What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is how customers perceive their interactions with your business, it's products or service at any point in the customer journey.

CX considers everything a customer experiences when they deal with your business or brand. It is formed from the customer's perspective and can be before, during and after a purchase and considers every touchpoint; online, in person, over the phone and using your product or service.

Why does CX matter?

Brands are built on more than just advertising, they are built on experiences. We live in the age of the consumer. Where consumers are more empowered than ever, with easier access to information, more choices, greater time pressure, shorter attention spans and liquid expectations.

Simply put, a great product and marketing campaign is no longer enough to cut it with customers, they’re looking for a positive experience.

How CX adds value to organisations

Advocacy

Whilst 72% of customers will share a positive experience, bad experiences drive customers away.

Customer loyalty

1 in 3 customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience and 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative experiences.

Price premiums

Positive experiences enable business to charge a premium price. Across a range of sectors, the average price premium a positive experience can command is 16%. This increases further for luxury and indulgent products and services.

Driving consideration

73% of customers point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision. In the US, studies have shown that 65% of customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.

The experience gap

Experience gaps occur when a brand fails to meet the expectations across any point in the customer journey. Bain & Company found that 80% of CEO believe their businesses deliver superior customer experiences, whilst only 8% of their customers agreed.

More often than not, poor customer experience is born from assumptions rather than real knowledge of what the customer wants.

Building a customer experience strategy based on customer research will help you close the gap on customer expectations.

Liquid customer expectations

Liquid expectations are when customer experiences seep over from one industry to an entirely different industry.

For example, when a customer compares their visit to the dentist to an Apple store. Unlike businesses, customers don’t see why a great experience in one can’t be enabled in another, unrelated area.

Customers expectations are continually being set by their experiences with the world’s most innovative and customer-centric businesses. These expectations have become the standard for customers and continually set the bar for businesses to meet. However, they also provide businesses with opportunities for competitive advantage.

What does great CX look like?

Great CX ensures three outcomes:

Effectiveness
Customers can complete their task accurately and satisfactorily.

Efficiently
The customer makes a minimum investment (time, money, emotion, perceived effort) to complete a task.

Satisfaction
The customer finishes a task with a sense of accomplishment, happiness and ease.

Components for achieving great CX

According to the Customer Strategist Journal, six key ingredients enable great customer experiences:

1. Reachability
   Can a customer find and/or get access to your business easily?

2. Service convenience
   Can customers get the support, information and value they want, when they want it?

3. Purchase convenience
   Is there friction in the purchase process?

4. Personalisation
   How well does your business meet or cater to individual customer needs?

5. Simplicity and ease of use
   Are all touchpoint and components of the customer journey intuitive, effortless and frictionless to use?

6. Channel flexibility
   Can customers complete any task from any channel and thereafter have every channel know what they have completed earlier irrespective of the channel?

The importance of brand in CX

What differentiates your customer experience from competitors is how you integrate your brand into the customer experience.

If you design experiences around the customer that are devoid of your brand, you are simply designing generic solutions which competitors could easily replicate.

To deliver a distinctive customer experience, look for ways where you can bring your brand promise to life in customer interactions. When a customer feels the brand promise in their experience they gain the true value of your brand.

Why you need a CX strategy

The experience age is changing the way we need to compete today. Research agency Forrester has stated that the only source of competitive advantage that can survive continuous technology-enabled disruption is "an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers".

The most successful organisations tomorrow will be those that take their customers seriously; closing the gap between what they promise and what their customers experience and the starting place for this is developing your own CX strategy.