What is Customer Experience
Also known as CX, customer experience is the perception of your brand or business in the eyes of customers.
The perception is the outcome of the combined effect of all the touchpoints and engagements the customers have with your brand across their complete journey. In essence, all interactions from getting a referral, a nurture mail, onboarding, sales pitch, purchase to customer service are consolidated as customer experience. So, every action that the business takes impacts the perception of the customer.
Why is Customer Experience essential for business?
All businesses have a core belief or an idea that solves a problem for a certain set of people who become their customers. CX directly determines how the business interacts with the customers. This makes customer experience central to how the entire business functions.
Two major problems that businesses face are the high cost of acquiring customers and providing continuous value to retain them. CX solves both these problems, directly and indirectly. The better CX you have, the more word of mouth is generated at the same time there is a reduction in the number of complaints.
The benefits of having a great customer experience include:
- Increase in customer loyalty
- Increase in customer satisfaction
- Better word of mouth
- Improvement in customer retention rates
There is no business on the planet that cannot improve its operations by focusing on CX. Especially service-based companies who can deploy technology to reduce turnaround time and delight their customers.
Are we talking about Customer Service?
No. Customer service refers to the department of the company that is responsible for interacting with the customers when they have approached with a request or a complaint. This could be via email or telephonically. Customer service is an extremely small subset of CX.
Customer Experience encompasses the entire customer lifecycle and every single touchpoint that they engage with. These engagements could range from reading a blog, watching a Youtube video, clicking on a PPC link, reading the pricing on the landing page, talking to the sales rep, making the payment, and so on.
