What Is A Customer Experience
A customer’s experience (or CX) is how the customer defines the experience they have had with you and your enterprise. This can be anything from the experience they have online on your website, to physical interactions.
A customer’s experience carries a huge amount of influence on other potential customers. For this reason, brands are now investing a lot more time and effort into ensuring that their customer experience is top-notch.
As Bob Hooey said, “If you are not taking care of your customers, your competitor will.”
How You Can Gauge A Customers Experience
There are so many different ways that can be applied to gauge a customer experience when dealing with you and your brand.
One of the more popular ways to analyze a customer’s experience is by looking at the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS asks customers to rate their experiences from 1-10. An example question would be ‘How likely are you to recommend X company to a friend?’. The customer when then provide a score with 1 being very unlikely to 10 being exceptionally likely. The score is then reviewed with any answer being between 1-6 classified as a detractor, 7 and 8 being passive, and 9-10 being classified as promotors. The NPS score is then calculated by deducting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Other ways organizations are able to measure a customer’s experience is by analyzing customer’s journey analytics, carry out customer surveys, and measuring satisfaction scores.
These different ways to collect data work in different ways. Gauging customer satisfaction (CSAT) is typically an automated survey the customer will be passed through to or asked to complete usually within 30 minutes of the inquiry. This enables the data to be collected to be almost instantly. Whilst in comparison, looking at the analytics requires so much data to be collected for review and provides an understanding of the customer’s experience over a set time period.
How Can A Customer’s Experience Be Optimized
So as you know, it is vital that you ensure your customer’s experience is a positive one. A positive customer experience converts to a loyal customer, that will return for further business or via word of mouth share your brands via recommendations.
Here are a variety of different ways that can be implemented within your organization to boost those customer experience scores.
Outsource
Hire a company to help with your customer experience optimization. Irrespective of the size of your organization there are professionals who focus on collecting this information, identifies can weaknesses, and then comes up with strategies to improve the numbers. The benefit of this is that can you can continue to focus on what you do best within your company without having to increase your workload.
Ensure Accurate Data Is Collected
Your customer experience starts with any type of engagement with you and your brands or organization. This could be from the website, referral, telephone, email, or face to face. It is important that whichever avenue they use, their experience is to the highest standard. It is also vital here to ensure that when you are collecting the data about their experience you are covering all channels, enabling you to focus on any areas that require certain focus areas.
Proactively Focus On Providing Superior Customer Experience
Build customer experience into your organization’s performance strategy. A customer’s experience should be all about the customer. A positive customer experience will generate repeat business and a word-of-mouth experience.
If you use digital and online services, you could start including live chat’. This provides the customer with instant engagement by being able to answer queries immediately. This then reduces will then improve ‘first contact resolution’(FRT) statics.
Upskill Your Staff To Support Your Customers Experience
In the majority of all cases, your employees are the first point of contact for the majority of customers, and like all first impressions, they are lasting.
With that in mind, it is important that your organization sets an expected standard for its customer’s experiences.
This can be achieved by holding and carrying out regular training sessions to continue keeping the skills at this standard and implementing any changes as and when identified.
It is also vital that your employees carry a clear knowledge of your business and products and that they can discuss with your customers with authority. In addition to ensuring product and business knowledge is held, it is also beneficial to invest in working on all employees ‘soft skills’ – these employees represent you and your organization. It is vital their etiquette supports this.
