Why Having A Customer Experience Management Strategy Matters

In today’s marketplace your business success is about so much more than purely the quality of your product or your pricing.

In fact, given that 76% of customers now expect companies to recognise their needs and 74% say they will make a purchase based on a good customer experience alone, delivering a high-quality service along with great experiences is probably now the most important thing a business can do.

In addition, when you also consider that happy customers are more likely to stay loyal to you, delivering great experiences is a good business move too, as it can be up to five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one. It’s also worth bearing in mind how keen todays customers are to share their experiences with others, whether that’s through social media platforms, review sites, help forums and more. So, it literally pays to keep your existing customers happy.

So, how can you ensure your customers are contented with the experiences you’re delivering?

Well, that involves having the right tools in place to track, measure and manage these experiences throughout your customer journey including customer feedback data collection tools, surveys and CX metrics.

We will touch on this later in this piece, but before that we need to explain what we mean by customer experience management and why it’s so beneficial.

Benefits of customer experience management

At this point it can be helpful to see how specific areas of your business will benefit when you have an effective customer experience management programme in place.

How to measure customer experience

Managing your relationship with customers and the experiences you deliver for them starts before they even walk through your door, or find you online, and then continues after they buy your product or services. This is because you want to ensure that they’re always thinking about your company, whenever they’re talking to their friends, family members or colleagues, and they’re asking them to recommend a company to them.

However, to get to that point you need to know what your customers currently think about your company and the experiences you’re delivering for them, so you know what and how much you need to improve.

Here are some pointers to help you with this:

Using surveys to measure perceptions of your brand

We’ve already talked about the importance of your customers’ perception of your company and brand and knowing how well the experiences you’re delivering are being received by your customers.

Well, a good place to start finding out about this is to run a brand survey of your customers. This should give you a better feel about how your customers feel about you and what you’re delivering, as well as their overall perception of your brand compared to your competitors.

To further support this, you might also like to include a question based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) ® metric, which is also part of the CX family of metrics. This looks to ask your customers the following question.

‘On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?

The idea behind NPS is that it can help gauge the loyalty of your customers and therefore provide an indication of how happy they are with the experiences you’re delivering for them, by measuring how likely they are to recommend you to others.

Get your customers’ product feedback

When it comes to developing your products and services, who better to ask how well you’re doing than your customers.

In this case running a market research survey of your customers can help you gather some really useful insight that you can use to ensure your products and services better meet their needs moving forward.

In addition, you might also like to introduce another CX metric into your research, to get an even deeper understanding of your customers’ experiences with your products and services through the customer effort score (CES) question.

By asking your customers the following question…

On a scale of 1 to 5, how much effort did you have to expend to handle your issue?

(where 1 represents very low effort and 5 very high effort)

…you can get a better idea about how easy or hard it was for your customers to interact with your business. The idea here is that the more effortless you can make your customer experience, the more likely your customers will stay loyal and keep buying from you.

Know how well your service and support teams are performing

Whether it’s instore, online or over the phone. The abilities of your customer service and support teams are also major contributors to the overall experience you’re able to deliver for your customers, so you’ll want to ensure they’re performing as well as they can be.

By sending your customers follow up customer satisfaction surveys, you can check whether your service and support team resolved their issues to a satisfactory level. In addition, you can get an even more precise measurement of their contentment levels by asking them the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) question. Another question that belongs to the CX metric family, this is based on asking your customers the following question.

‘How satisfied were you with our (product, service, support interaction)?

Each customer is then invited to rate their satisfaction on a 5-point scale ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied.

For more information about how to measure CSAT and the other question types in the CX metric family, why not visit our recent ‘Investigating Customer Experience Metrics That Matter’ blog piece.

Final thoughts

We hope you found this blog helpful and feel better informed about why customer experience management is important to delivering better experiences and building a more successful business.

What is also valuable to point out, is that in addition to using the right surveys and CX metrics, your feedback data collection tools are also vital in making it easier for you engage and collect feedback from your customers. So, whether it’s email, SMS and in-app pops to kiosk or QR codes, these can be deployed at various stages of your customers’ journey to ensure you successfully collect this insight.

By leveraging API technology, you can also create automatic survey triggers, and create feedback loops at the point of experience, so you’re better able to gather data across multiple touch points. This should also allow you to better track, manage and improve your ongoing customer experience.

If you can do this, the more customers you’re likely to retain, the more you’ll be able to sell to them and the more successful your business is likely to be.