What is Customer Experience?
8th January 2021
A recent survey has shown that only 10% of brands excel in providing a great customer experience!
So what are brands missing and how can you improve your customer experience offering?
A positive customer experience is crucial to the success of your business. After all, a happy customer is likely to become a loyal, lifetime customer.
How people perceive your brand comes down to their experience. Their journey from start to finish contributes to their perception and evaluation of your brand. Important factors that relate to your bottom line.
When customer experience becomes the core part of any brand it brings tangible benefits. If your company is one that promotes its ethos to be based around putting your customers first, then delivering an excellent customer service experience is fundamental to that.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience is about understanding your customer journey. Learning what your customer experiences from the moment they discover your brand or consider making a purchase all the way through to the point beyond the purchase being completed.
It’s about improving the relationship between you and your customer to make their journey as simple and efficient as possible.
“Customer Experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with an organisation over the life of the ‘relationship’ with that company – and especially or importantly, the feelings, emotions, and perceptions the customer has about those interactions.”
– Annette Franz
Know your customers
You might feel that you have a good understanding of your current customers, but unless you’ve already mastered the customer journey map, there’s likely still some key customer insight you’re missing out on.
There’s a big difference between knowing the demographics of your customer personas and knowing their wants and needs in relation to your product or service you provide.
This can easily be accomplished with a customer journey map. Without a proper journey map, you’re missing out on some key behaviours of your customers. This can be extremely risky as you don’t want to waste time and money by repeatedly targeting the wrong audience.
Create a strategy
Changing your business to be customer-centric isn’t easy but it’s not impossible. It simply requires a collective mindset shift to put customers at the forefront of all decisions.
A journey map will help you identify the areas that need improvement. Once you’ve identified the issues, you can prioritize them and implement the changes necessary to improve the experience.
Follow this up with a behaviour shift that brings the customers voice into all meetings, decisions, services and more.
Measure Success
Fuelling your customer experience strategy is only half the battle. Measuring each touchpoint is equally as important. Learning what is working and what isn’t to change and adapt your strategy.
Following a 3 step framework, you can easily measure each component. It is important to measure the journey as a whole as well as breaking it down into the different phases and the granular individual touchpoints.
Don’t confuse with Customer Service
However, don’t mistake the customer experience for customer service. Customer service is just what cog in the machine of CX. A strong customer experience ultimately leads to impressed shoppers that are likely to turn into loyal customers. Ideally, we would all like to have exclusively positive feedback but that’s not a realistic goal. Having a strong customer service system that handles negative feedback in a polite and positive way, whilst trying to resolve the issue is important.
Build Brands
Realistically, in today’s climate, the customers are the ones with all the power. They have an excess of options at their fingertips in almost any market. Combined with the resources needed to educate them, they can easily make purchasing decisions on their own. And this is only growing by the minute!
84% of consumers no longer trust adverts. Instead, these shoppers seek third-party validation. If you offer an exceptional customer experience customers will advocate your brand for you. Imagine if you could turn every customer into an advocate how much your business would grow.
If you want help from the experts, drop us an email and see how we can help you.
Here at Bopgun, we use our creativity to enhance the experience of your customers. We consider every interaction and touchpoint of your customers’ journey in order to enhance the perception of their encounter with your business or brand.
With the customer at the heart of everything we do, our range of strategic, creative, technical and commercial expertise enables us to identify how all the different elements of your customers’ journey fit together.
