CX is not just a set of actions. It encompasses the emotions your brand evokes in your customers or potential customers. Therefore, it’s crucial to consider how they feel about your brand.
Every interaction with a customer, or touchpoint, has the power to either enhance or damage their perception of your brand. Therefore, the decisions you make at each touchpoint are critical and can significantly impact the overall success of your business.
How can Customer Experience (CX) drive growth?
Remember the old saying: “The cost of acquiring a new customer is five times the cost of keeping an old one.” Therefore, providing each customer with a positive experience is vital for sustainable business growth. Great Customer Experiences can lead to incremental growth through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Great CX also drives customer advocacy, practically bringing new customers to your business for free.
Negative CX is a leading cause of declining growth. Customers with negative perceptions leave, pushing customer churn through the roof. In the digital world, this can happen very quickly.
Social media and online review sites provide customers a platform to share their experiences with a wide audience. Unfortunately, customers are more inclined to share complaints than compliments, and a single negative comment can quickly spread to millions. As a result, customers hold significant power in shaping a business’s reputation through their experiences.
At what part of your growth journey should you start to focus on CX?
A company’s growth journey is often divided into the stages start-up, ramp-up, and scale-up. A common and very general definition of ramp-up is that a company has reached a turnover of 1 million euros or has about 10 employees. And for a scale-up, it would be a turnover of 10 million euros and about 100 employees. But please note that this is a very general definition and can vary depending on lots of circumstances.
It makes sense to start focusing on CX once you reach ramp-up. Your product or service has been launched, you have paying customers, and you have started to form teams. Now is the time to broaden your perspective from chasing new customers to also keeping existing ones.
Who is responsible for the Customer Experience?
Every employee is responsible for Customer Experience. Customer-facing functions like marketing, sales, and customer service stand for a large part. But not all. Below are some examples of how the rest of the company shares responsibility:
- Inventory management must ensure that a customer gets a product they ordered, so they don’t have to be told it has run out of stock.
- E-commerce sites need to provide the same experience to online customers as that received by in-store customers.
- Accounts receivable (AR) and billing needs to assist and alleviate any issues around billing and payment.
- Human resources (HR) must ensure that the right employee, with the right skill sets, is hired for the right job.
- Logistics needs to guarantee that the product arrives when promised.
- Finance must ensure that your company can support the subscription-based pricing models customers want.
What is a CX strategy?
A Customer Experience (CX) strategy outlines the necessary steps to ensure a positive, valuable, and distinct CX at every touchpoint. It should consider competitive intelligence, market and consumer data, and internal strategic objectives, initiatives, and value statements.
Moreover, a CX strategy must encompass all departments, not just those traditionally viewed as customer-facing. In today’s business landscape, every employee plays a role in customer service. Including teams across the organization can help align everyone around customer-centric goals and improve the overall CX.
Best practices for Customer Experience management
Collect feedback from your customers
It is a great idea to ask for feedback when and wherever possible. Review functions can be included as plugins to your website; you can send surveys via email, ask on social media or just phone some of your customers sometimes and ask.
Follow up on feedback fast
If a customer takes the time to give you feedback, you need to act on it or at least answer and explain. A customer who feels heard/not heard can have a big impact on your NPS (see NPS described below).
Create a customer-oriented culture
A clear brand message through all functions across the company will enable a seamless experience in the customer journey. As a manager, you want to make this a priority. Another tip is to reward excellent customer service amongst your employees.
How to measure Customer Experience
In order to determine the success of your Customer Experience strategy, you need to find KPIs relevant to you. The KPIs you use depend on your business, customers, and industry. But since customer experience is designed to increase customer satisfaction, some general KPIs might be inclusive enough to list here. These would be:
- Revenue growth
- Customer retention/customer churn
- Cross-sell and upsell amounts
- Customer service costs
- Net promoter score (NPS) change
- Various digital metrics like page visits, time spent on-site, conversion rate, etc.
Do you need help advancing Customer Experience?
At Cooach we help growth companies by offering Business Support services. Subscription Customer Experience Insight is one of the services we offer within Customer Insights.
Cooach Subscription Customer Experience Insight provides you with customer insights gathered by conducting quarterly Voice of Customer (VoC) surveys provide complex feedback on key moments of contact with customers and customers’ needs and expectations that need to be fulfilled to be competitive in the market. Finally, you gain a clear indication on how to create the best customer experience ever and how to deliver it consistently. Our VoC survey results in two metrics that are benchmarked and visualized in a Dashboard in our portal. A specialist will present the result and advise on appropriate necessary measures.
As a Cooach client, you can access templates, Q&A, and expert help via Slack. If you are not already a customer, you can still register for a free account and enjoy our template library.
Here you can log in or register an account, free or paid, depending on your current needs. https://staging-cooach.velumi.site/en/signup/
