What is customer experience (CX)?
In simple terms, customer experience is how customers feel when they see, understand, and interact with your product.
Is it applicable only when they're consuming your product?
No. It includes all the stages of customer interaction: pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.
It starts the moment someone lands on your website. It extends to your user interface and how you navigate your visitors through your content and convert them into customers.
Also, customer experience is not just limited to the engineering aspects of your product. It also includes your brand's overall attitude towards customers: how your support team interacts, hears, and resolves their queries. It even comes into play in how you treat your customers when they leave your product/service.
In a meta sense, customer experience also includes how customers feel about your product even when they're not using it.
The terms “customer experience” and “customer engagement” are often used synonymously, but they're not the same. Check out our blog to know the difference between customer experience and customer engagement, and how the two go hand-in-hand.
Benefits of improving customer experience
In the past, low-cost and unique marketing placements were attractive enough to bring customers to the store. But today, brands have to do a lot more.
Why? Because the customer is king.
Brands can no longer be negligent about their designs, language, and user interface or be lethargic about how their customer support works. The internet gave power to every customer out there. If they're not treated well, customers can harm brands.
How?
A few decades ago, people didn't have access to convey their opinions on mass media. Social media platforms changed these dynamics and brought people virtually together, closer than ever.
When a brand fails to offer good customer support to one individual, the individual can take the issue online and bring it to the notice of thousands of other customers. It affects the brand's value and reputation among its present customers and those who're considering using the brand.
An individual customer can cause multiple ripples the brand cannot control. Ultimately it could result in financial as well as reputation/branding loss.
Fortunately, access to the internet is a double-edged sword.
Yes, customers can harm a brand that's not providing a satisfying customer experience, but, at the same time, when a brand does provide excellent CX, it will create positive ripples for that brand.
A satisfied customer could share their positive experience on the internet, and it'll grab the attention of both current customers as well as those interested in that brand. It'll in turn increase the reputation and value of the brand without them having to spend anything.
Build brand reputation and earn loyalty with customer experience
Is customer experience only about these viral moments?
No. CX is not something that is practiced expecting something in return. It doesn't work that way. Customers can feel the artificiality in it.
It's about naturally constructing the elements of CX, which should make every interaction with your product a joy for the customers.
Even for a brand that hasn't heard about CX, its ultimate goal is to make the customer happy. Only by making them happy can they expect their customers to stay with them. If not, churn will happen, and the brand will fade away.
When customers are satisfied, they tend to stick to the brand, increasing brand loyalty. A loyal customer is an unpaid spokesperson for your brand.
If a brand can achieve that, they've got an army of loyal customers who'd be there with them for life. That is why providing a great customer experience is important.
We can take the example of Apple here. If there are multiple alternatives available on the market for every Apple product, why are people spending more to buy Apple products?
Because Apple made it their mission to provide the best possible customer experience, which turned their customers into loyal spokespersons. When you talk to any Apple user, they will try to convince you to buy or at least try the Apple products. Apple doesn't pay them to praise their products. They praise them because that's the loyalty Apple has earned by providing awesome CX.
Customer experience vs. Customer service
The terms customer experience and customer service are often understood interchangeably, but there is a sea of differences between what they convey.
Customer experience is about creating a memorable, helpful, and happy experience for your customers, whereas customer service is about providing assistance and solution to customers in need.
The other differences between customer experience and customer service are as follows:
- Customer experience starts from when they visit your website as just a prospect, and continues as they become a customer and even when they come to your support team for assistance. Meanwhile, customer service kicks in only when the customers come to your support team. So customer service comes under the broad spectrum of customer experience, and it plays a critical role in the success of your experience strategy.
- Customer experience requires businesses to be proactive, i.e., customers should be able to experience it even if they're not initiating any interaction with your business. But customer service can only be provided reactively. i.e., only after your customers ask for it.
- Since the goals of customer experience and customer service are different, they are also measured by different metrics. While Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer loyalty and retention, Churn, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), etc. are attached to customer experience, Response time, First Contact Resolution (FCR), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, etc. are measured to determine the results of customer service.
The evolution of customer experience
Even though the origin of customer experience can be traced back a few decades, it wasn't cautiously practiced by businesses in their day-to-day activities, nor did it cover the multiple stages of customers' interaction with the brand.
They weren't excited about providing a great customer experience and viewed CX as the cost of doing business. Its practical application was limited only to the customer support teams.
How did this atmosphere change?
As the economy and technology boomed, brands started positioning their products as "Experiences."
Owning a product was no longer cool—the attraction shifted towards getting a great experience out of it.
Apple is the best example to explain this positioning shift. When Apple started selling its products in the late 1970s, it didn't focus on what it was selling. i.e., it's groundbreaking tech and sophisticated hardware. They focused on people's emotions, feelings, and positive experiences when using their products. It did wonders for them.
Slowly, other brands observed this positioning shift and started bringing in the practices that offered the best experiences to their customers. Now every brand competes against each other to provide the best possible customer experience.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management (CXM) is the process of understanding your customer's needs and concerns and implementing the remedies to improve their overall experience of interacting with your product.
There are multiple stages involved in customer experience management.
The first part would be monitoring and interacting with your customers, as well as asking how they feel when using your product/service. Their feedback and your observations should be analyzed, and the remedies should be implemented to void any concerns. If customers have any feature requests, they should be addressed, and if it's an apt request, it should also be added to the roadmap.
In large organizations, multiple departments take care of customers at various stages. Customer experience management should break the silos between those departments and ensure a smooth, uniform experience across multiple touchpoints within the organization.
Customer experience management [CEM] vs. Customer relationship management [CRM]
Another pair of phrases are also often misunderstood and used interchangeably—customer experience management and customer relationship management.
How do they differ?
Customer experience management is about creating how businesses want to be perceived in their customers' eyes. In contrast, customer relationship management is a business's view of its customers.
Let us elaborate on this. Businesses have hundreds of thousands of customers, and it'd be impossible to remember every customer's journey with the business and their interaction. Customer relationship management is vital in helping businesses record their customers' journeys and interactions with them. Majorly used in sales funnels, customer relationship management helps create a good relationship with prospects and customers, and its goal is to improve revenue, increase profits, and retain customer loyalty.
Whereas customer experience management focuses on all the touchpoints of the business. Since the goal is to improve customer interaction, businesses strive to understand user behavior, listen to their feedback, analyze them, and tweak the funnel.
What is good customer experience?
Good customer experience anticipates what customers expect at any interaction with businesses and provides a uniform experience throughout the funnel.
It understands customer behavior when they interact, analyzes where they find difficulties, and addresses them to ensure smooth interaction. It also creates adequate touchpoints for customers to leave feedback and ensure they're looked into.
Whereas if you make customers feel stranded in their journey, it confuses them about what to do next, which results in a bad customer experience. Bad customer experience leads to erosion of trust and loyalty, which would ultimately reflect in your revenue.
To provide an engaging, good customer experience, businesses need to have an efficient customer experience strategy. Having key elements in place ensures you provide a good customer experience.
Key elements of customer experience strategy
1. Uniformity: Since customer experience covers all the touchpoints, businesses have to ensure a uniform experience to provide a good experience.
2. Simple but consistent experience: Businesses tend to add complexities without even being aware of them, as there are no guidelines to create a good customer experience. Keeping it simple helps them to implement it while helping their customers to understand and enjoy the experience.
3. Accessible and available: To deliver a good customer experience, businesses should anticipate where customers might struggle and make sure they have accessible means in place to contact them.
4. Personalization: Making the customer journey feel personal to the visitors is a challenge, as everyone's preferences vary. Analyzing visitors and how they interact with your business will give a better idea of how ideal customers navigate. Based on those inputs, businesses can personalize the communication.
5. Convenient: At any point, customers shouldn't feel their interaction with the business is a burden, and customer convenience should be anticipated and taken care of.
How to measure customer experience
To measure customer experience, businesses can observe the following metrics:
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS): Calculating NPS is a standard format. You share a survey with your customers, asking them to recommend your product/offering to their friends on a scale of 0-10. Those submitting 0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are passives, and 9-10 are promoters.
Net Promoter Score is the percentage of detractors subtracted from the promoters. Usually, for SaaS companies, NPS above 30 is considered exceptionally good and denotes you have solid customer experience plans in place.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This is the total value a customer adds to your business during their stay with your business. It's calculated by multiplying the customer value by the average customer life span. The more the value is, the more your customers are happy about their experience with you.
3. Customer churn rate: This is the percentage of paying users leaving your product in a time frame divided by the total number of users you had in the beginning. The percentage of subscribers who left the platform divided by the total number of initial users is how you calculate the churn rate.
When you have a low churn rate, your customers are happy with your offerings and having a good time.
Why is Zoho SalesIQ the best tool for boosting your customer experience?
Do you need a software tool to engage your customers and offer them a whole customer experience? Well, technically, you don't, but managing every stage of customer interaction manually would be a nightmare. This is where Zoho SalesIQ comes to your rescue.
Zoho SalesIQ, the engagement intelligence platform, offers abundant features to boost your customer experience at three pillars of customer interaction: marketing, sales, and support.
Features like Visitor tracking/Live view, Lead scoring, and AI-based profile enrichment for companies help you easily identify your potential targets. Using our proactive live chat, you can instantly reach out to them based on their interaction with your website and resolve any queries they have. SalesIQ also offers features like Chat routing, Departments, Messaging channels, and Canned replies to empower your support team to better serve your prospects and customers.
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