A complete guide with everything you need to know about Customer Experience

In this article you will learn what Customer Experience (CX) is, why is it important and examples to improve the experience you offer inside and outside your organization.

Who are your customers? What are their needs? What is the right channel to inform them about your offers, products and services? How can you create positive experiences and maintain the relationship with the client in the long term?

You should be able to answer each of the above questions since they are critical for the customer experience of your organization.

The long-term success of your business is only possible with satisfied customers. That is why today, in addition to knowing what Customer Experience is, you will discover the best methods to keep this indicator at the most optimal levels to ensure your business success.

What is workplace culture?

Customer Experience is one of the most important aspects of your company. Poor service from your employees can turn away customers and lead to bad reviews.

Just as customer service is important, there is a metric that is equally vital for your business: Customer Experience.

Measuring the experience and focusing on improvement is an essential step in increasing brand loyalty and retention.

Use this guide on Customer Experience to understand and learn how you can use feedback surveys and start creating a positive experience for your customers.

Before starting the guide, we will define what Customer Experience is. So, if you want to know more, continue reading.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is what a customer thinks of your brand based on the relationship they have with each other. Although the Customer Experience is a simple concept, it has complex implications.

Customer Experience includes every interaction that consumers have with your brand. Your customers use these interactions to form perceptions and opinions about your products, services and the brand in general.

Example of Customer Experience

Let's say you have a favorite brand of bread. You enjoy this brand's bread because the product tastes good, the company is charitable, and the price is affordable. The customer experience with the brand has been good, leaving you with a positive thought.

On the other hand, you may have tried another brand's bread in the past. You found out that this brand has high prices and unethical business practices, and that the bread itself doesn't taste great either. Thanks to poor customer experience, this brand lost you as a customer, and you are likely to tell your friends and family to avoid buying it.

This is the process of managing the points of contact between your brand. Good Customer Experience Management (CXM) personalizes interactions for each audience. Your goal should be to make every one of your customers feel important and valued.

If you like this article about Customer Experience, you might be interested in reading types of surveys in customer experience management.

5 benefits of positive Customer Experience

As a business owner, you know it’s vital to increase sales or customer acquisitions. However, when you focus solely on sales metrics and pinpointed data, you risk losing ground in the overall success of your brand.

By focusing on the entire customer experience, you build relationships with customers. This ultimately leads to your goals of increased sales and acquisitions, as well as other benefits.

As you learn how to improve customer experience, remember that a good customer experience usually helps:

• Increase brand loyalty: High-quality customer experiences lead to a higher level of customer loyalty. Today’s customers have plenty of options, so you have to find a way to make your brand their top choice. Building a positive, trusting relationship with customers keeps them coming back to your brand instead of choosing a competitor.
• Reduce customer churn: Customer churn happens when an existing customer no longer interacts with your business. This customer has stopped buying your product and has also ended their relationship with your business. A high customer churn rate means you have a lot of customers who stop communicating with your business. As it’s much less expensive and easier to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones, reducing your customer churn is important for your success. Address the needs and wants of your customers to give them a great customer experience. This will lead to repeat customers.
• Create brand advocates: Advocates of your brand are part of your loyal customer base. However, brand advocates take brand loyalty to the next level. In addition to purchasing your products or using your services, advocates make a point to tell family, friends, and acquaintances about your business. Word-of-mouth marketing is still one of the most effective strategies out there, so it’s worthwhile to go the extra mile and create a new advocate.
• Address customer concerns: Your business is going to face negative feedback at some point. What you do with that feedback is important to the future of your brand. Part of customer experience is dealing with negative feedback after a customer has an interaction that’s below expectations.
  
  When you build relationships with customers, they’re more likely to send concerns directly to you instead of airing them publicly. If a customer has a poor experience and gives you direct feedback, you can use that to improve the experience at the next interaction. Measuring customer experience also lets you anticipate concerns your customers might have so you can address issues before they happen.
• Streamline market research: Your business naturally gets to know its customers better when you take a customer-focused approach, which means you can meet their needs more effectively. This allows you to spend less time on market research because you already know your customers and how they will likely react to changes.

How to measure Customer Experience through surveys

Sending surveys to customers is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to monitor customer experience. Customer feedback surveys let you capture a large amount of data without the added cost of running in-person interviews or focus groups.

Reasons you should be measuring customer experience with surveys include:

Reasons you should be measuring Customer Experience with surveys include:

• Affordable: Online survey platforms make it easy and cost-effective to create and send feedback surveys.
• Easy tracking: You’re able to see who has opened and completed your survey, as well as send reminders to those who haven’t taken it.
• Reach more people: Interviews and focus groups limit the number of customers giving you feedback. Surveys let you reach the majority of your customer base through email surveys, SMS, and surveys embedded on your website.
• Efficient: Creating and sending surveys through an online platform streamlines the process so you can focus on the data you receive.
• Real-time results: See the responses to your survey as your customers complete it. You’ll be able to catch and address concerns right away.
• User-friendly: An online survey platform makes it simple to create a custom customer experience survey and analyze your results.

Top five survey features for measuring Customer Experience

Surveys are one of the research tools to get to know customers and measure their customer experience.

Once you know how your customers perceive your brand, you can start building a CXM plan and focus on how to improve customer experience. The following type of questions are just a few examples of measuring your customer experience:

Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a single question that helps quantify a customer’s brand loyalty. It also identifies your brand’s advocates. The question asks respondents to rate how likely they are to recommend a brand to friends and family. An NPS survey uses a scale of 0-10, with zero being Very Unlikely to recommend your brand and 10 being Very Likely to recommend your brand.

Customers are categorized depending on their answers. Customers who are likely to recommend your products rated a 9 or 10. These customers are known as Promoters. Those who answered with a 7 or 8 are considered Passive customers. Passive customers usually have a good experience, but not enough to actively promote your business. Finally, scores between 0-6 come from Detractors. Detractors did not have a good experience and, depending on their experience, may recommend that family and friends stay away.

You can customize when you use NPS to maximize its effectiveness. For example, send out an NPS question right after a customer makes a purchase, as it’s a good starting point to help measure brand loyalty and identify your advocates.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

The customer satisfaction metric (CSAT) looks at the overall feel a customer has for a brand, product, or service.

Most CSAT questions ask a customer to rate their experience after a specific event, such as a transaction. For example, you own a restaurant and want to know how your waitstaff is performing. You send diners a survey right after their visit and ask them to rate their satisfaction with customer service.

The answers for a CSAT question range from Extremely Unsatisfied to Extremely Satisfied. This data helps you understand where customers are having the best and worst experiences throughout their journeys.

To continue with the restaurant example, if your CSAT scores dip when customers are asked about their satisfaction with your waitstaff, you can use this information to help build customer service training for your waitstaff.

Customer effort score (CES)

Like CSAT, Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the satisfaction of your customers, or more specifically the ease of completing a transaction with your brand.

This could include how easy it was to make a purchase, resolve a customer service issue, or even navigate your website.

Generally, the more effort a customer has to make to resolve an issue, the more likely they are to shop somewhere else next time. However, less effort doesn’t always lead to higher loyalty. This means you should strive to make transactions easy for your customers, but you’ll need to go above and beyond to create a customer experience that increases loyalty.

Open-ended questions

Adding open-ended questions to your customer experience surveys gives your customers the opportunity to expand on their opinions. Many businesses find that an open-ended question after a customer experience rating helps them pinpoint areas of improvement.

In the restaurant example, you ask customers to rate their experience with the waitstaff. You then ask a follow-up, open-ended question asking them to explain their rating. You learn that many customers feel service was not prompt enough. You can then work with your team to improve efficiency while serving customers.

Report creation and sharing

Question types aren’t the only important part of a customer experience survey. You need to be able to analyze the data you collect. Choose a survey platform that offers analytics reporting and the ability to share reports and data. Report sharing allows you to communicate with other decision-makers and team members to showcase the findings of your surveys.

How to improve Customer Experience

With a better understanding of customer experience, it’s time to look at how to improve customer experience. A great advantage of customer experience is that you often don’t need to invest a lot of money or overhaul your business systems to improve it. You simply need to take a customer-first approach to run your business.

• Implement a customer-centric strategy: Great customer experience begins with placing the customer at the center of all the company's concerns. Before focusing on the product, you must first start by learning and understanding what customers are looking for. The business must be able to think of everything, be it offers, products, services, etc. And then do what is necessary to adapt them to the expectations and needs of the client.
• Offer a frictionless customer journey: To improve the customer experience, it is important to provide consumers with a smooth and comfortable shopping experience thorughout their Customer Journey. Everything must be practical and impeccable. From the moment of purchase to the moment of delivery, the customer must be able to benefit from all the easy and fast means, in particular offered. For your part, you must be attentive to what customers want and offer them an adequate offer, so that they can enjoy a good customer experience and become brand ambassadors.
• Promote a multi-channel experience: Nowadays there are a large number of channels through which customers can communicate with the company, be it by phone, SMS, email, social networks, or chat. To improve the customer experience, the company must be able to provide its services through different channels. Of course, this may require investment in many effective communication tools. However, it is worth it for the benefits you can get.
• Develop a personalized experience: There is nothing better to engage consumers than offering them personalized products and services. This allows them to get what they really need and build brand loyalty. Your organization can do this very well by conducting a process of collecting data from customers, processes, businesses and devices. This research will help you work in advance to cover the needs of the client and meet their expectations.
• Listen to customers: Surveys help you collect the opinions of your customers, but they won’t help if you don’t listen to what customers are saying. Be sure to collect responses from multiple sources so you get an idea of what your entire audience thinks of your brand. This might include a social media survey as well as an email survey to capture different demographics.
• Act on feedback: The results of your surveys will give you an idea of how your customers feel about their interactions with your brand. Use this feedback to improve your processes and customer service to enhance the experience.
  
  You shouldn’t just wait for negative feedback, either. Look for trends in your customer experience responses to help you identify pain points before they become an issue. For example, you notice a lot of customers see your retail store prices as too high. You can provide new products or offer special, limited-time discounts to help retain these customers before they go to a competitor.
• Go a step further: Nothing improves customer experience like a business that goes the extra mile. The best part is how much a small gesture can help. Encourage employees to make personal connections with customers and provide a higher level of service than is expected.
  
  Say a customer asks for help finding the dress section at your clothing store. Your employee only needs to point the customer in the right direction to solve their problem. However, they could also lead the customer to the area and help them find a specific style and bolster that customer’s opinion of the store’s staff.

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If you want to offer great customer experiences, try QuestionPro CX for 10 days (free) and find out how it feels like to have everything in one place: extensive toolbox set, survey creation, deployment, flexible dashboards, closed-loop feedback, data segmentation, and more!

QuestionPro CX offers actionable data to help you manage customer experience. Take a live demo of the QuestionPro customer experience management platform and have a 360-degree view of your customers' interactions with your business.