Understanding Your Customers' Experience

Customer experience is a key driver of business success. From social media analytics to specialized software, there are hundreds of tools devoted to measuring it. When it comes to understanding and improving customer experience, there are five things every business needs to know.

1. Customer experience is different from customer opinion.

When it comes to understanding your customers, "experience" is different from "opinion." Customer experience, sometimes referred to as CX or UX (user experience) is the product of all the interactions a customer has with a business over the course of their relationship.

2. Customer experience drives loyalty.

Your goal as a business should be to create an enjoyable, ongoing relationship (experience) to produce a positive feeling (opinion). This creates loyalty, making your customers more likely to turn to your company again. Above everything, the goal of tracking the customer experience is to support overall business outcomes. "These are the most important goals, including increasing revenue, decreasing churn and improving team productivity."

3. Focus on the journey.

From finding your website and reading social posts to asking follow-up questions after a purchase and reading marketing emails, there are dozens of points where customers interact with your business. These are all part of your customers’ experience, and each of them can affect whether you develop loyal, long-term relationships.

4. You can measure customer experience on any budget.

There are lots of tools out there for measuring customer experience and companies to partner with who can help you set up CX systems. Even if you don’t use software to measure customer experience, you can still use your website or social media analytics to learn how customers find you, what makes them stick around and what leads to them making a purchase.

5. Measurement is only the first step.

Finding tools to measure customer experience is important, but those insights don’t mean anything on their own. Once you have CX data, the most important step is what you do with it.

Customer Experience



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