Consumers have recently been paying a lot more attention to experience, putting the pressure on customer experience (CX) professionals to deliver. With technology evolving at the rate it is, the bar for customer experience is rapidly being pushed higher for more transcendent usability. With these developments, creating a CX that exceeds your customers’ expectations is becoming increasingly challenging. Ease, accuracy, and speed combine for a 1-2-3 punch that’ll keep your customers loyal in the long haul.
What’s Customer Experience?
Generally, customer experience refers to the combined interactions a customer has with your brand. It closely resembles the lifecycle of the customer, mapping every touchpoint the customer has with you. It highlights where you’re building advocacy, loyalty, and delivering an exceptional experience. And also where you’re delivering a mediocre experience, that’s, unfortunately, driving your customers to your competitors. In simple words, it puts you in your customer’s shoes.
Now you may be wondering, “All companies have a Customer Service Department. Isn’t that sufficient?” Actually, customer service is a process, but not a regular one. It happens at a particular moment in time, solving a specific problem. Customer experience is about showing up for the customer where and when they need you, with consistency and easy access counting for a lot. It’s about ensuring every interaction with the business is meaningful and memorable. CX is about maintaining relations – it’s not transactional.
Another and a bit more theoretical way of seeing it, is that Customer Experience is a simple substraction. Customer experience is generally determined to be the difference between customer expectation and the subjective experience the customer experienced. This is exceptionally way to analyze customer experience as it shows that there are two ways to affect too customer experience via you customer experience strategy – influence your brand that creates the expectation and/or influence the section of the business that creates the experience so essentially the entire customer journey.
Who’s Responsible for Customer Experience?
Previously, responsibility for the customer experience was usually divvied up between the product, customer support, and other departments. It’s quite rare for the responsibility to rest on just a single department. The customers being targeted with enhanced CX – in the entire lifecycle of advocacy, action, desire, intention, and awareness – are all prospective customers. CX must be optimized for the influencer, the audience, and the prospect.
A top-level view on CX reveals that it best fits under the umbrella of your marketing department, which is why marketing usually controls a large part of the customer experience budget.
Is a Customer Experience Strategy Vital?
Why have people started focusing on customer experience strategy? Providing exceptional service has always been a key to growing your customer base, but is that what’s going to make a difference for your brand? The answer is nothing but an emphatic “YES.”
Your competition is gaining more access to your customers and is steadily growing, learning how to eliminate their pain points – and where they hang out. At the same time, a customer-facing shift is being witnessed – they’re now self-empowered, thoroughly educating themselves before every purchase decision, expecting excellent service, and engaging your brand through whichever channel they see fit. This has not just disarmed the similar products battlefield, but opened up a brand new realm for you to conquer to keep and win customers: the CX.
Jaakko Männistö believes that personalized, branded moments at every point of customer engagement are what market leaders are seeking. The gap must be closed between what the brands are delivering and what the customer is actually demanding.