According to research, 86% of customers are willing to pay more if they have a pleasant experience with a company. This can be accomplished through Customer Experience (CX) tools, or improving the quality of the customer experience. All this works for any business from an online Casino Woo to a flower online store.
What Is Customer Experience?
CX is a marketing term that describes the overall customer experience of a company. It is built into every brand communication, from introduction to fulfillment or disengagement. The two key components of CX are Customer Service and User Experience.
Customer Service is the quality of communication between the client and the employee of the company. For example, the customer books a tour over the phone. The operator communicates in a friendly manner, answers questions and helps to choose the appropriate trip according to the financial capabilities of the customer. This is good service.
You can improve CS by exceeding the customer’s expectations. For example, if an employee finds a non-stop flight at the same price and books a hotel room in a higher class than the customer expected, this is excellent service that will be remembered by the customer. A satisfied customer can become a regular customer and will actively recommend the brand to his friends.
User Experience is mostly applied to websites: how user-friendly the interface is, what emotions the interaction with the platform evokes, whether there are problems when using it. The structure of the site, the usefulness of the content, even the colors and fonts affect the attitude of the client.
Map of the Customer Experience
A customer’s impression of a brand usually comes not from a single communication, but rather from all interactions as a whole. To encompass them, marketers create a Customer Experience Journey Map (CEJM), or customer experience map. This term is similar to another marketing term, Customer Journey Map (CJM), or customer journey map. It’s important not to confuse the two – CJM reflects a customer’s journey from introduction to transaction, while CEJM reflects a customer’s emotions along the way.
When building a Customer Experience Journey Map, you need to make a list of touchpoints with the customer, and then ask real users about their attitudes toward that segment of communication:
- First Contact. Through advertising, for example. What associations does it evoke? Where does it occur, in what context?
- Product selection and ordering. If the client browses the site, how convenient is the design? If he interacts with the manager, how is the communication structured?
- Is it convenient to pay? Are there all methods? If it’s online payment, is the user experience simplified, for example, can you scan your card and not have to enter all the data manually?
- How is feedback handled? How quickly are problems resolved?
The more opinions you get, the more objective the map will be.
What Influences the Customer Experience
Customer Experience helps a business stay in touch with the customer: know their real needs and manage their emotional state. In other words, it’s a way to make the customer like you so that they want to come back.
Conventionally, the points of customer experience can be divided into four groups:
- Brand recognition and positioning.
- Culture of communication, attitude of employees to the consumer and to each other.
- Usability in sales: the interface of the site, accessibility and the interior of offices.
- Eco-friendliness, unobtrusive advertising, work with feedback, bonuses.
Problems in any group can ruin the customer experience and lead to a loss of loyalty. For example, a technology store is fine with brand recognition, customers easily find platforms to communicate with the business, and employees are loyal to customers and genuinely want to help them. But all these advantages and work are leveled by problems: the store is located on the second floor, where a narrow staircase leads, it is stuffy, and the staff is constantly understaffed and because of this only one cash register works. Accordingly, the customer experience will be ruined.
You can identify these mistakes by taking a CJEM or customer survey yourself.
How to Track the Customer Experience
Customer Experience research is an ongoing process. You can use marketing tools to collect data: monitoring the reputation of the brand in the media and social media, engaging mystery shoppers, and conducting customer surveys.
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a measure of consumer effort. It measures how many actions a user has to perform in order to solve his task. The less effort, the higher customer loyalty.
To calculate CES, you need to gather a group of customers and ask them to rate the effort they spent to complete a transaction. They are usually asked to choose from five options: very little, little, medium, much, very much.
The more people who didn’t spend a lot of effort, the better. Those who reported a lot of effort can be asked qualifying questions.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index of customer loyalty. It shows how customers feel about your company. Customers are asked the question “Would you be willing to recommend this company to your friends and acquaintances?” on a scale of 0 to 10, where “0” means “never” and “10” means “definitely recommend.”
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is an index of customer satisfaction. It’s similar to NPS, but offers fewer answer choices. Usually it is used to evaluate not the whole business, but a specific situation or transaction. For example, you are offered to evaluate the quality of service, choosing from four options: excellent, good, satisfactory, poor. Those who rated “satisfactory” and “poor” must be questioned in detail to improve the Customer Experience based on their responses.