Customer Experience: Learn All About The Concept

By Gretchen Clarke- Aug 12, 2022 301

The concept of customer experience is much talked about nowadays. This has a big impact on successful companies. Experience in question means that customers go through the time of their conversation with the brand and how they feel about them. Thus, it involves all areas of the company, and all employees must be willing to help. 

Optimizing the company’s value delivery is a successful strategy to improve the customer experience. This is evidenced by many big companies like Netflix, and Starbucks. 

Throughout the content, you will learn more about the customer experience and how to develop your own strategies for utilizing your business.

 

What is Customer Experience?

The customer experience is the consumer experience with a particular brand. It involves many emotional and rational aspects, which have a direct impact on the quality responsible for the brand by consumers. 

Feelings, usefulness, and satisfaction are some of the factors that affect the consumer experience, which can be positive or negative. 

The idea began to gain more space in the market because professionals realized that consumer behavior had changed. Now they evaluate more than the product, but that experience they give the brand for the purchase decision. This experience includes the whole journey taken by consumers, which the brand must pay attention to. 

Companies that value the customer experience always put their priorities first. They optimize their functional and organizational processes to improve the customer experience. 

To better understand your strategy, see how many benefits it can provide.

 

Advantages of Customer Experience?

Investing in the customer experience is very beneficial for your business. It can help you bring customers closer to the brand, reduce churn, collaborate with the brand's image, among other benefits.

 

Some of the main benefits are:

 

Brand Credibility

Increasing brand credibility largely depends on the degree to which customers rely on the company. Customers trust the brand when they see your efforts to really help them and provide the best possible experience. 

There is a sense of customer achievement and success while going through this experience that includes everything from the service field to the product and after-sales relationship. 

Just as trying to maintain relationships builds trust between parties, maintaining trust between customers and brands also builds trust. It in turn increases the credibility of the brand.

 

Customer loyalty

Customer loyalty plays a fundamental role in the growth of the company. And one of the main reasons for contributing to loyalty is the consumer experience with the brand. 

The frequency of customer interaction with the brand increases significantly when the customer feels a pleasant and memorable experience. This frequency can create a loyalty relationship, which is very convenient for the brand.

 

Brand Promoters

A big advantage of the customer experience is creating brand promoters. Brand promoters are nothing more than enthusiastic customers of the brand. That is, those who have a deep relationship with the brand and actively participate in its spread when it is needed to protect. 

Promoters collaborate with the company’s word-based marketing, enhancing its overall performance.

 

3 pillars customer experience

To better understand the customer experience, you need to know the foundations that support this strategy, i.e. its pillars. 

You need three main pillars to focus on your strategic development. Check it out below:

 

Effort

The effort in question does not specify what you apply to provide the best experience. Rather the effort that the customer needs to make to take some action in your company. 

Think of a time when you were frustrated with some time-consuming and inefficient service. Unfortunately, this is a common situation, and in many cases it shuts down customers, driving them away from the brand. 

It is important to evaluate and review the process that the customer goes through in order to take some steps with the company. Such as purchasing operations, after-sales support, among other methods. 

The less effort you put into taking these steps, the higher your customer satisfaction will be and the better your experience will be.

 

Emotional

The pillar of emotion cannot be missing from the customer experience strategy. 

Creating emotional bonds allows for the formation of deep and lasting relationships. They are very positive about the brand. 

Awakening of different emotions and feelings during the customer experience with the brand is essential to preserve them in their memory. After all, the most memorable memories are those intense emotions that trigger feelings that are hard to forget. 

Feelings of success, happiness, joy, and comfort are some of the things you can give customers in your experience.

 

Success

You've probably heard of customer success. 

Customer success occurs when they reach their goals while traveling with your brand. That is, when his expectations are not met but exceeded, he finds out what he was looking for. 

This pillar needs to be worked on continuously so that the expectations of the customers are met and their experience is optimized.

 

Creating customer experience strategies in practice

There is no standard formula for developing your customer experience strategy. As a recent and flexible concept, it covers many aspects and some of them may or may not be important to a specific audience. 

Customer Experience Wheel Lego is a good example that highlights the whole consumer journey and all the important things for its success in collaborating with the final competitor. But, there are some general ideas and initial steps that you can take to get an overview of the strategy and direction. 

In the following topics, you will learn some necessary steps for pricing customers:

 

Internal onboarding process

An onboarding process consists of alignment between different parts to create a collaborative, integrated environment with the goal of solving problems with greater efficiency. 

In this case, the result will be to improve the customer experience in all areas of the company, which directly or indirectly participate in the customer experience. It is important to line up for meetings and even training so that all fields cooperate to improve the customer experience. 

Tip: Customer service is one of the most important areas of customer experience. It is essential that the whole team is willing to solve customers ’problems efficiently and empathetically, improving their experience.

 

Study your customer

This is probably the first step in creating your strategy. 

To provide the best customer experience, you must understand their overall needs, wants, and profiles. Understanding how your client behaves and drawing a psychological profile of it can help you create more robust strategies that yield better results. 

Having this profile helps all areas of the company to be ideal for achieving and maintaining an integrated process. An in-depth customer study creates very useful and valuable insights.

 

Customization

Customization is a feature that cannot be lacking in customer experience. 

Customizing means customizing, adapting, and modifying. In the customer context, customization means adapting to the company as a whole, thinking about improving the customer experience. 

This adaptation can be performed more easily when the client is studied in depth. 

Keeping in mind your preferences and behaviors, you can develop more powerful strategies that include personalization. Although it is possible to customize products and services according to demand, this is a difficult task and requires a high level of effort. But, in other areas such as customer service, sales, and support, customization is necessary to make the customer feel welcome and get the best experience.

 

Usability

Every customer walks a path before actually converting. Some big, some small, but there are always some steps he needs to take. For example, this path can be simple navigation through the pages of a website until it reaches the purchase page. 

It is important that the path that the consumer can follow is clear so that he can take the next step, always with adequate direction. Not only that, the paths need to be educational and straightforward, as consumers demand quick and quick solutions. And reducing their waiting time to load or purchase a page. 

This is beneficial for companies working on the usability of their website, apps, and services. Because it has an instructive, efficient, and fast way, which guides the customer towards their destination. It helps to attract more customers, which enables a great customer experience.

 

Communication with the customer

Maintaining active communication channels and teams willing to help customers is essential. So that they can provide a positive experience with the brand, which is crucial for CX. 

Channels such as SMS and WhatsApp have gained a lot of importance to maintain a fast and convenient online service with customers. They are always ready to contribute to an optimized experience.  A great example of a company that explores this communication strategy very well is FameNet. It wants to keep its customers informed and serve them with excellence. 

All the above points are essential for developing a successful strategy and contributing to a good customer experience. 

Now you know how the customer experience works. Be sure to put your knowledge into practice and analyze the results, which can be very promising. 

If you want to know more, check out our regular post on Influencer Marketing and learn some tips to keep your customers engaged!