THE TOP 10 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FAQS ANSWERED
1. How is CX different from customer service?
The goal of customer service is to achieve customer satisfaction. This usually takes the form of assisting customers by answering their questions. This could be before or after a purchase. Typically customer service only plays a role in improving satisfaction at certain points in the customer’s journey.
Customer Experience is the sum of all the interactions they have with a brand. This ranges from discovering and research and product, purchasing and using it, maintenance, servicing, updating it and eventual disposal. The goal of CX is to improve customer satisfaction at all points in their journey.
2. What is the difference between UX and CX?
Often used interchangeably, user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) share several principles but have quite distinct meanings and applications.
“UX encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interactions with the company, it’s products and services”
UX typically looks at an individual interaction, e.g. using a product, website or app, and focuses on improving the user’s experience by addressing their needs and making the process easier, quicker and more joyful.
“[CX is] how customers perceive their interactions with your company”
CX looks at the holistic experience from the customer’s perspective, from advertising to sales, customers services and the experience of using the product/service itself. Thus UX is a subset of CX:
Both UX and CX place people and research at the centre of what they do, utilising design thinking to provide better experiences and value to deliver profit to businesses, but their individual focuses are quite different. UX specialists usually come from more technical backgrounds; design, technology, product & psychology whereas CX practitioners come from a marketing background.
3. How does CX differ to CRM?
CRM encompasses the practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to track and analyse interactions with current and future customers. It's great for monitoring order fulfilment, and sales leads, but doesn’t necessarily lead to happy satisfied and loyal customers.
CX takes a different perspective. It looks at the world from the customer's viewpoint. What are their needs, how can we help, are they satisfied in their dealings with us? This is in direct contrast to CRM that tracks customer progress on a pre-determined journey.
4. Are customer centricity and customer experience the same?
Customer centricity is an approach whereby the customer is placed at the centre of a business. Whilst it's a great aspiration, it can be a vague quest, as it’s hard to define when you have become a customer-centric business or brand.
CX strategy embraces the ambition of customer-centricity but provides a structured set of methods, tools, and measurements to deliver experiences that customers value. Crucially it allows you to track customer satisfaction and measures the effectiveness of customer-centric initiatives.
The value of CX comes from knowing where to invest your finite resources and where they will make the most positive and profitable contribution to the customer's experience.
5. What are empathy, customer journey and experience maps?
Empathy maps
Customer empathy maps help business understand a customer’s mindset. It maps what the customer says, thinks, feels and does. A business may have different types of customer, and an empathy map should be developed for each customer group.
Customer journey maps
A customer journey map focuses on the direct interactions between each customer type and business at a superficial level and in a linear process for a particular task. For example: See advert, visit a website, make a purchase and consume. It is a useful tool for visualising pain points and gain points in a customers interaction with your business.
Customer experience maps
A customer experience map visualises the entire end-to-end experience a generic customer goes through to accomplish a goal (e.g. choose a credit card) including activities and interactions that don’t involve the business directly (visiting a comparison site, asking friends). It is used to understand general human behaviour and create a baseline understanding of an experience that is product/service agnostic.
Service blueprints
A service blueprint takes the customer journey maps and visualises the service components that are directly tied to touchpoint or specific service within a customer journey.
6. Is NPS the best measure of Customer Experience?
Whilst NPS is probably the best known, easy to understand and most widely used CX metric, it is based on the response to one question; how likely are you to recommend a product/service. The drawback of NPS is its simplicity doesn’t accurately reflect the diverse interactions and experiences a customer has through their customer journey and most of the useful information gets lost.
Alternative customer experience metrics include:
Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT)
Customer Effort score
Average response time
Churn rate
The best way to measure CX is dependent on what you are looking to learn and apply to your business. You may need a combination of measures to achieve this.
However, when it comes to communicating the success of a CX project, the most important business measure is financial. How many dollars your CX initiatives have saved the business, how much profit per customer you have gained or additional sales made.
7. Do customers always need to be delighted?
The concept of ‘delight’ is frequently used in CX. However, random acts of surprise and delight is not a sustainable business practice. Whilst CX focuses on delivering positive experiences, it’s important to not get caught up on short-terms wins over long-term success.
Think about it. When did Apple, Amazon or Google surprise you? Chances are they haven’t done so recently. What they have focused on is making every interaction with them easy, joyful and painless.
If you are going to surprise and delight a customer, it pays to understand which customer segments to target and the likely payoff in terms of likelihood of repeat purchase, loyalty and/or advocacy.
8. Is CX reliant on big data?
Fortunately, CX is not dependant on vast amounts of data. What’s more valuable is gaining a human understanding of the different types of customer, the ways they interact with your business and the barriers and challenges they face in their interactions.
Data does play a role in measuring the change in customers experience before and after a CX strategy is set in place. However, this doesn’t need to involve complicated systems and large volumes of data - customer surveys, interviews and existing web analytics can provide a picture of what is and isn’t working.
9. Is CX limited to business transformation?
Whilst CX strategy can lead to identifying major changes in the ways businesses engage with customers. Often, a series of incremental changes can deliver quick and profitable improvements to the customer experience.
A key concept of CX is developing solutions that meet the customer’s primary needs (the minimum viable product or solution), testing how they perform and iterating to further improve the experience. This approach brings solutions to market quicker, provides faster feedback, resulting in a higher success rate.
10. Does CX require a big budget?
One of the wonderful attributes of CX strategy and management is that it can be delivered with a lean team. With a clear objective, vision and access to customers, improving the customer experience can be achieved without the need for a significant budget. In fact, over time, the increase in revenue from loyalty customer and profits from customers valuing you experience should result in a positive return on your CX investment, paying for itself many times over.
More important than budget, to achieve CX success requires support from the senior leadership team to put the customer first, permit experimentation with new operating methods and provide CX practitioners with access to key stakeholders across the business (e.g. Product, Operations, Customer Service, Brand, Finance, IT teams) as they can provide additional insights and help implement CX enhancements.