What is customer experience?
Definition: The customer experience is a customer's overall impression of a brand based on their interactions and experiences with the business across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Customer experience encompasses all customer journey aspects, including user experience, customer service, product or service quality, branding, marketing and community.
A good customer experience stems from a quickly resolved issue, transparent pricing, receiving a high-quality product, or social media interactions with the brand.
It is crucial in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy and can impact a business's reputation and bottom line.
How to measure customer experience
- Online reviews/feedback/ratings – Through these comments, brands see how customers view the brand and find places for improvement.
- Customer Satisfaction Score – Brands calculate this score by asking existing customers to rate their experience from 1-10, and find out what they need to work on.
- Customer Effort Score – CFS reveals the customer’s experience and the amount of effort put into buying or returning a product/service. UX and user-friendliness are important for a good customer experience.
- Customer Retention Rate – This score is calculated by dividing the number of retained customers by the total number of customers. Brands use this information to track loyal customers and get feedback.
- Net Promoter Score — Calculate the NPS by asking customers about the likelihood of them recommending your brand to others. This score helps with discovering how loyal customers are to the brand.
- Cart Abandonment rate – This score shows how many customers have left their cart minutes before buying, so brands look into their journey and see what might have caused it.
- Average Resolution Time –This rate refers to the amount of time it takes a customer support agent to resolve a request. The speed of resolving customer issues directly influences customer experience and satisfaction.
- Customer Churn Rate –A lower churn rate (customers who stop their subscription) means your customers are satisfied with your service.
What makes a good customer experience
- Transparency
By being transparent about the prices, features, product/service information and results, a brand easily meets customer expectations and reduce the number or returns and unsatisfied customers.
- Empathy and personalization
Empathy and personalization is key to customer satisfaction because customers want to feel valued and appreciated. Customer support has a great deal of responsibility here because customers expect empathy and personalized resolutions to their problems when reaching out. A good experience with the brand’s support results in more positive reviews and loyal customers.
- Responsiveness
Responsiveness to feedback is vital when it comes to having a good customer experience. Whether through customer support, comments or reviews, the brand should consider customers’ problems and suggestions and try to implement them right away. Customers appreciate when they don’t have to wait long for an answer, and AI customer service can help out.
- User experience
User experience (UX) influences the customer’s overall impression of the brand. UX refers to the customer's interaction with the product or the service in terms of ease of use, features, or design. A good UX experience increases the chance of a good overall experience with the brand.
To create a better CX many teams need to work on pre-sale, support and feedback while improving UX is usually the job of the product development team in the areas of ease of use and user needs.
- Consistency and proactivity
To leave a memorable and good impression in the eyes of the customer, a brand needs to be consistent with its messages, values and responses. For a brand to be associated with a good customer experience, it should be proactive and try to prevent future problems or issues by listening to customers and following KPIs.
Examples of a bad customer experience
Snapchat
In 2018 Snapchat updated its design, and customers weren’t happy at all. In fact, 80,000 users signed a petition and reached out to Snapchat to show their dissatisfaction with the update.
Snapchat’s team refused to remove the update, despite the negative feedback from customers. This negative customer experience resulted in many customers deleting Snapchat accounts.
Facebook has often found itself on the “ Worst Customer Support” list, and the reason behind it is the long waiting time and non-responsiveness of their customer support agents.
Facebook users have found no empathy nor resolution to their problems, which may include hacked accounts or forgotten passwords. Poor customer support has influenced the brand’s reputation and image.
Example of a great customer experience
Shopify
During the pandemic, Shopify’s team noticed small businesses were having trouble switching to e-commerce. By listening to their customers, Shopify has invented new helpful features such as plug-ins to create shoppable ads on other social media apps, meeting user needs and expectations.
Samsung
Samsung has increased customer engagement by 19% by using AI to measure feedback and calls and predicts issues. By using a chatbot, the company has reduced wait time, the number of unresolved issues and unsatisfied customers.
