BrandingDigital Transformation

What is Customer Experience? Why It is the Ultimate Marketing Tool

Consumer’s perception can make or break your business. The importance of the customer experience cannot be understated as it is the heart of every successful business. A happy and satisfied customer is more likely to turn into a loyal customer and an advocate for your brand. 

The way you look at customer experience impacts how you run and manage your business as a whole. A customer-centric approach across all departments helps businesses grow sustainably. That’s why creating and maintaining a great customer experience is crucial to your success. 

In this article you’ll get your hands on proven and tested strategies and examples on how to create seamless consumer experiences. 

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business. Every interaction customers have with your brand during the customer journey shapes their perspective. It results in how they perceive your brand as a whole and ultimately impacting your brand reputation and revenue. 

The two main touchpoints that shape a customer’s experience are people and product. The former refers to the quality of interactions between the customer and your customer service agents. While the latter refers to the performance of your product or service.

Why is customer experience important?

The exact reason why and how the customer experience is important for businesses depends on their goals and the industry they compete in. Having a poor customer experience can damage your reputation and cost you revenue, customers, and your most valuable employees.

Unsatisfied customers will most likely express their dissatisfactions in an online review, which can significantly impact your brand image and reputation. With the being said, customer reviews are powerful; they can be your best sale person when handled properly with a great attention to customer service and experience.  

Remember customers have a plethora of options at their fingertips, so it’s important to provide a remarkable experience and educate them on your brand and products.

A positive customer experience can be crucial to any business’s sustained growth since it promotes customer loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy. 

More benefits of delivering a high-quality customer experience include:

  • High customer retention as 93% of customers who love the service they receive will become valuable repeat customers.
  • Increase customer loyalty through warm and positive interactions, which results in a 306% higher lifetime value for customers if they have spent time with you.‌
  • Boost sales and conversions as 86% of customers say they’re willing to spend more for a better customer experience.

How to measure customer experience?

  • Measuring Net Promoter Score
  • Identify Churn Rate
  • Feature requests
  • Analyze customer support ticket trends

Measuring customer experience helps businesses define and prioritize what works and what doesn’t. Important initiatives that you can undertake to measure customer experience are calculating the Net Promoter Score, identifying the churn rate, feature requests, and analyzing customer service ticket trends. 

Let’s dive deeper in how you can use these 4 methodologies to measure customer experience:

Measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS)

customer experience measurement
Net Promoter Score Formula

A great indicator of how well customers are satisfied with the products and services your brand offers is by analyzing the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures the probability that your customers will recommend your brand to their friends, family, and colleagues. This gives you valuable insights into people’s personal experiences, which can help you increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The use of customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis is a valuable marketing tool. This will provide valuable insights into your customer experience with your brand and product or service throughout the whole customer journey. These insights will tell you what you need to improve and where you already provide an excellent experience. 

Identify Churn rate

Churn Rate Formula

The churn rate is the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period of time. For example the number of subscribers who cancel or do not renew their subscriptions. The churn rate is a useful indicator of how well a business is retaining customers. This reflects the quality of service the company is providing, as well as its usefulness.

Nevertheless, its limitation is that it does not define the types of customers that are dissatisfied. This is because newly acquired customers are more likely to leave than retained customers. Therefore, calculating the churn rate regularly can provide valuable insights into why customer retention increases or decreases so that appropriate action can be taken.

Feature requests

Feature requests are a form of product feedback to discover ways to improve your product and better serve the users’ ever-evolving needs. A smooth feature request process can demonstrate to your customers that you’re listening to them and prioritizing their needs, in turn earning their trust and loyalty.

In order to achieve this, start by creating a centralized place to capture and organize feature requests that helps you gather valuable data. Analyzing this data will help you figure out what aspects within the business need to be improved. After consistently gathering, prioritizing and handling feature requests, the overall brand image and customer experience will improve drastically.

Analyze customer support ticket trends.

Whenever your customers interact with your contact center or help desk, you receive valuable data that can inform your customer experience. Once you review the data consistently, you will begin to observe trends in the submitted tickets. You can use these insights to determine how well your team interacts with customers and which product issues to focus on. 

By implementing this process, the total number of tickets reps receive will be reduced while the customer experience will be streamlined and enjoyable.

4 proven and tested strategies + examples to improve customer experience

Personalization

Personalizing consumer experiences throughout the entire customer journey can help create long-term relationships between the brand and the buyer. Personalization can take on many forms, like thank you emails to customers after purchase, follow-up surveys, recommendation based on user preferences. The purpose of personalization is to make customers feel valued even after the sale is made. This is a great way to boost the overall customer experience.

Grammarly makes use of all the data it collects from its users to deliver weekly reports, providing an analysis of their writing technique. These personalized features establish the brand as a vital tool for content creators, writers or people worried about silly typos in their emails.

It also acts as an upselling strategy, reminding users that they’ll get even deeper insights into their writing habits and fix more problems if they upgrade to a paid account.

How Grammarly makes editing suggestion based on user's context input

Implement customer loyalty programs

Creating a loyalty program specifically designed for your audience is a great way to build a long-term relation between the customer and the brand. The aim is to incentivize customers to spend more money on your products or services in order to let them ‘earn’ the benefits.

A well-structured and personalized loyalty program can generate significant benefits in recurring revenue for your business by improving customer experience. Here’s how Starbucks Reward Program became the pioneer of using a omnichannel experience with their loyalty program:

Did you know that Starbucks was one of the first businesses that used a mobile app to run a loyalty program? Customers could use the app to accumulate loyalty points but they had to pay with the app.  

The brand used these centralized customer transactions in the app to gather valuable information on their customer preferences and behavior. As a result, they were able to boost the customer experience by creating personalized experiences. For example, recommendations based on previous consumption and go-to Starbucks recommendations when customers are on the road.

Build an omnichannel strategy for a better customer experience

An omnichannel approach is all about making the customer’s life as easy as possible. Building an omnichannel experience is a great tool to meet this ever-growing need. The strategy includes multiple channels for sales, customer support, and marketing. 

In order to create a successful omnichannel experience, you must be able to make it as easy as possible for customers to connect with the brand through their preferred channels. This in the end contributes to better team productivity and an improved customer experience.

For example, there is a common frustration among customers who place online food and beverage orders that they still have to wait for their orders to be processed, assuming they can pick it up immediately. The fast food chain, Chipotle, aims to eliminate that frustration by using an online system and mobile ordering app that allows its users to place an order wherever they are. It ensures that no matter what the order includes, it will be ready by the time they arrive.

Implement customer feedback to enhance customer experience

Measuring customer satisfaction is a profound first step in improving the overall customer experience. Several proven and tested strategies for measuring customer experience are already presented in this article. 

Now it’s time to use this information and choose the right channels for communicating with your customers to gather actionable feedback. With channels like live chat, in-app, or chatbots, you can get customer feedback almost immediately after each interaction. This process helps us understand how customers feel about the product and how satisfied they are with it. Ultimately, you will be able to provide better experiences to consumers.

Among businesses that utilize the power of customer feedback is Uber. This brand is well known as a consistent innovator in the rideshare space, which developed a two-way feedback system for customers: riders and drivers.

For Uber, it was essential to consider both drivers and riders as customers. This is because satisfied drivers will want to drive for Uber, and happier drivers empower happier customers who will appreciate the company’s services.

Final thoughts

Creating seamless consumer experiences cannot be understated as they can make or break your business. Therefore, it is crucial to use customer feedback to identify how key points along your customer’s journey can be improved. As soon as you begin doing this on a regular basis, you’ll start noticing trends that will reveal valuable insights that hold the key to an unparalleled customer experience.

Having helped businesses create seamless customer experiences, we know the time and effort needed to get a project like this off the ground. That’s why our team of experts is ready to guide you with proven and tested framework that ignites a digital transformation within your business.

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