Customer Experience is the sum of all the experiences your customers and potential customers have during every interaction with your brand.
Investing in customer experience drives revenue growth and increases customer loyalty.
According to Gartner, customer experience will be the main battleground for competing companies over the next two years. And when researchers analyzed the experience and revenue data from two $1 billion+ companies for a recent study published in the Harvard Business Review, they found that:
In transaction-based businesses, customers who had the best experiences spent 140% more than customers who had the worst experiences
According to Forrester, CX is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. They define good customer experiences as being made up of three things from the customer’s perspective:
- Useful—they deliver value
- Usable—the value is easy to find and engage with
- Enjoyable—they’re emotionally engaging and people want to use them
What we do
1. Create a clear customer experience vision
The first step in your customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate with your organization. The easiest way to define this vision is to create a set of statements that act as guiding principles.
For example, BrandFace use their BrandFace core family values and these values are embedded into their culture; which includes delivering wow through service, be humble and embracing change.
Once these principles are in place, they will drive the behavior of your organization. Every member of your team should know these principles by heart and they should be embedded into all areas of training and development.
2. Understand who your customers are
The next step in building upon these customer experience principles is to bring to life the different type of customers who deal with your customer sales representative. If your organization is going to really understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to connect and empathize with the situations that your customers face.
One way to do this is to create customer personas and give each persona a name and personality. For example, Anne is 35 years old; she likes new technology and is tech savvy enough to follow a video tutorial on her own, whereas John (42 years old) needs to be able to follow clear instructions on a web page.
By creating personas, your CSR can recognize who they are and understand them better. It’s also an important step in becoming truly customer centric.
3. Create an emotional connection with your customers
You’ve heard the phrase “it’s not what you say; its how you say it”?
Well, the best customer experiences are achieved when a member of your team creates an emotional connection with a customer.
One of the best examples of creating an emotional connection comes here. A customer was late on returning a pair of shoes due to her mother passing away. When the company found out what happened, they took care of the return shipping and had a courier pick up the shoes without cost. But, the company didn’t stop there. The next day, the customer arrived home to a bouquet of flowers with a note from the company customer service team who sent their condolences.
Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is based on an emotion as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions.
Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached and they remember how they feel when they use a product or service. A business that optimizes for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85% in sales growth.
4. Measure the ROI from delivering great customer experience
And finally, how do you know if all this investment in your teams, process and technology are working and paying off?
The answer is in the business results.
Measuring customer experience is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations, which is why many companies use the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS, which collects valuable information by asking a single straightforward question:
“Would you recommend this company to a friend or relative?”