What Is Customer Experience? How to Enhance It in the Digital Age

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

In the 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report, when surveyed about their business strategy for the coming year, both major corporations — Econsultancy and Adobe — gave the same answer as always: focus on improving the customer experience. So how do you build an outstanding customer experience strategy for the digital age? Let's find out with SimERP in the article below!

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is the sum total of a customer's experiences with a brand. It is not a momentary emotion the consumer feels over a short period, but what remains after every interaction they have had with the brand — through the website, social media, email, and other channels — or in person at the store with any of the brand's employees.

Put briefly, customer experience is the result of the interaction between the consumer and the business. This interaction is made up of three main components: the customer journey, the touchpoints — where the user interacts with the business — and the experience environment (including the digital environment). An outstanding customer experience means the user's experience at every touchpoint is satisfying and meets their expectations exactly.

The customer experience journey covers every activity the business puts out: from advertising and packaging to design, product quality, and the quality of customer care. Customers react in enormously varied ways when interacting directly or indirectly with a business:

• Direct interaction usually happens when the customer starts using or places an order for a product.

• Indirect interaction usually relates to advertising, reports, news, spontaneous encounters with sales staff, or word of mouth.

One question that arises is: what is the nature of customer experience? What customers experience is a personal feeling, and it can involve emotional, rational, and physical aspects that combine into a memorable experience. In the retail industry, both the business and the customer play a major role in creating the best possible experience.

Why Is Customer Experience Important to Businesses?

Customer Experience Is What Retains Loyal Customers

An outstanding customer experience builds customer loyalty. When customers feel affection for a brand, they stay longer, come back to buy more often, and find it easy to recommend your brand to others.

Conversely, if customers have terrible experiences with a brand, they will soon leave you — and may even badmouth, denounce, and share negative information about your business with others.

Customer Experience Is the Business's Key Competitive Factor

As the market becomes increasingly saturated and factors such as product and service quality, selling methods, and advertising imagery become ever easier to copy, the customer experience itself becomes the business's top competitive factor, setting it far apart from and above its rivals.

Customer Experience Helps the Business Increase Revenue

Business results and customer experience are two closely intertwined factors. Why? When customers love and trust the brand, they come back to buy regularly. That gives the business an income stream from its existing customer base.

These existing customers go on to introduce their friends and relatives to your business. The company thus gains revenue from new customers without having to spend heavily on advertising and marketing.

5 Effective Ways to Enhance the Customer Experience

Define Your Action Goals

The first step is for the business to define a customer-centric development goal, putting the customer experience first. The simplest way to implement this step is to issue directives from the top or establish general principles that apply across the entire company.

Anyone who has ever shopped at Thế Giới Di Động (Mobile World) has surely remarked that the staff there — from the motorcycle parkers to the sales, retail, and warranty staff — all display professional, standardized service attitudes.

This company's secret is focusing on corporate culture training for new employees. In addition, these employees are trained in skills for working with colleagues, partners, and customers. For positions that involve a great deal of customer contact, employees also take psychology or similar courses to sharpen their soft skills.

This customer-experience-first development at the Thế Giới Di Động retail chain has not only raised the company's reputation and sales — viewed from a broader, macro perspective, it has gradually become a standard for other retail chains to follow, while positively affecting consumer interests nationwide.

Create an Emotional Connection with Customers

"It's not what you say; it's how you say it."

The most exemplary customer experience is achieved when the business creates an emotional connection with a customer. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that more than 50% of an experience is based on emotion, because emotion governs attitudes and actions, leading to liking or disliking — and only then to the decision to buy or not buy.

A customer stays loyal to a business when they feel connected on an emotional level and impressed while using the company's product or service.

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that emotionally connected customers typically:

• Recommend the company's products and services at least 3 times more often.

• Come back to buy at least 3 times more often.

• Do not actively seek out other brands to buy from (44% of those surveyed said they rarely or never shop elsewhere).

• Become less price-sensitive (33% of those surveyed said they would need a 20% or bigger discount from a competitor before deciding to stop buying from their current brand).

Always Record Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is extremely valuable information; thanks to it, the business gains a comprehensive view of its products, services, and customer experience. Objective, positive feedback lets the business confidently push its operations forward, while criticism can help improve product quality and the quality of the company's customer care.

Here are effective ways to collect customer feedback:

Email

This is the best way to gather feedback from customers. To run a successful email strategy, the business needs to consider purpose and context. Consumers are more willing to respond to feedback requests if they know why you care about their answers. So pay attention to how you encourage feedback via email.

Website and Social Media

Touchpoints are a great place to find out what customers think of the business. According to statistics, in retail, dining, travel, and similar industries, up to 90% of potential customers typically search for and read online reviews before deciding to buy.

In addition, you can quickly respond to negative reviews and answer customers' questions. That way, all customers will know their issues or complaints are heard and addressed.

Text Messages

You might think text messages are only for promotional campaigns — but that is not accurate. According to statistics, about 90% of text messages are opened within three minutes of the customer receiving them, with a response rate of around 30%.

To make the most of text messages, the business should send only 1 or 2 short questions, or send a shortened survey link via text message.

Personalization

Over the course of the market's formation and development, the definition of personalizing the customer experience has changed in certain ways. A few years ago, personalization meant calling customers by the right name and storing a bit of their information in the company's software.

Today, however, this definition carries far higher requirements and criteria. For instance, customers' actions, preferences, and shopping history are all displayed on the company's website even when the behavior took place only moments ago.

Chartbeat has studied this and found that "on average, a web page has no more than 15 seconds to capture a visitor's attention before they leave." That window is not long, but it is enough for the business to make a certain impression on customers and help them decide whether or not to buy.

Measure the Customer Experience Effectively

How can you know whether all your efforts to improve the customer experience are delivering the expected results? Tracking business results is one of the most intuitive ways.

Beyond that, as mentioned above, you can collect customer feedback as an evaluation basis. Don't hesitate to ask direct questions such as: "Would you be willing to recommend our brand to others?" to gauge the true effectiveness of your customer experience upgrade efforts.

What's more, with today's leap in technology, you can study customer behavior throughout the buying journey at each individual touchpoint. This is a huge advantage that lets businesses collect important data and information, and thereby improve the customer experience.

And to measure customer satisfaction, businesses today typically use these 3 types of metrics:

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): the customer satisfaction index. This metric shows how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or other specific object of measurement.

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): the promoter index. This metric shows how willing customers are to recommend the company or brand to relatives, friends, or acquaintances.

• CES (Customer Effort Score): the customer effort index. This metric uncovers what is causing friction for customers along the customer journey.

Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the practice of managing and tracking customers' perceptions and evaluations throughout their use of the company's products and services.

To get the most honest feedback from customers, managers must pay attention to, monitor, and note every behavior of every individual customer. This kind of management minimizes the risks or problems customers face when using products and services — because those risks may be exactly what drives them to a better brand.

In addition, you need to distinguish and clearly understand that experience and customer interaction are two entirely different concepts. Interaction simply stops at the transaction of buying and selling, or question-and-answer exchanges about products and services. In a fuller and more meaningful sense, experience is what helps the customer decide whether or not to choose your brand again.

>> See more: What Is Customer Experience Management? Steps to an Effective Strategy

To manage the customer experience effectively, the first thing you need to do is answer 3 questions:

Question 1: What kind of experience is the business striving to deliver to customers?

This means asking whether your company has strategies, directions, and improvement steps in place for managing the customer experience. This forces business managers to plan the work needed so that every employee gives their all to deliver the most engaging and meaningful buying experience possible.

Question 2:What emotions does the business want to evoke in each different market segment?

With this question, the business should set out the emotional purpose for each customer segment. For example, for those who buy infrequently, what kind of experience do you want them to have? Or for frequent buyers, what experiences do you need to provide?

Question 3:What is your business's customer experience vision?

This means the business not only has a goal but must also strive to achieve it. Naturally, a good vision will bring many benefits to your company.

Conclusion

The market grows ever more saturated, customer expectations climb ever higher, and information spreads faster than ever with the explosion of social media.

Customer experience is a factor that requires continuous nurturing and care. When your company builds customer-focused strategies, you will easily see the positive effects — such as a higher retention rate for existing customers and surprising revenue growth. If you have any further questions, leave a comment below this article so SimERP can answer them quickly!

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