputation and hurt customer loyalty. The consequences reach far: customers moving to a competitor, weak lead conversion, and customers forming a negative view of your brand.
Put simply, a “bad customer experience” is a consumer deciding the business failed to meet their expectations. The most common signs of poor customer experience in digital interactions are these:
- Having to enter your information over and over.
- Unresolved problems and questions.
- Too much automation.
- Service with no personalization.
- Slow loading websites.
- Confusing UI and UX.
A bad customer experience has the potential to derail your marketing campaigns. Because so much time and effort goes into purchase decisions, these potential buyers get more annoyed by the friction and inconsistency that makes their job harder. Brands that push customers into actions they do not want, or serve up disconnected experiences, will inevitably lose more customers.
How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Strategies
Much of what customers make of your brand comes down to personal preference, and there are still several tactics marketers can apply to encourage better experiences. These strategies are built to measure, smooth out and improve customer experiences at every touchpoint.
Here are some tips from us at Türk SEM on how to improve your customer experience strategy.
Build a Feedback Loop
Customer feedback is the easiest way of understanding what your customers expect from you and how you could give them a better experience. It gives you firsthand knowledge of what customers think about your brand, what problems they run into and what works for them.
Remember to accept their feedback and do your best to act on it. That builds trust, shows your customers you care, and gives them a solid reason to keep doing business with you.
Companies with no feedback system of their own can read what people say about their products or services on complaint portals.
Design an Omnichannel Experience
Building an omnichannel customer experience strategy gives your service representatives a more efficient and more effective way of engaging with customers. Several channels integrated into one system lets customers pick up where they left off, keeps the communication journey consistent, and delivers a good experience across the channels.
Personalize the User Experience
Personalization covers interactions through the channel a customer prefers, product recommendations based on past purchases and search history, or an online experience designed around each customer.
Using data to understand who your customer is, their preferences, their habits, their basic character, helps marketers understand what customers expect, which can lead to faster support and faster resolution.
The persona work we use in user experience design can serve you well here.
Empower Customers Through AI
Digitalization keeps moving faster, and machine learning applications, chatbots and mobile messaging move with it. AI assisted chat tools and virtual customer assistants work well for fast, repetitive tasks.
Stay in Touch With Your Customers
Making sure your customers remember you matters a great deal for holding on to them. Following up with customers through the channel they prefer, or through surveys, can teach you where to improve and show your customers that they matter. It is also a way of adding them to an email list, sending them personalized recommendations, and letting them know when you widen your services or offer seasonal or tailored discounts. Email marketing matters a great deal for building trust and familiarity with your customers.
Deliver Proactive Experiences
As I said earlier, delivering proactive experiences matters a great deal for your business. Alongside accepting customer reviews and feedback and responding to them, being proactive in how you solve things will serve your customer experience. Anticipating what customers need and solving problems before they appear or grow helps you build unique, personalized experiences.
Build an FAQ Page
For example: /sss
When a problem is fairly common, customers usually prefer solving it themselves rather than contacting a live service representative. You can help them by making self help services easier to reach and easier to use. A frequently asked questions page is usually a help page that resolves relatively common questions quickly. Making sure your content is accurate and updated regularly matters enormously; an unhelpful article turns into a bad experience quickly.
Use Analytics to Improve the Customer Journey
Research and data tell you a great deal about how efficient your customer support team is. What you gather helps you raise customer satisfaction in interactions, gives you insight into consumer behavior trends and much more besides. Changing processes and services with your customers in mind starts with understanding what the data you already hold is telling you.
For a professional approach to this, we set out a road map in our piece on what data science is. Read that one and you can learn the process.
Customer Experience, User Experience and Page Experience Compared
| Feature | Customer experience (CX) | User experience (UX) | Page experience (PX) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | The sum of all a customer’s interactions with a brand | A user’s interaction with a particular product or service | A user’s interaction with a particular web page |
| Scope | Broad: every touchpoint before, during and after the purchase | Medium: the use of a particular product or service | Narrow: a single web page or group of pages |
| Focus | Brand perception, loyalty and the long term relationship | Usability, accessibility and satisfaction | Page performance, content and engagement |
| Metrics | NPS, CSAT, customer lifetime value | Usability tests, user satisfaction surveys | Page load speed, engagement rate, conversion rate |
| Who owns it | Marketing, sales, customer service | UX designers, product managers | Web developers, SEO specialists |
| Time frame | Long term | Medium term | Short term |
| Shared goal | Raising user and customer satisfaction and delivering positive experiences | ||
| Shared method | Collecting and analyzing user and customer feedback | ||
| Shared difficulty | Keeping up with expectations and technology that never stop changing |
How Do You Measure Customer Experience?
Because customer expectations keep changing, the services put in place to meet them have to change and develop over time as well. Being able to measure how well your customer experience strategies work is what tells you what is useful and what needs improving.
Many marketers map customer journeys to understand customer experience better. That work helps them see the buying experience from the customer’s point of view and makes the areas needing improvement easier to spot.
Mapping customer journeys also gives you a good road map for measuring and steering the success of marketing campaigns. Whether it is how engaged customers are with your content or how many purchases were made, marketers will tailor those maps to reflect their brand’s KPIs.
Some of the most effective ways marketing teams can measure customer experience are these:
Use Data to Analyze Customer Satisfaction
Surveys can tell you about factors such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). CSAT surveys let you measure how satisfied customers are with the product or service they got from you. They are usually expressed on a 5 or 10 point scale (1 meaning “not satisfied at all” and 10 meaning “very satisfied”) or with binary yes/no answers. NPS is a customer loyalty score you get by asking customers “on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or company to a friend?” You can of course change the question slightly to suit your brand or your business.
CSAT surveys are more specific to the product and service they bought from you; NPS focuses more on how your customers feel about your brand overall.
Customer effort score (CES) measures a customer’s experience with a product or service in terms of how “hard” or “easy” it was for them to complete an action or reach a resolution. CES surveys are usually taken after an interaction with customer service, with questions like: “How easy was it to solve your problem today?” It is an excellent way of staying in touch with your customers and getting fast feedback.
Analyze the Churn Rate and the Reasons Behind It
Losing customers is a normal part of business, but learning from it so that it does not come from bad customer experience is vital for us.
Analyzing lost customers regularly can tell us whether our churn rate is rising or falling. It also lets us understand the reasons behind the loss: if customers responded well to your personalized communication and became customers again, for instance, you know that team or department in your company did a good job.
Build a Community Forum
Community forum discussions are an excellent place for understanding where customers run into trouble, how they buy and use your product, and what they want. It is where you can learn directly how your customers feel about their interactions with your business or your products.
Forums can be shared through email surveys, social media or a community page, and they give customers the chance to make suggestions proactively. Community work also lets your brand advocates help your other customers. One of the most successful examples in this area is the Google support community.
Look at Your Customer Service Data
Find out how long customers have to wait before they reach a live service representative or get an answer. Long waits are a serious cause of bad customer experience.
Look for repeating problems among the support tickets too, understand why they exist and take a proactive line on them. Solving those support requests before customers bring them to you lowers the total number of tickets your representatives receive and lets you deliver an easier, more pleasant experience.
Train Your Customer Service Team
Alongside building feedback loops with customers, marketers should build them with their own staff. Customer facing people such as service representatives hold insight from direct customer input or from their own experience dealing with customers. Training your representatives gives them the basics about your company and gives your staff advance warning about the problems that may come their way.
Popular Customer Experience Platforms
Customer experience platforms are built to help brands manage their interactions with customers so that satisfaction rises. They serve as a single place where a brand can run the whole customer lifecycle journey, from overseeing engagement to responding to problems.
As your customers’ expectations keep rising, it is vital that brands use personalization to improve the customer experience. Some of the most popular customer experience platforms that could improve yours are these.
Zendesk
Zendesk lets you build an integrated help center and community forum for the people using your products, and it provides plenty of features such as a support ticket system for faster customer service. It is very easy to move around in and it carries a lot of customization; with it, every customer interaction becomes a complete journey. Its Sunshine platform also keeps every representative fully in sync, which helps your business stay coherent inside itself.
Sunshine carries a distinctive addition called the “Zendesk Marketplace”, which lets you connect to more than 1,200 applications. As the one place to find partners, apps and integrations, it raises your representatives’ productivity and smooths out the workflow.
Zendesk unfortunately has no Turkish language support.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
The most striking thing about Adobe Experience Manager is its open architecture, which lets you integrate it easily with the enterprise software systems you already run. AEM gives you a powerful enterprise toolkit covering web analytics, automated tools for personalized content experiences, and intelligent tools for adapting and delivering your assets to your audience over the internet quickly.
Its digital enrollment and forms feature can help customers at every step of the process, from purchase through to retention. The feature also lets you build responsive forms that customers can fill in easily and sign electronically, securely and encrypted.
No Turkish language support here either, unfortunately.
Satmetrix
Satmetrix, offers brands holistic customer experience solutions, omnichannel feedback and customer journey based design among them. It lets you combine and analyze feedback of every kind across the customer journey. Its VOC solution NICE Satmetrix also gives you unified customer feedback out of millions of customer interactions, so you can optimize customer experiences accurately.
Zoho CRM Plus
Zoho CRM Plus helps brands improve their customer experience through broad, unified solutions. The platform gives marketers omnichannel engagement support, social media marketing tools, marketing analytics data, chatbots and customer segmentation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Experience
Marketers and brands know that improving customer experience is necessary for raising engagement and return on investment (ROI), and many of them are short on knowledge about why it matters, how to deliver results and how to improve.
We researched and answered some of the most popular questions marketers ask about customer experience.
What is the difference between marketing and customer experience?
Marketing is designing and carrying out the effort to make a product or service appealing to a suitable audience. To be effective, marketing work has to reflect a company’s vision and mission. It should not market something that can easily be disproved. If the marketing talks about high quality customer service, for instance, the company genuinely has to deliver it.
In that sense customer experience is one of the most important parts of marketing. Any interaction with the company should reflect the values shown in the marketing material.
What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?
Put simply, customer service is only one part of the whole customer experience.
Customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparing the two, customer service refers to the specific interactions inside that experience where a customer is looking for help or support.
Customer service is usually reactive; it only comes into play when customers get in touch for support or to give feedback. Customer experience, on the other hand, is active: you can optimize how customers feel about your business before they ever reach out or run into a problem.
What causes a bad customer experience?
In short, a bad customer experience fails to meet customers’ needs. Long waits to reach customer service and having to repeat your information over and over are two serious factors behind it. Research by Qualtrics found that 80% of consumers will move to a competitor after a bad customer experience with a brand.
What is the role of a customer experience team?
The role of a customer experience team is making sure your company meets customers’ needs and expectations. That team gathers customer data such as feedback and churn rates and runs various pieces of work to solve problems and make sure they do not repeat.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management means designing ways to ensure customer interactions meet or beat expectations. The aim is building more satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. CX management can be done by focusing on marketing, sales, product and customer service.
To manage customer experience successfully and deliver value, though, businesses are better off looking at the organization as a whole rather than trying to work out how to improve each part separately. Looking at the areas one by one can be slow and can make businesses miss how those areas affect each other. Taking a more holistic view while you follow the customer journey can lead to more satisfaction and loyalty, which is to say more accurate results.
How Do You Improve Customer Experience?
There is no single template that fits every company, but here are three basic points.
- Prove that CX matters: senior management has to be directly involved in the process. One person should be responsible, holding all the authority and resources they need to improve the customer experience.
- Empower your staff : can they solve a customer’s problems? If not, why not? You can find out through an employee pulse survey. That research can surface the common pain points in the employee experience and show you where you need to improve.
- Personalize your interactions with customers : there are many ways of personalizing, and most of them can be automated. They include thank you emails sent to customers after a purchase, customer follow up surveys, and website recommendations based on user preferences.
Conclusion
Customer experience keeps changing and developing along with the technology. So companies have to keep up with it. Successful customer experience is better treated as a journey that never really ends. A proactive approach has to be the basic stance of every company. Producing solutions before problems appear also usually happens under the eye of a specialist.
