Manage Customer Experience and Grow like a Unicorn

Customer Experience Defined

Customer experience encompasses the opinions that people form during and after they interact with the brand. It is measured from the start of the customer journeys and can be affected at any stage. 

Why is Customer Experience Important?

If you stop and think about any business you have used or bought from, you probably have an impression of them. You know if you like them or dislike them. You have a good idea as to what you liked about their product, customer service, and what you thought they could improve.

When we interact with brands, we form feelings about those brands. Some of these start at the moment when we interact with them. They are based on the first impression. Others are related to the product quality, the support provided to us, etc.

Our overall customer experience can be affected by small things like a page’s design, the response time on social media channels, the politeness of the customer service, and more.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into this.

Key Factors That Influence the Customer Experience

These aren’t the only factors, but Vassit’s Periodic Table of Customer Experience surely gives an insight into what most affects the customer journey. This is what it looks like:

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Every little piece of the customer journey adds to the experience. For example, a bad experience with support can ruin the overall customer satisfaction and kill the chances of impressing a great customer. 

Let’s take a look at what causes poor customer experience in a business.

But, why is the customer experience so important for your brand?

Only a happy customer will gladly become loyal to your brand. Happy customers will come back to buy more, which will boost your revenue. The ones that are really happy with what you offer will spread the word around, becoming your business advocates. The power of social proof can have a tremendous impact on your business’s image, success, as well as your revenue. 

Generally speaking, two things build the customer experience. Let’s take a closer look at them.

If you do all of it right – create the perfect product and give your customers the service they need, you’ll have achieved a remarkable customer experience. 

4 Ways to Measure Customer Experience

Before you start managing the customer experience, you need to learn where you stand.

The best way to measure customer experience is through obtaining feedback. By obtaining customer feedback and tracking their behaviors, you can collect enough data to improve the customer journey. 

Naturally, you can’t know what every customer needs. Even so, companies can create and implement the right strategy to track their customers’ every interaction, as well as analyze their behaviors and answers to learn what’s best for the company.

It’s quite obvious – you cannot make people happy unless you know what makes them happy. With that in mind, let’s discuss the 4 best ways to measure the customer experience for your business. 

Let’s go through these step by step. 

1. Customer Satisfaction Survey Analysis

As we previously mentioned, customer feedback is your best tool for determining how to impress your customers. Surveys and customer feedback forms will allow you to collect the data you need to make smart and informed decisions. In other words, they’ll show you what your customers want.

How to Collect This Data

Luckily, collecting customer feedback is now easier than ever thanks to tools like Trustmary. You can create customer feedback forms and implement them with ease to get fast, actionable, and helpful customer data. 

Such surveys can be used at different points of the customer journey. You can use them to see if your customers liked your product, service, or the customer support your agents offered to them. You can also use surveys to see if they liked your site, would recommend your product, or figure out what it is that you’ve been doing wrong. 

Based on this, companies create their marketing strategy.

Take, for example, NPS surveys. These are the most popular surveys used to measure customer experience and satisfaction. Here is what an NPS looks like:

Let’s say that you created and sent out this survey. The customer data you’ve collected as a result is very easy to analyze. Based on the numbers your customers chose in this survey, you can learn how likely they are to promote your brand to others based on their customer experience. 

How Does This Work?

NPS surveys are pretty straightforward – they tell companies if the customer liked or disliked their product and share their customer experience. Once you collect this information, you can implement other types of surveys and collect feedback to figure out what they liked or disliked, all to make the customer experience management more effective later on. 

Based on the NPS results, you can differentiate between 3 different types of customers. 

Of course, NPS surveys aren’t your only option. There are many types of surveys to conduct, so don’t be afraid to test your options. With every different survey your business sends out, you can create a new strategy for success. For example, you can ask more focused questions as Netflix did here:

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2. Asking Customers for Feature or Product Reviews

One of the best ways to collect customer data is to simply ask for it. You can’t just be waiting for customer testimonials to show up online. Many of your customers will need a bit of a push to share their opinions with others – as well as with your brand. 

However, you can build your brand with the information you receive!

In addition to asking people about their customer experience with your existing products and services, you should take this a step further and ask for feedback on product requests. 

Your customers are the best way to source promising ideas for your future products, as well as learn about new potential features for the products you already have. 

Companies often do this once they establish a solid database of regular customers. Their strategy includes sending out surveys and different forms that will provide them with answers at different stages of the customer journey. 

Based on the data tehy collect, companies then form a new marketing strategy aimed to increase customer satisfaction, improve the products, and boost the overall success of the company.

How can you do this?

Join social media groups and networks, as well as forums where your customers and target audience communicates. Reach out to them via email or send a survey form to ask them what they need to fix the problems they have.

If you’re talking to customers who have already bought from you at some point, you can allow them to comment on the quality of your products and services. They can give suggestions for improvement, tell you what to remove and what to add, and basically share with you the reasons behind their customer experience. 

And if someone give you a positive review, reply to it!

3. Analysis of the Reasons behind Customer Churn

No company likes customer churn but the reality is – it happens to all companies. This is part of doing business. There will be people who have a bad customer experience and decide not to use your brand again. 

A lot of the time, this won’t be your fault. Customers can have a poor experience if they chose a service or product that didn’t meet their needs. If they didn’t check your product description or purchase something they didn’t know how to use, their customer experience will be bad despite all of your efforts. 

At other times, it will be your company’s fault. The customer will speak to a lazy support agent, get the wrong answers, read the wrong things about your product, or be disappointed by the quality and value you offer. 

It is your job as a quality business to find out why customer churn happens and prevent it whenever and wherever possible.

How do you do this?

You do this by collecting customer data, of course! Perform regular testing and analysis of the churned customers to see what causes them to leave your business. Here are some ideas:

• See which parts of your site are most commonly causing them to leave it
• Check what content is lowest-ranked – and fix it
• Reach out to customers that haven’t returned to buy again and ask them why

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• Perform surveys and testing to see what went wrong with their customer experience
• Ask them directly via email when they unsubscribe

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4. Analysis of Customer Support Tickets

Another great way to test the customer experience is to analyze support tickets. If your business is popular and has some customers who are communicating with it, you probably have some support tickets from those communications. 

How do you analyze the support tickets?

It’s always a good idea to save the conversations between your customers and your agents. This way, you can analyze them later and see if you’ll come across some recurring issues. You can also use this as an opportunity to see how well your support works and whether or not they need further training to improve their service. 

Once you learn more about the customer experience, you need to take some action and form a new, better strategy. If you want people to come back to your business and refer you to others, you need to dedicate some time and effort to customer experience management. 

By measuring the customer experience after each customer support interaction, you can better allocate your resources and improve processes.

What is Customer Experience Management?

CXM includes everything from surveying and collecting customer data to analyzing it to improve customer interactions. 

This is a vital component of a company that puts the customer first, which should definitely be you if you want to boost customer loyalty. As long as you make a customer-centric business that cares about opinions and customer experiences, you can expect people’s loyalty to keep growing.

The Importance of Customer Experience Management

According to this customer experience guide, market leaders focus tremendously on the customer journey. As an explanation for why this is the case, the guide states a very simple answer: “they understand its importance”. 

So, why is customer experience management important?

If you don’t add value to your product to improve customer experiences, people will lose interest and look elsewhere for solutions for their problems. The customer interactions are your way of impressing people and meeting customer expectations. 

Think about it this way – would you go back to a company that doesn’t meet your expectations or needs the first time?

Good Customer Experience at the Heart of Brand Loyalty

Forbes reports that 73% of customers find the experience to be one of the most important factors in their purchasing decisions. In return for their trust and investment, they expect a proper welcome on behalf of your company, and a valuable product or service.

If your business manages to create a positive experience for the user, this is a win-win for both sides of the transaction.

Good customer experiences are linked to an increase in revenue. But, that’s not all. One of the best perks of boosting the customer experience is that it also builds loyalty. A loyal customer is your best customer.

Based on a Temkin Group study, customer experiences can influence a set of behaviors in consumers. 

Behaviors You Can Expect from Your Loyal Customers

This same research has shown tremendous results in terms of brand loyalty. According to their findings, the likelihood for such behaviors increased over 500% from 15% of customers to over 80% of companies that manage to provide excellent customer service.

Now that we know this, let’s take a closer look at them.

Recommend the Business

If you are really satisfied with a company’s work or product, wouldn’t you recommend it to your friends? Even if you don’t go around shouting that you liked the product or service, you’ll probably mention the company to interested parties.

Consumers with positive customer experiences are much more likely to recommend a business to others than those with an average or bad experience. A happy customer will tell an average of 11 people about a business they had a good experience with.

This makes word-of-mouth one of the best tools you have in your arsenal. It’s how you spread the word around, build loyalty and make your business recognized by more people.

It’s not all about the revenue – it’s also about convincing people to brag about their purchase and experience with you and attract new leads toward your business. 

How Likely are People to Recommend a Company – and Why

Repurchase from the Company

Every business, regardless of its size or products, has a goal – to attract and retain more customers. The people that you convince to come back to your company are your best advocates, as well as your strongest source of revenue. 

From the point when you open your company, attracting and keeping those people happy is your biggest and best marketing strategy.

Positive customer experiences can affect repurchases greatly. Those customers that gave you the highest ranking in the surveys are most likely to make a repurchase. This means that, by offering excellent customer experience and improving people’s interactions with your site and support, you are turning a great customer into a potential returning customer. 

Since gaining new customers is up to 25 times more expensive than retaining the ones you already have, this might just be the best behavior that a good customer experience can prompt. 

Trust the Company

We can all agree that trust is the most vital element of customer loyalty. People won’t be loyal to you unless they trust that you’ll meet their expectations. 

Every time you offer a customer a good experience, you’re building their trust. Over time, this creates strong brand-customer relationships, and it turns people into frequent buyers and great advocates. Making people trust you is the best strategy you can have.

Try New Products/ Services Right Away

Customers that are sure of your quality and value won’t think twice before buying what you’re offering. They won’t ask for samples of products they’ve used, and they’ll gladly invest in a new product that you are marketing without much thought. 

Why is this?

It’s because customers who had good experiences with you in the past are much more trusting that you’ll offer them the same quality again. After all, who would you rather buy from – the company that’s been providing you with great products or some new companies that you just came across?

Naturally, you’ll be hesitant about the latter. That won’t be the case with the first.

This gives you a great opportunity to make more sales as a brand, too. Based on your customer’s previous purchases and behaviors, you can recommend products you think they’d like, even if they weren’t looking for them or knew you had them. Here is an example by Sephora:

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Forgive the Company

This is the hardest thing to achieve – convince people that your brand is loyal and good to them so much that they forgive a mistake when you make it. To do this, you must respond to negative reviews and feedback.

Let’s face it – we are not perfect. Even if you do your best not to make a mistake, mistakes will happen now and then. 

Let’s say that you made a mistake with your product or wrote something misleading about it. Your customers are angry and you need to apologize publicly. How do you think they’d respond to such an apology:

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Now, some of your customers will remain angry with you and leave your brand. Others will forgive you.

Over half of the people who have a single negative experience with a company will look elsewhere the next time they want to buy. However, if a small mistake happens to a brand they trust, they’ll be more willing to forgive and forget. 

Customer loyalty can make all the difference for your success. 

Naturally, you’ll have to do your diligence and apologize, as well as fix the error. 

Best Practices to Boost the Customer Experience and Improve the Customer Journey

Now that you know why customer experience is so important for your brand as well as how to measure it, it is time to take some action. There are certain things that you can do to make the experience of the customer amazing. In return, you should get more loyal customers and boost your business’s success. 

Let’s take a look at some great practices.

Understand Your Customer’s Needs

When you need to improve a business or a product, the first thing to always do is gain a better understanding of your customer. This is why brands create customer profiles and constantly analyze data to learn more about their target audience. When you have such information on hand, you can make informed, smart decisions that will improve their experience. 

When we talk about understanding your customers, we mean just about everything you can learn about them. You need not only to know what their needs are but also how urgent they need things, what alternatives they have on the market, what expectations they’ve set, etc. 

Based on the data you collect, you can take actions to improve your product, services, and maximize the quality of their customer experience. 

Collect User Feedback

It will be impossible to learn about your users unless you perform some research. The best way to learn about the customer journey and their overall experience is from them directly. Whether you’ll do this by analyzing their testimonials or asking them via forms or surveys, it is up to you. 

User data collection is an ongoing process for top brands. They continuously do research and testing to learn more about the people they are targeting. Thanks to tools like Trustmary, handling and collecting testimonials is made very simple. If you want to better collect and utilize user feedback, you can book a meeting with them here.

Be Available When Needed

You can’t expect customers to be loyal to you if you aren’t loyal to them. They need to know that they can reach you at any point. Even if you have the best site and the most honest product description, they might encounter some issues along the way. 

A good brand is always available to its customers. If you make the contact process too lengthy or too complicated, this can ruin their entire experience and the quality of your product or service won’t even matter. 

Being available to your customers can come with many other perks, too. You can use their queries to learn more about their touchpoints and needs, find issues that need to be resolved, and get ideas to improve your existing or create new products in demand. 

Sometimes your customers want to have immediate contact, even if it is outside your business hours. First aid for these situation can be e.g. adding chatbots to you website.

Apply the Omnichannel Approach

Do you know how annoying it can be when customers have to go through a lengthy process whenever they want to reach out to you? This should be made as simple as possible. If you expect the customer to repeat the same conversation every time they speak to your support, you haven’t done a lot about their customer experience, right?

This is a common issue that ruins the journey of your audience. To combat such situations, you should opt for omnichannel support. Whenever a customer reaches out to the agents, the agent will be able to see the previous conversations and handle their queries more efficiently.

Multi-channel vs. Omni-channel

Guarantee What You Offer

If you want people to trust you, you need to be honest with them. If you keep throwing vague or inaccurate data their way without any guarantee or clarification, you can hardly achieve brand loyalty. 

Whatever you offer the customers, you need to be able to back up your claims. It’s better to promise very little and stick by it than to promise a lot and come up short. People will remember when you fulfill your promises, but they’ll remember it even more when you fail to complete them.

In Case You Still Need Help…

It’s not easy to build customer loyalty and keep your target audience and customers happy. These are just a few of the many things you need to do in customer experience management. If you want to make it more successful, there are also tools that brands use created specifically for customer experience management. 

Let’s see some examples.

3 CXM Software to Try

To better manage the customer experience, many brands today use management software.

CXM software solutions and professionals monitor customer touchpoints and help you find ways to deliver better customer experiences.

What Is a CXM Software/ Platform?

CXM is a management software that allows users to create, manage, and deliver omnichannel experiences. CXM platforms will track and report on customer interactions to help the user understand the customer journey more efficiently.

Depending on which CXM software you choose, you can enjoy many perks such as customer feedback analysis, real-time communication with customers, customer loyalty analysis and reports, etc. 

CXM platforms often offer capabilities for ticket and customer management, product inventory, analytics and reports, customer self-service, as well as collaboration. If you pick a good CXM software for this, you can also integrate it with third-party tools you are probably using to grow your business.

Some CXMs are more popular than others based on features, value, as well as price. Here are the top 3 CXMs you should be considering. 

Zendesk

Zendesk is one of the best-rated cloud-based software solutions for businesses. This is a customer support CXM software designed to improve communication and relationship with customers. 

What Does Zendesk Offer?

Zendesk will provide you with an integrated customer support/ help desk portal tool. Brands use it for customer experience management since it allows them to track the communication via any channel (including web, text SMS, phone, email, mobile app, and even social media).

If you use this CXM  tool, you can manage phone calls, interactions of different sorts, and tickets. It offers features like live chat, knowledge base management, a ticketing system, and help desk software. 

Zendesk’s Top Feature

One of Zendesk’s best features is the Content Cues. Take a look at it here:

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IBM Tealeaf

IBM Tealeaf is a feature-rich digital marketing CXM platform. It’s powered by AI and has an amazing behavioral analytics feature. With this feature, you can manage and track your customers’ and visitors’ reactions, behaviors, disputes, and more. 

What Does IBM Tealeaf Offer?

This CXM software is great at delivering fast and accurate business analytics, as well as providing its users with insights that can help them boost the customer experience. It runs on an advanced analytics engine that will record data from customer visits and interactions. 

By using this CXM tool, you can learn how your customer interacts with your website, the mobile site, or your app. You can monitor large traffic amounts without affecting your site’s performance. 

IMB’s Top Feature

One of the best features of IBM Tealeaf is the replay feature. This is a browser-level recording of your customer’s experience, which you can use to detect and then fix issues. 

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Medallia

Last but not least, Medalia is a cloud-based CXM platform tailored to help you improve the customer experience. It delivers real-time insights and helps you determine how to make your customers happier. Not only that, but Medallia also helps brands keep their employees happy, which is equally important. 

What Does Medallia Offer?

Medallia’s CXM features include benchmarking, data collection, real-time analytics, customer recovery, personalized reporting, artificial intelligence, data integration, and predictive analytics. 

If you use this CXM tool, your customers can engage with your brand in several ways including SMS, mobile apps, email surveys, messaging channels, etc. The software will track this for you and provide you with amazing insights to improve the customer experience. 

Let’s take a look at some of Medallia’s integrations:

If Implementing a CXM System Doesn’t Sound Appealing…

Try implementing a system that lets you decide the triggering events for sending out a customer experience survey.

For example, here are the benefits a customer success team using Trustmary has listed:

• Collect (video) testimonials while measuring the happiness of your customers
• Customer-centricity becomes a common goal for the whole company
• Everyone knows how customers are currently doing
• Churn prevention

Most importantly: gain insights regularly from all customers. Book your meeting to hear how Trustmary’s automated software can help your company grow by managing customer experience.

Conclusion

Customer experience management is not an easy task but, if done right, can greatly improve your brand’s image and boost its loyalty. If you find a way to manage the customer experience and improve it, you can expect growth in every sense. 

Good customer experience management means a better customer journey. This, in return, means more people finding and picking your brand, higher brand recognition, more loyal customers, and with it all – high revenue. 

If you need some inspiration and want to learn from the best, here are some amazing examples to learn from.