Customer experience, what is it actually?
1 August 2020
The definition of customer experience is as follows: “every perception and emotion that a customer experiences during all interactions with your company throughout the entire customer journey and across all channels.” Quite a mouthful, then, but an accurate description of the big picture that is customer experience, or CX for short.
How Customerry explains customer experience to SME entrepreneurs
CX management is an entrepreneurial approach that focuses on people and humanity. View it as a combination of strategic thinking exercises, tools, and processes to make your business more customer-centric.
Broadly speaking, you can divide CX management into two issues:
- What is your customer strategy? Read: what do you want your customers to experience when they do business with you, and what would you like people to say about your company?
- What do your customers want? What are their needs, what are they trying to solve, how do they want to be treated, and what feeling do they want to take away after a transaction with your company?
By thoroughly studying and analyzing both questions, you will already make significant progress with your customer experience optimization!
From (soft) business strategy to the holy grail of marketers
In Belgium, customer experience is receiving increasing attention, and as true believers in customer experience, we can only be happy about that, of course. However, we do notice that there are still quite a few myths and misconceptions circulating in the market. We have therefore listed the main ones for you.
- Customer experience is soft and fluffy because “it is all about pampering customers.”
Wrong, because CX is about much more than 'surprising or pampering your customers'. On the contrary, one of the most important things to remember is that a good customer experience must be consistent. It is therefore completely pointless to send every customer a bouquet of flowers one month and then simply carry on with your old momentum. Moreover, customer experience is indeed a business strategy, for which you should properly build a business case and subsequently be able to perfectly verify whether your efforts have actually yielded results.
- Customer experience is just a new marketing trick
Right and wrong. Marketing is indeed evolving more and more towards a customer-centric approach. This makes sense when you consider that current generations rely primarily on peer reviews to choose a supplier. As a company, you therefore get much further with satisfied customers who act as ambassadors than by simply spending money on advertising. In that respect, customer experience and marketing are overlapping more and more. But CX is much more than that. After all, to adopt a truly customer-centric approach, you need a clear strategy and vision that is known and applied within all departments of your company. Consider, for example, HR and how they treat 'their' customers (read: your employees), or how you ensure that you place the right, customer-centric emphasis during recruitment.
- Customer experience is only relevant for large B2C companies.
Wrong. There is not a single company, no matter how small, that can afford NOT to focus on customer experience today, unless you have an absolute monopoly within your product or service (just think of certain government services). In all other cases, customer experience will be the only relevant factor by which you can differentiate yourself in the market within the foreseeable future. According to research in the USA, this would already be the case in 2020, although we believe that as far as Belgium is concerned, there is just a little more time to get started.
- CX management costs a fortune in money and time.
Right and wrong. After all, much depends on the size of your company and exactly what you are planning. Naturally, a change process in a company of 500 employees will take a heavier bite out of the budget than in a company of 50 employees. But how much money do you spend annually handling complaints that keep recurring? And how many customers do you lose without knowing exactly why? Exactly. Making your company more customer-oriented is therefore an investment that pays for itself many times over in the long (and sometimes even very short) term. A bit like solar panels, then, but more human.
Does your company already have a customer experience strategy?
Fantastic! At Customerry, we are always curious about local CX heroes, so don't hesitate to share your success story with us!
If you are just starting out with a customer-centric approach, a customer experience audit workshop is exactly what you need!
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