Customers today expect a great experience at every stop along their journey with a brand. This is known as customer experience (CX). Delivering a positive customer experience can be difficult. This has created uncertainty about the precise components of a winning customer experience.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about customer experience — what it is, why it’s important, how it differs from customer service, what good and bad customer experiences look like, and the strategies you’ll need to provide a good customer experience.
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What is customer experience (CX)?
Customer experience(CX) is every interaction a consumer has with a brand — across all channels and departments — and their perception of that experience.
Customer experience matters as much as your products or services. Consumers say they’re willing to pay up to a 16% price premium on products and services. Additionally, one in three consumers says they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Customer experience is a critical component of modern marketing and sales, as businesses focus on meeting high consumer standards and improving overall lifetime value. Marketers need as much information as possible to ensure they’re maximizing their return on investment at every touchpoint.
The most important thing to recognize is that customer experience is a relationship that’s built over time through a series of interactions that take place across organizational initiatives and departments. Customer experience refers to a consumer’s opinion of how interactions are carried out, from introduction to the sales cycle, and whether they consider them positive, all the way through to customer support.
Customer experience is far more than a mere checklist of actions to be implemented. It goes beyond the surface level and delves into the realm of feelings, emotions, and impressions. It recognizes that every touchpoint along a customer’s journey has the power to shape perception and sentiment. Whether it's a website visit, a phone call with customer support, or an in-store experience, each interaction has the potential to leave customers feeling positively about your company or, conversely, create a negative impression. Understanding this holistic view of customer experience allows businesses to analyze and optimize each touchpoint, ensuring that customers are satisfied throughout their entire journey.
What does a good customer experience look like?
Creating a good customer experience is primarily about simplifying the process for customers to do business with you. It involves removing barriers and making interactions as effortless as possible.
A good customer experience is reliable. The focus should be on solving problems for customers, fixing customer pain points, and providing a seamless experience. This is a primary goal for many businesses. To achieve this, it is essential to examine and optimize the entire customer journey. Identifying areas for improvement and determining how to make each touchpoint positive can significantly enhance a customer’s experience.
For new customers, this may look like easy checkout processes for ecommerce sites or providing convenient access to representatives for inquiries, especially for significant purchases or products or services with a long sales cycle. When it comes to returning customers, making the return process as hassle-free and straightforward as possible is essential. While striving to make every purchase satisfactory, recognizing the inevitability of returns and accommodating customers' needs during such instances is crucial for securing loyalty and encouraging repeat business.
What does a poor customer experience look like?
A poor customer experience is a failure to grasp the unique needs of customers. It’s frequently the result of taking a generalized approach to marketing and sales. If you don’t make the effort to personalize your communications and make the buying process as simple as possible, customers will very likely feel as though you don’t value them.
Keep in mind, CX goes beyond customer service. Consider the entire customer journey and look for pitfalls where users or buyers could become discouraged, frustrated, or inconvenienced — and then identify ways to improve and become more efficient.
Poor customer experience can start with marketing content and extend to sales and product onboarding. Brands should make sure that all their information is available and accessible on every device. If landing pages and website content are not mobile-friendly and designed responsively, consumers are likely to get impatient and move on to a competitor.
Marketing should be consistent and keep up with customers’ desires. That means no irrelevant product recommendations or non-existent customer service. And if automation is used, there should also be the option to connect with a real person.
That’s just the start. Other examples of tactics and processes that can lead to a bad CX include:
- Inaccurate or impersonal marketing outreach
- Disappointing products or services
- Poor customer support experiences
- Inadequate customer feedback programs
- Difficulty purchasing a product or service
- Questions about personal security online
How to improve customer experience.
Companies can improve customer experience by creating and implementing a customer experience strategy. A customer experience strategy is an organization-wide plan designed to deliver consistently positive and valuable interactions at every customer touchpoint. By leveraging competitive insights and aligning all departments, not just customer-facing ones, a strong CX strategy drives customer acquisition, loyalty, and retention.
Here are several recommendations to guide your strategy for enhancing customer experience:
- Establish Feedback Loops: Implement systems to consistently gather and analyze customer feedback to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. A customer experience management (CXM) platform can provide the critical data necessary to build and refine a robust strategy.
- Create a Seamless Omnichannel Experience: Ensure a consistent, integrated experience across all channels, from your website and social media to in-person interactions. Map the customer journey to identify crucial touchpoints and align your internal processes with customer expectations.
- Empower Customers with Self-Service: Provide convenient self-service options, such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and interactive tools. This allows customers to resolve their issues on their terms, giving them control over their experience.
- Deliver Personalized Interactions: Tailor experiences to individual customer preferences and behaviors by delivering relevant content, recommendations, and offers. Personalization shows customers that you value them as individuals, which increases the likelihood of repeat business.
- Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) Effectively: Use AI technologies like chatbots and virtual assistants to automate routine tasks and provide real-time assistance. AI can also analyze vast amounts of customer data, such as search behavior, to generate actionable insights for personalizing recommendations, anticipating needs, and delivering targeted marketing campaigns.
- Offer Proactive Support: Anticipate customer needs and proactively reach out with helpful information, support, or personalized recommendations. A proactive approach makes customers feel supported throughout their journey.
- Utilize Quality Data and Analytics: Ground your decisions in data by gathering and analyzing customer information. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide insights into interactions, marketing automation tools show which communications are most effective, and detailed customer profiles allow for precise audience segmentation and personalized messaging.
How to measure customer experience.
Relying on a single metric or KPI to gauge the health of the customer experience is insufficient and often misleading. A truly effective measurement framework integrates multiple types of data to provide a complete and nuanced picture. This framework should be built on two categories of metrics:
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Experience Metrics: These are the metrics that measure the customer's perceptions and feelings about their experiences. They provide the "why" behind customer behavior. Three valuable experience metrics include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by asking how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to others on a 0-10 scale. This metric is a strong predictor of future growth.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measures satisfaction with a specific interaction, product, or service, typically on a 1-5 scale. It provides immediate, actionable feedback on individual touchpoints.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to complete a task or resolve an issue. It is a powerful indicator of friction in the customer journey and is highly correlated with loyalty.
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Operational Metrics: These are the hard business metrics that measure customer behavior and financial performance. They provide the "what" of business outcomes. Key operational metrics to track include:
- Customer Retention and Churn Rates: The percentage of customers who remain with the company over a given period and the rate at which they leave. This is a direct reflection of loyalty.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total net profit a company can expect to generate from a single customer over the entire course of their relationship. This metric quantifies the long-term value of retention.
- Average Order Value (AOV) and Repeat Purchase Rate: These metrics track changes in customer spending behavior and are influenced by positive experiences and effective cross-selling or up-selling.
Customer experience vs. customer service.
It’s common to confuse customer service and customer experience. As part of delivering a positive and engaging customer experience, a brand must provide high-quality customer service at specific touchpoints along a customer’s journey.
Customer service provides prospects and consumers with assistance and advocacy when it comes to products and services. This can be anything from live support agents to online resources like frequently asked questions. High-quality customer service provides timely responses and user access, keeping interactions positive and helpful.
Customer experience takes those support efforts and amplifies them, providing reasons for a visitor to become a customer or remain one. Support teams can also leverage other elements of the customer’s experience with your company to better understand their journey and provide meaningful information to streamline the support process. All of this can be managed through dedicated systems that make cross-departmental communication effective.
What is customer experience management?
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the systematic process of analyzing, measuring, and enhancing the entire customer journey. It encompasses every interaction across all touchpoints for both new and existing customers. The primary goal of CXM is to consistently meet customer needs, add value, and foster long-term relationships that cultivate satisfaction and loyalty.
Effective CXM leverages technology to monitor, personalize, and optimize the customer journey. Managing the numerous components that shape a customer's perception of a brand would be nearly impossible without the right technological tools.
The process begins at the first point of contact. Marketers must craft clear, engaging first impressions and calls to action. Nurturing programs, powered by marketing automation and customer success platforms, can then entice prospective customers with personalized messaging and relevant promotions.
Once a prospect becomes a customer, CXM ensures they are aware of value-added services, products, and ongoing support. Customer experience platforms deliver targeted updates and marketing campaigns designed to maintain long-term interest. When combined with quality products and support, CXM allows a business to measure its successes, identify potential issues before they escalate, and continuously refine touchpoints for maximum engagement and impact.
Improve customer experience with Adobe Experience Platform.
Customer experience can be a deciding factor in purchase decisions. This is especially true now that customers are going online, constantly sharing positive and negative feedback, and are free to buy alternative products and services.
Marketers and operational teams should prioritize customer experience, as it encompasses all interactions an individual has with a brand, not just customer support requests. A misguided email campaign or faulty service call could be just the trigger to cause a customer to leave a brand. By improving customer experience through personalization, analysis, and cross-departmental collaboration, companies are better poised for success, retention, and ROI.
When you’re ready to optimize CX at your organization, start by analyzing your customer journey and noting any points of friction or areas for improvement. Next, you need to find the right tool to help your business provide an exceptional customer experience.
Adobe Experience Platform makes real-time customer interactions possible. It enables you to analyze customer experience data that genuinely matters, train generative AI and large language models (LLMs), and integrate all your CX technology into a single source of truth.
With Adobe Experience Platform, marketers can create accurate, comprehensive customer profiles that drive relevant experiences for every person, from messaging and promotions to sales and support. Everything is tracked and available in one place, making information sharing among teams a breeze while centralizing the metrics needed to determine success.
To learn more about creating a customer experience that makes a difference, see what unified customer experience solutions can do for you. Request a demo today.
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