Customer Experience

Excellent customer experience requires significant efforts from a business to ensure that every stage of a customer journey is oriented the way customers want.

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Customer experience is set by all the interactions customer encounters during all the stages, from pre-purchase to consumption/post-purchase. Over time, it has become crucial for business sustainability and long-term growth.

Customer Experience

Customers expect a lot more from companies today, and why shouldn't they set high expectations? Considering the competitive environment, customers have plenty of choices to choose from. For companies, it has become more vital than ever before.

In this article, we will have a closer look at customer experience and highlight key aspects around it.

What Is Customer Experience?

In simple words, customer experience is the impression about your products/services after undergoing all the stages of the buyer's journey, including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.

The key elements are our products/services and people. For example, how much did they love using your products/services? How was their interaction with customer support?

Why Is It So Important Today?

The 21st century has become a lot more digitalized and technologically advanced. The digitalization of the business world has increased the customers' brand selection capabilities, thereby triggering more competition. Today, you can quickly lose your client with just one bad incident. Therefore, it is very crucial to sustainable business growth.

When you focus on a customer-centric approach and emphasis on customer experience:

• It increases customer retention rate.
• It brings more loyal customers, which mean more word-of-mouth marketing, recommendations, and positive rating.
• It impacts brand reputation.
• It gives a competitive edge.

In short, it is as crucial as delivering best-in-class products/services.

What's a Good & Bad One?

Not every customer experience can be the same. A good one means that customers can hassle-free achieve the desired objectives they expected from the product/service. A good one can be triggered with:

• Intuitive, user-friendly product/service.
• Live customer support with minimal wait time.
• Transparent pricing structure.
• Setting realistic expectations about the product/service.
• Providing more value than expected.

On the other hand, a lousy one means that customers' expectations were not fulfilled, or customers had to struggle in some stages of the customer journey. A bad one can be triggered with:

• Less personalized experience.
• Long wait times.
• Unfriendly product/service design.
• Unfriendly customer support.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer service is just one stage in the customer journey, while customer experience is a conclusive understanding after undergoing all the stages.

In more simple words, customer service is one element of customer experience where a customer makes some requests and gets assistance from a customer representative.

How to Measure Customer Experience?

There is no standard or single method to measure customer experience, but setting up some measurable indicators can help you evaluate it over time. The following are some standard metrics used to measure it:

• Customer Effort Score (CES): CES surveys indicate how easy or complex it is for customers to interact with a product/service to accomplish a specific action.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS surveys reflect how likely customers will recommend the product/service to colleagues.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT surveys indicate the satisfaction level of customers from the product/service they received.
• Time to Resolution (TTR): TTR is an indicator of how much time customer service representatives take to resolve the issue of customers.

There can be other metrics or other approaches for measuring it, depending on your business customer type and product/service nature.

Wrapping Up Customer experience is vital to any business's future growth and sustainability.

Therefore, closely look at all customer journey stages, take customer feedback, and analyze trends to ensure a great customer experience.