People are ten times more likely to share a bad experience over a good one which is why a great customer experience is so vital to your business. We believe the customer shapes the business. Our mission is to help companies create customer-focused experiences and customer-centric cultures that do the marketing for them.
What is customer experience?
The best way to define customer experience is the accumulation of impressions your company leaves with your customer, resulting in how they think and feel about your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. Multiple touchpoints factor into the customer experience, and these touchpoints occur on a cross-functional basis. Each interaction results in an impression and those impressions make up the experience.
Who is your customer?
Every business should at least have a basic idea of who they serve, whether it be B2B or B2C and how those customers feel about their products and services. Oftentimes, companies invest heavily in market research and neglect to fully understand their individual customers when designing and selling their products and services.
Good businesses apply design thinking – viewing the business through the customers’ eyes and working backwards to create their products and services. Your customer isn’t just a demographic – they have wants and needs, fears, frustrations, obstacles, loves, hates and everything in between. And it’s your job to know what they are, understand them and build your business around them.
What do your customers want?
Like all good experiences, your customer seeks ease – through all journeys including communication, purchase and resolution. We’ll use technology to create a positive customer experience – but the technology itself can’t create what human connection and empathy can.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie (author of How to Make Friends and Influence People).
The customer experience is about emotion – not just technology.
Experiences are based on emotions, therefore, your services and products – and each interaction with them – must be positive across all your channels. Like my father always said, the customer is always right – and even if they aren’t, it’s your job to make sure they feel that way.
Working with businesses, we often find two scenarios: companies capturing data and not using it or companies not capturing data. In either scenario, the data must be captured and transformed into a positive experience that generates positive emotions for all your customers across all your channels. Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to do that.
And then we’ll develop your loyalty and marketing campaigns based on that data. And better yet, once your campaigns take off, we show you how to measure their effectiveness. It really is all about the data – and how you use that data to change the way your business performs and the way you serve your customers.
But first and foremost, who is your customer, how do they feel about your brand’s products and services, and what does their experience mean for your bottom line?
“Customer experience encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering—the quality of customer care, of course, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability.”
– Harvard Business Review
The Proof
“Customer experience is the new brand. Today, 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010. But while 80% of companies believe they deliver super experiences, only 8% of customers agree.” – Forbes
Salesforce’s research finds 95% of customers say they are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust.
McKinsey insights found that, on average, brands that improve CX: increase revenue 10-15% and lower costs 15-20%.
“If you build a great CX (customer experience) customers tell each other about it. Word of mouth is very powerful.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon
“For transaction companies, clients who had the best experiences were shown to spend 140% more than those who were shown to have the poorest experience. For companies based around subscription services, it was shown that members who rated their experience at the lowest score possible only had a 43% chance of still being a member one year later. In contrast, those who scored their experiences at the highest ratings had a 74% chance of still being a member in a year.” – Harvard Business Review
A Walker study found that by the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Accenture found that 89% of customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their issues to multiple representatives. Moreover, 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience.
According to Esteban Kolsky, if a customer is not satisfied, 13% of them will tell that experience with 15 or even more people and share that they are unhappy. On the other hand, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
The top three reasons to invest in good customer experience management: it improves customer retention, improves customer satisfaction and it increases cross-selling and up-selling.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs, Apple
64% of people believe that customer experience is more important than price when making a purchase. – Gartner, Inc.
65% of buyers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.
Aberdeen Group claims that companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the demand for an omni-channel customer experience will be amplified by the need for near perfect execution, and the number of companies that invest in omni-channel has jumped from 20% to more than 80%. They also found that of 15,000 consumers, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience.
