One common metric that companies focus their attention on is customer satisfaction. They most often attempt to measure it at the point of purchase and after customer service requests. Customer satisfaction is likewise used by the public as a metric for how reliable, trustworthy, and good a business is. Unfortunately, this is an incomplete way to determine how customers really feel about and relate to a company or brand. A better way to understand and serve those customers is to evaluate customer experience.
What Is Customer Experience?
When we think about what an experience is, we understand that it is, or can be, multilayered and formed over time. Customer experience refers to how a customer perceives and interacts with a company or brand throughout their buyer journey. This ranges from the first encounter or awareness they have of the company through to purchase and subsequent purchases or interactions. Unlike customer satisfaction, it includes all of the customer’s interactions from marketing to sales to customer service or support.
This experience can be positive or negative or positive and negative. The impression the customer forms of the company as a whole and its products or services will be impacted by how catchy their marketing is, how positive their purchase experience was, and how or if they have to interact with customer service representatives.
Customer experience is always subject to change. Overlooked brands can get a second look with better marketing or if a high profile celebrity decides to declare them a favorite. The opposite can be true too. Recently, more and more companies have taken social or political stands with their marketing that influenced their previously loyal customers to decide to boycott their products going forward.
Essentially, customer experience is the relationship the customer has with the brand as opposed to how satisfied that customer is at one critical point in their buyer’s journey. That relationship can be tenuous, tense, or very close at different times as it deepens or changes.
How to Improve the Customer Experience
Most of the time, companies focus on how they can improve sales or decrease costs because those are the most direct ways to increase profit. Unfortunately, measuring customer satisfaction will only yield a very limited understanding of the customers the business serves.
To improve the customer experience, the company has to shift focus to building relationships with their customers. That requires much more understanding. The company has to know who their customers are, what they want, how they use their products or services, and how they understand their own needs. Do you understand why your customers buy from you? If not, why not?
Better understanding of your customers begins with listening to direct feedback – via social media or customer service interactions. This means paying attention to what they really are saying, not focusing on just fixing a temporary problem or making a customer service problem go away.
Once you begin to understand their stated needs, you can work on creating customer personas and customer journey maps. This will likely influence your product or service offerings in turn. Adapting to customer needs is a critical part of growing and improving.
One way of improving customer experience is to offer something of value to your customers. Whether that’s a small free service or just a genuinely entertaining advertisement, when they associate positive things with your brand, they begin to develop longer-term loyalty and satisfaction.
The end goal is to have your customers incorporate your brand into their lives. This is a much larger challenge than getting people to purchase a single item or fill out a form on your website. If you can demonstrate how they can better use the products or services they’ve already purchased, they will value them and your brand more – and they will be more likely to purchase again.
Ultimately, as in all relationships, in order to improve customer experience, you need to make your customers feel seen, understood, respected, and valued. This will lead to repeat purchases and genuine recommendations to others. By understanding their needs, pain points, and preferences, you can conserve company resources while improving customer satisfaction and sales.
If you would like to discuss customer experience or how your company can better understand what your customers need, Prometis Partners is here to help. Get started by Get started by scheduling a meeting with Vincent Mastrovito today.
