When customers want and expect you to meet or exceed their expectations, how purposefully you design winning, and keeping, their happiness at the centre of your own business model matters.
As an adult, everyone has an experience of being let down as a customer somewhere, and when it happens, everyone has an opinion on how a better experience might have been delivered and received.
Customer experience is entirely based on customer perceptions, and perceptions relates to money spent – with a business or with its competitors.
A negative customer experience leaves a customer feeling unhappy and disappointed, often arising from the perceptions that a supplier doesn’t care about or understand them, and that it may be difficult to do business with.
Negative CX pushes businesses into decline when customers with negative perceptions leave, and customer churn sets in.
This is of course exacerbated in a digital world, in which social media and review sites facilitate more rapid sharing of poor experiences.
Customers are now in the driver’s seat, and, as we aim to prove, with extremely rare exception, much more likely to jump online with a complaint than in praise of a company’s actions.
As such, as many companies are finding out, CX, refers to how a business engages with its customers at every point of their buying journey – from marketing to sales to customer service, and at every stop in between. In large part, it’s the sum total of all interactions a customer has with its brand.
Technology analyst Gartner defines customer experience management (CEM) as “The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
In this practice, data about the customer’s experiences, and their satisfaction or otherwise, is collected at “touch points,” that extend across the entire sales process – from initial web site searches to digital customer service channels, in-store and post-purchase experiences.
These are direct contacts, either with the product or service itself, or with representations of it by the provider or a related third party.
The expression “customer corridor” is sometimes used to articulate the series of touch points a customer experiences.
A customer experience strategy can therefore prescribe the actionable plans needed to deliver a positive, valuable, differentiated CX – no matter the customer touchpoint.
And companies need to map the corridor of touch points, as at each point, the gap between customer expectations and actual experience spells the difference between what can more reliably be predicted to make a sale a success or failure.
CX matters most at precisely those points when your business has least control, such as when an agent or intermediary represents your product.
Tracking and knowing about the customer experience – and articulating explicit strategies to manage each step – gives a business a bargaining lever in its sales channel relationships by enabling it to select only those agents most capable of representing it and its outputs as it would wish to be represented to customers.
The customer experience grows in importance as products become more commoditised, and buyers differentiate based on experiences with a company more than on specific product features and functions.
As they want the companies they buy from to respect them, CX is becoming the leading competitive differentiator, meaning businesses must implement CX strategies that deliver personalised, pleasing interactions at every touchpoint.
It’s widely recognised that it’s more costly to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, so, done well, positive perceptions result in increased customer loyalty, retention, and customer advocacy that drives business stability and bottom line growth.
As today, within the scope of digitally driven CX, every employee’s role can be defined as being in customer service, a CX strategy must include all departments, not just those historically considered to be customer-facing.
The smarter approach to such planning is based on the premise that intelligence is distributed, and that different people within different departments across a business each hold different pieces of information and contribute different skills that, when combined, create a more complete picture of any problem and how to solve it.
Incorporating groups from across the business in the design of purposeful CX strategy will therefore make it easier to align everyone around customer-centricity goals and improve its delivery.
In its support, all systems must share reliable data, and while marketing, sales, and front-line customer service have traditionally received most of the attention, each of the following must also be true.
Finance must ensure a business’s ability to support the pricing models customers are willing to pay for, while ecommerce sites must offer a purchasing experience to online customers which is at minimum equivalent to what they may expect in a physical store.
Inventory management must make certain that a customer gets the product they ordered, triggering the logistics that guarantee it arrives when expected.
Accounts receivable and billing must lessen pain around any account management, billing and payment concerns that may arise.
And, sitting at the top of every consideration concerning CX, human resources (HR) must ensure that the right employees are developed and designed into the right roles and are available to work in ways that meet and further the outcomes defined by CX strategy.