What is Customer Experience (CX): Do's and Don'ts

What is customer experience?

Customer Experience (more commonly known as CX) is all the interactions that your customer has with your business from the first contact to their experience in using your product after a sale. A good customer experience will always result in a happy and loyal customer.

CX has become more important than ever according to both customers and companies. As a matter of fact, 75% of customers are willing to spend more to buy from companies that give them a good customer experience while 63% of CX managers say their company prioritizes CX way more than ever before.

Why is CX important?

Having a better experience with customers will not only give you more repeat customers but also tons of positive reviews. Thereby, reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns.

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

• increased customer loyalty
• increased customer satisfaction
• increased word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

How is CX measured?

Customer Experience may seem difficult to measure, but it is not. It can be easily done by monitoring every point of contact of your business with your customers.

Following are stages of a customer journey for an E-commerce business that must be monitored:

1. Awareness (eg. Posts on Social Media)
2. Website/Store Visit
3. Purchase
4. Support

A bad experience at any of the above stage can make or break a customer for Life.

By having an indicator to measure CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use it to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might be affecting your customers. Here are four top metrics commonly used by professionals to track customer experience:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Time To Resolution (TTR)

(Do's and Don't)

Due to saturation in most markets, many companies are realizing customer experience is their best chance to stand out from competitors. In other words, if a good product and competitive pricing are no longer enough to produce loyalty, then a personalized experience will have to be your differentiator.

Below are a few Do's and Don'ts we at BotSpace have seen from our own experience and our customers too.

🖼 Design

Do's

• Keep every process - Simple and Easily accessible. From searching for a product to returning an item.
• Following traditional design principles that most of your customers are already accustomed is very important. For Instance, an e-commerce website always has a cart on the top right of their website, OR In a supermarket, you will find gum or magazines at the check-out counter always.
• Map out your customer journey. This will help you understand every touchpoint that you have with your customers. From there, you can focus on how to make each of those touchpoints a positive customer experience.

Don'ts

• Don't reinvent the wheel, when it comes to designing your store.(unless necessary)

⏳ Response Time

Do's

• The best response time to have is 0 minutes. If you cannot have that, make sure you have automation respond to your customers with the exact average wait time.
• Let your customers know a fairly correct amount of time a product will take to deliver. Even if the time is as long as a month. No customer likes to follow up and hear you ask for more time.
• Send timely updates of the order status. Also if possible a web page link, so that they can check anytime.

Don'ts

• Do not have a live chat, if your wait time is greater than one minute. Customers tend to leave the website at that time, and most do not even bother to leave an email to get in touch. Try Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other messaging platforms instead.
• Never keep a customer waiting. Long wait times = Bad customer experience

☘️ Ease of Use

Do's

• Make every customer Interaction simple and easy. For instance, a customer wants to chat with your support. Provide them with a Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp Chat option rather than sharing your email address.
• Another example is the sign-up process for user onboarding. Having a one-click signup process (of Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn) is just the Best! No one likes to fill a form, set a new password to remember, or switch to email to verify their email id.
• With the percentage of Mobile Web users increasing, having a non-mobile-friendly website is not acceptable.

Don'ts

• Never make it difficult for a customer to return a product, cancel a subscription or even delete an account. You may just get a customer annoyed enough to not only stop using your product but also bad-mouth your business by passing on negative feedback to peers.
• Avoid tricking customers with offers that have complicated "Terms and Conditions" below.

🦻 Support

Do's

• Listen to your customers always! Can't stress this enough. Most of the time, you may feel like you are doing your level best to make your customer happy but they are not satisfied. Bain and Company once asked organizations to rate their quality of customer experience. 80% believed they were delivering a superior experience. But in reality, only 8% of customers believed they were receiving a great customer experience.
• Be present on all social messaging channels, and manage support there. If you do not have the bandwidth, be present on the most used social messaging channel for the geographic region you serve.
• Automation to FAQs saves time and money.

Don'ts

• Never allow Support Agents, who do not understand customer needs, to speak with customers. Provide them the necessary training first.
• People with anger issues or who lack patience are not meant to interact with customers. Have strict policies against such behaviors, and incentives employees for being patient and understanding.

Exemplary Customer Experience Example

One company policy you will notice is present in most Unicorn companies today like Uber, Amazon eCommerce, Zomato, Swiggy, etc. is their "No-Question-Asked Return Policy".

According to this policy, whenever a customer files a grievance in using the services of this company, their entire transaction amount for that particular service is refunded. No Questions asked, No wait time for cross-checking or anything. The money will instantly show up in your account.

This experience makes the customer feel valued, heard and also a willingness to give the company another chance in using their services. That's how loyal customers are made!!

Create a Remarkable Customer Experience

Collect customer feedback to improve and keep iterating on those experiences. This will help you improve customer sentiment about your company and keep them telling their friends and family about your business.

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