Customer experience (CX) starts long before the handshake on the day of the deal, the entry of credit card details on the checkout page, or even the call the customer makes to enquire about a particular product or service you sell. Customer experience accounts for every interaction an individual has with your brand up to and beyond the point of sale.
Each time a customer returns to your website and makes a purchase, the experience you provide impacts their perceptions and feelings about your brand. It's, therefore, essential to continuously optimise your customer touchpoints, with continued customer satisfaction high on your agenda.
First off, let's clear one thing up: although connected, customer service and customer experience are two separate topics. Customer service refers to the direct interaction a person may have with your business when dealing with a sales or service representative in person, over the telephone, or via email and live chat —it's a contributing factor in the overall experience a customer will have. CX, on the other hand, looks at the broader customer journey: what judgement did the customer make in reaction to each step in the process — this includes researching your business, making a purchase and rating you afterwards. By focusing on the customer journey from end to end, your business can benefit from the following:
A quality customer experience ensures that all touchpoints are integrated and aligned with your company’s values and mission.
The modern buyer has more power than ever. In the past, it may have been easier to manage the customer experience your business offers by managing the information you disclose about your brand, keeping a close eye on in-store service delivery, and controlling the narrative around your brand through traditional media channels.
With the advent of the internet, however, your customers have free access to all the information they need to make a decision about your brand by simply doing a little investigating. They can either go to your website and make a value judgement based on the website's appearance and the quality of the content, or they can scour your social media channels and see what other buyers are saying about you. In addition, there are websites like Glass Door and tools such as Google Reviews that give potential buyers unlimited access to other people's positive and negative experiences when purchasing from your business.
In summary, making an educated decision about your brand is easier than ever, and there are only a few elements that you can control.
Customer experience can be measured using a variety of metrics.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) looks at customer loyalty by measuring how likely a customer is to recommend your business to others. Usually, customers will give a score out of 10, with the higher figures indicating a high probability of recommending you to others.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) requires correspondents to rate their overall satisfaction with your service or product.
Customer Churn Rate measures repeat purchases or continuous monthly subscribers. This is a very useful metric for SaaS-type businesses, which need to predict monthly recurring revenue.
There are many metrics you could explore, but another key determinant of your CX quality is the trends arising from your support tickets. It's important to analyse these frequently to ensure that your support representatives aren't forced to continuously handle recurring issues and that, instead, you are taking proactive action to streamline CX and actually decrease the number of support tickets. This demonstrates that you are not only solving customers' problems, but that you are actively listening to and learning from them — something your loyal buyers will definitely appreciate.
The customer journey you offer most likely includes an online experience. This could be through a website or app you use to make sales. This business-critical digital channel needs to be evaluated, optimised and managed regularly to ensure that you're staying ahead of any potential issues ( like peak sale season causing website crashes ) and also ahead of the competition! Here's what you need to consider:
Giving your customers the ability to purchase or interact with you through their smart device is, quite frankly, a smart move. In reality, however, many businesses rush to get a website up and treat mobile experience as an afterthought. Not a good move considering that 58.99% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
It's important to review your mobile user experience from a technical perspective to ensure the website or app is responsive, glitch-free and intuitive for the user to browse. You could miss out on many opportunities by not tuning your mobile website to deliver a smooth and easy-to-navigate experience that helps buyers locate you, find out about your products and services, or access other key information that may influence their purchasing decision when they're on the move or would prefer not to use a desktop. An on-brand omni-channel experience is key.
Your product could be great, but if navigating your website requires a PhD and the patience of a saint, good luck trying to make that conversion happen. Your website needs to be laid out in a way that triggers the desired action while customers learn more about your offering. Apply recommended usability tools to test the user-friendliness of your site and ensure that the online experience you provide is smooth, intuitive and in line with the customer's goals.
A good example of a usecase for high-quality user onboarding is in the banking sector. Not all customers are tech-savvy, and for some, using an online banking app or website may be a novel experience.
Teaching your customers how to use your online products or services will eliminate any scepticism or lack of confidence customers may have when diving into a digital interaction with your product or service. If your goal, for example, is to maximise online transactions and minimise the burden on your brick-and-mortar bank branches, it's essential to teach users how to get the most of your app’s online features so that they can do basic banking independently.
We've made creating user-friendly, customer-centric, high-performing websites one of our top-rated services at BEE. Our Beevolution HubSpot Theme helps you build outstanding websites in record time. This, in addition to the BEE Website Services, includes extensive UX audits, which aid you in identifying existing opportunities for optimisation, and will help you to create a website that not only sells your brand well, but also ensures your customers keep coming back.
Click the button to find out more.