Customer Experience

What is your customer’s experience like within your brand?

Customer Experience (CX) is about each customer’s perception of your company, brand, and product. This perception is based on all the interactions that customer’s have with your employees, brand, messages, and product across every channel.

Customer Experience Management (CEM): This is managing how your customers experience with your brand and helping to improve their experience. Businesses do this by using various tools to create a seamless relationship with their customers. 

Customer Experience Management Software: This refers to software solutions that help businesses track the relationship with their customers. This software can also help the business analyze insights  and track relevant data to improve CX. 

CEM vs CRM: The main difference between Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is CEM focuses on ensuring the best customer experience and CRM is focused on managing relationships and maximizing revenue. 

Proactive Customer Engagement: A tactic used by companies that anticipates the customer’s needs to ensure a great experience. Company’s do this by taking the customer journey into consideration to determine the customer’s needs. 

CX in Marketing: Customer Experience is every touchpoint that a customer has with your brand. Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service play the largest roles in the touch points the customer has with your brand. Marketing typically takes care of all the branding, social media, events, website ect, these can often be the first interaction that customers have with your brand. Ensuring you have consistency and a strong brand identity is essential to securing new customers. 

Customer Experience Survey: A survey designed to feel out what the customer experience is within your brand and where you can improvement. This is a great opportunity to find out what customers love about your brand and where improvements could be made. 

Customer Experience Survey Examples: Ensuring you are asking the right questions is important. Here are a sample of questions you could ask to gain insight to the overall Customer Experience within your business. 

• On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate our company’s customer service?
• What did you like about shopping with our business?
• If you had to change one thing about your experience with us what would it be?
• What do we not do that you wish we did? 
• Why did you choose to shop with us?

CX Roadmap: Creating a CX Roadmap is simple and can make a big impact on customers experience. It will ensure your company stays committed to constantly improving customer experiences and stay ahead of customer expectations. The 5 steps to creating a CX Roadmap are: 

• Know Your Customers: Every business has different types of customers and knowing your customers is key to understanding what they want. Through surveys and compiling data, you can understand what your customer’s need.  

• Understand Your Customers: Now that you have collected data about your customers it’s time to analyze the data. You can figure out what is important to the customers, and why they are purchasing from your brand. This survey can provide insights about why customer have chosen your brand and key differentiators from competitors. 

• Map the Customer Journey: Ensuring you map the Customer Journey is key to better understand customers and their needs. This will show why there is a difference between customer survey answers and what’s important to customers at each stage. There are 5 steps in a Customer Journey: 

• • Awareness: This is when a potential customer first becomes aware of a brand.
  • Consideration: When a potential customer investigates a product/ brand to determine if it’s right for them.
  • Purchase: When the customer makes the purchase.
  • Post Purchase: When a customer has just purchased the product and weighs the price paid vs use. Customers then determines if they will purchase the product again.  
  • Loyal Customer: This phase is reserved for customers who purchase from your brand continuously. 

• CX Improvement Goals: Figure out the area’s of CX that is lower than expected. Next, create a plan to improve and set timelines for these goals. Ensure you are consistently sending out surveys to track the changes to ensure the adjustments made are effective. 
• Set Milestones and Benchmarks: It’s important to set improvement goals and long term goals/ benchmarks. Knowing where you are headed allows CX initiatives to move toward a singular goal. I’s essential to track the progress because you can’t manage and improve what you don’t measure. 

Prioritizing customer feedback can be challenging. Here are some helpful hints to determine what you should prioritize: 

1. If you are getting lots of customers giving you feedback about the same thing, you should investigate and figure out what customers either like or dislike about a certain product. 
2. It’s an ongoing situation. If you get customers complaining about an aspect of your product or service that continues to be an issue, then you should do a deeper dive to figure out what the larger issue is. 
3. If you have gotten a couple customers mentioning the same thing that is an easy thing to fix, then fix it. Though it might not be a majority of customers, it is a simple thing to do that will make a positive impact. Example: You work at a garden centre and customers have complained about the flower seeds being in the far back corner. An easy fix would be to move the shelves that hold the flower seeds closer to the front. 
4. If there is a risk to customers’ security, this should always take TOP priority. If you get even one customer saying that their account got hacked, they have fraudulent charges from your business, there is something in your store/ business that poses a physical risk to people, or anything else that poses a financial, security or physical risk to your customers, this needs to be fixed immediately. 
5. Only consider constructive feedback. Everyone who has worked in customer service knows that some people complain for the sake of complaining, it is important to note these people and filter them out. 

There are 5 Pillars of Customer Experience, and they should be kept in mind while planning your CX Roadmap. 

• Focus on the Customer: By putting all the focus on the customer, and making sure their experience remains your top priority is what CX is all about. Thinking about the Customer Journey from start to finish and consider steps that could have improved CX initiatives, is critical. You always need to think about how it will improve the customers time with your brand.  

• Listen to your Customer: Ensuring you are consistently surveying customers will let you know what they currently think of your brand, where you are doing well and where you can improve. Taking all of this information into consideration will show you where you next CX steps should be. 

• Improve Customer Support: The main touch points for customers should constantly be improving to ensure customers know that a business is striving to improve themselves. These days the best way to improve customer support is by using technologies such as social media, email, SMS and using a chat box. These technologies allow customer to quickly be able to contact customer support.   

• Empower Every Employee: Ensure every member of your team is empowered to make decisions, this shows the customer that you have confidence in your employees. 
• Make CX part of Company Culture: When onboarding new employees it is important to make sure they know that customers always come first. By showing them that customers come first, that attitude will echo to the customer. CX is something that is good to always review with existing employees and remind them why it is important to make great customer experiences!