Customer Experience

Customer experience is the overall interaction a customer has with your brand as they go through the marketing, sales, and customer service journey. Positive experiences enhance the perception your customers have of your brand, and, especially with customer experience in retail, include how you optimize the shopping experience. Harnon Consulting uses customer experience best practices to create the perfect customer experience vision for your brand.

The importance of customer experience is in its ability to control the emotions and impression your customers have of your brand. Customer experience management includes measuring customer experience and implementing customer experience management programs. A good customer experience strategy helps build raving fans out of your customers increasing retention, referrals, and revenue.

It’s much more expensive to find new revenue than it is to retain the customers and revenue that you already have. Invest in your customer experience so you can continue down the path of intelligent growth.

Improving the customer experience starts with measuring customer experience and ends with creating experience centers that create “WOW” moments for your customers. Here are the ways you can improve customer experience with your brand:

• Customer feedback - Use surveys and outreach to give scores to each of your services.
• Website Platform - Choose a website platform that will enable your target customer experience.
• Analyze Your Current Website - Use customer experience analytics to test the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) of your website. This includes how your content is structured and how easy it is to navigate your site.
• Increase Pagespeed - Compress image sizes and eliminate unnecessary code to reduce page loading times.
• Website Platform - Choose a website platform that will enable your target customer experience.
• Speed Up the Buying Process - Remove friction from the buying process, making it faster and more convenient for the customer.
• Create Unique Customer Experiences - “WOW” moments are unforgettable and are examples of good customer experiences.
• Enlist Customer Experience Consulting Firms - They can analyze your customer experience analytics to identify gaps in your customer experience.

Ask yourself what personally makes a good customer experience. Think of when you were a customer and you were on the receiving end of a good customer experience. How did it make you feel? What did you say about the brand who gave it to you? How did you talk about the experience online or to other people in person? Answering these questions can help you figure out more ways to improve your customer experience.

There are many aspects to creating a solid customer experience, however they can be broken down into 3 main components:

1. Success - Did the customer achieve the expected result and were they satisfied?
2. Effort - How much effort did the customer have to put into the transaction and how easy was it to interact with your company?
3. Emotion - How did the customer feel during the experience and was that expected?

Digital customer experience is how customers interact with a brand on a website, social media platform, by email, by text, or any other digital form of communication. It’s the functionality of their website, the posts that people see and interact with on social media, the Google searches the brand appears in, and the emails and text communications sent between the customer and the brand. Digital customer experience also includes the advertising and marketing messages that a customer experiences with a brand.

Customer surveys are one of the best ways for measuring customer experience.

Delighted

Collect and analyze survey feedback with Delighted, the self-serve customer experience management platform of choice for the world’s top companies with the best customer experience.

Qualtrics

This customer experience management software gives you the tools to ask the right questions, hear what customers need, and take the right actions every time.

Measuring customer experience is mostly done through measuring your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). It breaks down your customers into 3 categories in terms of your customer experience: promoters, passives, and detractors.

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and referring others to your brand
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and stop growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Your NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters (Promoters % - Detractors %), giving you a score ranging from -100 to 100.