Customer Experience is the experience that a user has at each stage of an interaction with a company. The customer experience is made up of dozens, if not hundreds, of factors. It begins to take shape long before a person becomes a customer – through contact with advertising, from information about the company found on the Internet, including in social networks. Experience is formed and influences a person’s final decision to buy, after which it continues to accumulate rapidly through interactions with customer service.
It’s important for any business to develop a positive customer experience, one that will make a person a regular and loyal customer. That way the customer experience will work for the business, not against it. Let’s understand how businesses can influence the development of Customer Experience, and how this complex and volatile metric can be measured.
Why Manage Customer Experience
The trend in commerce, including e-commerce, is that price is no longer the determining factor that makes a customer loyal. What is increasingly important is a business’s attitude toward its customer, which is exactly what shapes the customer experience. Manage the customer experience to:
- Build a long-term relationship with the customer and increase their LTV.
- Make it easier for the business to promote new products.
- Get more opportunities to work with the price – customers are more understanding of price increases, if the relationship with the company suits them.
- Gain a competitive advantage – don’t let the customer leave.
In the end, it’s the totality of the user experience, if it’s positive, that leads to increased sales, financial well-being and stable business development.
In short, the better customers feel about your company, the easier it is for you to make money.
How to Measure Customer Experience
The customer experience of interacting with a company is difficult to capture in numbers. This rule applies to any business, be it Play Amo South Africa or a local restaurant. However, it’s possible to measure it and look at the business through the eyes of the customer. It’s important to implement a CRM, which records all contacts with each client and shows at what stage of the sales funnel it is at, and actively uses all opportunities to receive feedback. A basic tool for getting feedback is surveys.
Here are the main metrics that show changes in Customer Experience.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Users are asked to answer the question “What is the probability that you would recommend this company / this product to your environment?” In this case, we need to assess the probability on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 – “definitely wouldn’t recommend,” and 10 – “would definitely recommend.”
Estimates from 0 to 6 points are negative. 7-8 points characterize the neutrality of the user, whose opinion can lean towards both denial and acceptance of the company.
Especially positive for the business are scores from 9 points and higher, as they show that the consumer experience the company manages qualitatively.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
This metric helps to understand how satisfied a customer is with any important business metric within an interaction, such as product consistency or customer service.
Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI)
In this case users answer the question “How do you rate your interaction with the company?”. Satisfaction is evaluated differently, for example on a five-point scale. 1 – “evaluated negatively, I didn’t like it”, and 5 – “everything is fine, I am satisfied.”
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The metric shows how easy or, conversely, difficult it was for the customer to solve his problem. It’s determined by a survey of the form “How easy was it for you to place an order / call the customer support service?”. It’s evaluated according to the five-point scale, where 1 – “very difficult”, and 5 – “everything is easy and perfect”.
Customer Loyalty Index (CLI)
To determine this index, users are asked to answer several questions:
- Are you willing to recommend the company/good to your environment?
- How likely are you to continue buying from this company?
- How likely would you be to buy other products from the company?
- How likely would you be to buy the same products from another company?
The answers to all questions are to choose numbers from 0 to 10, where 0 is “definitely no” and 10 is “definitely yes.”
The overall CLI counts as an average score for answering all the questions. It shows how likely repeat purchases are, which is very important for merchandise businesses as well.
Shaping the Customer Experience
Product
If a product is of poor quality, no service and no loyalty programs will keep a customer. The only option, to somehow stay afloat – a hard price dumping, the sale of a large number of low-quality goods to a large number of customers without reckoning on repeat purchases. But as a long-term strategy, this approach cannot be successful.
Customer Service
This is the support that the user receives both before and after the purchase. It contains the ability to easily call, quickly get an answer via email or social media – and the answer is competent. It’s good if customer service is available 24 hours a day, or at least common questions are answered by a chatbot at all hours of the day.
Consumer Experience
The impressions that the company has left on the client during the entire interaction. If both the product and the service are unquestionable, you can proceed directly to building the Customer Experience.