What is customer experience?
When people ask me, what is customer experience? I wouldn’t be being overly dramatic to say it is everything. Let me tell you why – To start with I’ll cover what is customer experience and how it is different to customer service.
Customer Experience, also known as CX is the whole experience your customer has with your company/brand as a whole. Think of it as the feeling they get when they think of your company/brand.
Whereas customer service is the service they receive during a touch point with the company, such as during a telephone call or in your facility. Therefore customer service does play a part in customer experience but it is only a part of it. Therefore if you aren’t aware of customer experience and what customer experience is, you are likely to be not covering the whole picture. And therefore missing some opportunities to create a positive customer experience.
The good, the bad and the ugly
We all know, without thinking about what is customer experience, that we have had some great customer experiences throughout of lives. However, we also will have had negative customer experiences.
When you consider the age we are in now, of the ease of leaving reviews. You can start to see very easily how important it is to give your customers a great experience. When I say customers, I also mean prospective customers.
You never know who will be a good customer when you start proceedings. Interestingly a ‘good’ customer doesn’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money with your company. They could be a cheerleader who recommends you to everyone they know and leaves rave reviews online about you.
Attention to detail is a great way to start with improving customer experience within your company.
If you can pre-empt problems people may have you can usually stop them from happening. You can also use historic data to examine previous issues and ensure processes are in place that stop repeat problems.
A few examples of bad and ugly customer experience
People trying to make a booking on your website and it not working as it should, i.e. quickly and easily.
When a customer wants to call or email your business and the contact information isn’t readily available.
Your customer has been told something will be ready on x date and then 3 days later it isn’t ready and nobody has communicated it.
The above examples may seem trivial to some people, but here’s where it gets interesting. Imagine you booked something online and the system was playing up. You may already be feeling less than positive towards the company. Then it hasn’t arrived when you expected it and nobody has been in touch. Now you want to contact them and the confirmation emails all came from ‘no reply’ email addresses with no contact information on the emails.
Now they start to seem less trivial. It may not be to the level that someone takes the times to leave a negative Google review for example. Some people are more inclined to do that and you never can really tell who they are. Especially in this case of being an online system. However, will they recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues? I think not!
A few pointers when thinking about customer experience
- Consistency is key – consistent not constant. You need to set your levels at what is sustainable. There is no point in trying to set a 1 hour response rate to emails for example if you aren’t able to keep it up at least 80% of the time. The reason for this is that people come to expect whatever level you set.
- You can’t please everyone all of the time – everyone has different levels of acceptable with everything. It is no different with customer experience. What you need to do is make sure your level of customer experience matches with your price point and your customer’s expectations. There are different price points available for everything. If you get it right you hit that sweet spot and your business will thrive.
- Perfection isn’t possible – By all means aim for perfect but don’t berate yourself too much when you don’t hit it. Notice I said when not if. We can all aim for the stars but we won’t get it right 100% of the time. I also speak from experience when I say that you sometimes just get those customers that everything seems to go wrong for. It is just one of those things. Sometimes you can almost guarantee that nothing seems to go right when dealing with a particular customer. Sod’s law it is called I believe. They key thing here it to make sure they are in the minority, a one off ideally. Also to have processes in place for everything that can go wrong so they know you care and are doing your best to help them.
So what can you do if you want to improve customer experience in your business?
Go on the customer journey – that is one of the best bits of advice I can give. Use their eyes and ears. See what they see. Sometimes it is very difficult to do from the inside. That is because being impartial can be very difficult.
One of my favourite services to offer is to do it for you. I love to improve customer experience within companies.
Also look at the whole picture. If you are going to take on this mission yourself, make sure you look at your business from the customer’s perspective and include it all. First impression all the way through to follow up customer service. What does your branding say about the company, does it fit in with your price point for example.
Cheap doesn’t mean rubbish anymore. Look at Premier Inn, they have created a whole business around providing affordable places to stay. No matter where you go to a Premier Inn, the rooms are practically the same. They have taken the extra step of having the same beds in every hotel which makes it feel more like a home away from home. You’re always going to get a good night sleep in a Premier Inn bed.
Cleverly they went on to create a Premier Inn at Home site to enable their customers to replicate their good night sleep at home.
People’s expectations only ever seem to go one way so it really is important to always be looking for ways to improve and differentiate from the crowd.
How can we help you and your customer experience journey?
This is where our customer experience audit comes into its own.
This involves is a full deep dive of your business from the customer perspective.
What do they see when they find you online. What are your reviews like? Do you have any?
Is your message clear and does it speak to your customers.
Is it accurate? By that I mean does your offer match your branding.
Do they get what you say when they come in?
Where we can, we like to do secret shopper type dives here. It is a very good way to evaluate if your staff are working with the company ethos and values in mind.
Once the data gathering is complete we write a detailed report on our findings and then present it to you, in person or on Zoom. During the meeting we talk you through your report, which includes our advice on the next stages for your business to improve your customer experience levels. We help you to build a strategy to work on over time to ensure continuous improvement and growth.
What our customers love about working with us on this, is that they get practical ideas with no corporate jargon. They get the feeling of support from people who really care about their business. They love how much we understand their business and their plans for it. We believe that your business should work for you and not the other way around so our goal is to help you make that happen.
Our customers also love that we offer this service starting at just £250 for small businesses with 1-3 people. The audits are £450 for businesses with 4+ employees based on one site, for full transparency. If you are a multi-site organisation please contact us for a quote.
Further requirements
We can look to help you with the implementation if required. Being a small company who cares about all of our clients we can tailor our services to fit your business. Often we work with companies to improve processes and then have a break for the embedding stage and revisit in 6 months to a year.
If you’d like to find out more about our customer experience report contact us and request a discovery call