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Understanding Customer Experience

If I had to reduce my advice about building products down to a single point, it would be this: understand the customer experience.

By Edison AdePublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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Understanding Customer Experience
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

How good is your product? Does it do what your customers want? Do they know it's there? How do they feel about it, and by extension your company? All of this describes the customer experience. But how to measure it?

Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. From awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.

As customer expectations rise and technology makes it easier than ever to switch among companies, companies need a new way of thinking about their relationships with customers.

A customer's experience of an organization begins with the first contact and can span any number of interactions, from a telephone call to a visit to the company's website. Individuals who shape the customer experience don't necessarily understand how their actions impact the experience.

The Customer Experience Index (CXi) is a comprehensive measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty for individual companies. A benchmarking tool designed with input from many of the world's leading brands, it lets companies track their performance against competitors by product or service - and also compare themselves in areas unrelated to competition, such as their internal operations. The Customer Experience Index lets marketers see if their efforts are helping them deliver on critical customer expectations in different aspects of the business, including sales interactions, billing and payments, call centre activities, social media engagement, email interaction, digital transaction processing, website navigation and webform completion, online help and support resources, mobile application performance, delivery of products or services ordered through the mobile app or website, and after-sales support.

The Customer Experience Management

The key to successful customer experience management is ensuring that your entire organization knows what the customers want and needs are, inside out and top to bottom, both today and in the future. 

Companies should view the entire customer experience as a unified effort involving multiple teams within a company - not a series of isolated work processes - and even extending outside the company. Customer Experience Management is all about focusing on the complete end-to-end customer journey, engaging an organization through shared responsibility and strong management focus. Customer experience management starts with collecting data from every touchpoint that directly or indirectly influences the customer experience, then analyzing it across big and small data to find opportunities and problems, and finally acting on the insights in a timely manner. Customer experience management is about creating the type of lasting impact and relationship with customers that will lead them to stay loyal and become repeat purchasers at increased profitability.

It's about putting the customer at the centre of every decision you make and adapting your business processes to ensure you deliver what your customers expect. It involves ensuring that customers have a positive experience during each interaction with the brand and adapting to the changing market. The goal of customer experience management is to increase customer loyalty and encourage new sales by building emotional connections with current and potential consumers.

Customer Experience Management is not just another process. It is a system designed to help companies build strong, lasting relationships with their customers by providing the right information or services at the right time. Effective CEM requires a commitment from senior leaders across all business units and a holistic view of the customer spread across efficient and effective processes while seeking long-term commitments with customers.

A Customer Experience Strategy to improve customer experience

To improve our customer experience, we need a customer experience strategy or a plan for improving our processes.

It requires a lot more than just installing customer-friendly phone systems, creating central customer lists, or developing effective complaint processes. The most important part of customer experience strategy is actually organizational culture. It's the attitudes towards customers that get things done - or don't. It's how employees are educated and trained, set up for success, and then let go to do their jobs. It's what people care about and their behaviours at every level of the organization. It's where you place your bets to win over customers and leaders alike with a clear vision of corporate purpose and meaningful objectives that build emotional buy-in.

Customer experience strategy forms an essential ingredient in creating a differentiated customer approach and enables you to engage with what matters most to customers.

Customer experience strategy should map out:

• The overall impression created by doing business with your company;

• How people feel when interacting with you;

• The emotions they associate with your brand;

• The feelings that lead them to recommend you or not to friends and colleagues. Customer experience strategy should always be evaluated against the experiences your customers have with other competitors, as well as their expectations of how a business in your category should behave

Customer experience awareness

Customer experience awareness is heightened when marketers place themselves in their customers' shoes, look through their eyes at all touchpoints, understand what they're feeling throughout the entire buying process - and then use this insight to drive future strategy. Customer-experience maps - maps of customer activities and interactions with a brand over time - can help marketers better see how various marketing initiatives to influence customer behaviour.

Customer-experience leaders

Customer-experience leadership is at the core of everything we do. Customer experience leaders create an ongoing, customer-focused dialogue across all business functions to drive consistent experiences that meet or exceed customers' ongoing expectations. Customer-experience leaders are able to articulate a compelling vision for delivering this ongoing dialogue, while also inspiring others in their organization to act on it. By focusing on customer needs and translating them into ongoing conversations within the company, they ensure every decision made - from product development through sales and service - incorporates what customers expect from your brand.

They lead by example, setting the tone for an organization-wide commitment to taking care of customers.

The ability to understand and feel empathy for a customers' experience, concerns, wants and needs are critical competencies for customer experience leaders. The job requires a broad perspective of how the various business functions impact the customers' experience. As such, customer-experience leaders must possess strong leadership and interpersonal skills.

Successful customer experience leaders are change agents and cultural drivers. They partner with senior executives to ensure that customer experience priorities are represented in short and long term objectives, business plans and strategies. They also create a sense of urgency around improving the customer experience that motivates others to action.

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About the Creator

Edison Ade

I Write about Startup Growth. Helping visionary founders scale with proven systems & strategies. Author of books on hypergrowth, AI + the future.

I do a lot of Spoken Word/Poetry, Love Reviewing Movies.

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