You hear CX mentioned wherever you turn. But is it anything new, or old news dressed in a sparkly 2020 gown? We’re here to clear up any confusion.

75% of organisations increased their customer experience (CX) investment since 2018. This isn’t a surprise at all, considering a quarter of customers have been swayed to use a company because their friend or family member recommended it.

Why does CX matter?

Let’s step away and refresh our memory – customer experience is all about how your customer perceives their interactions with your company. As a high-performing business, you want to keep the customer happy so that your reputation precedes you.

Whatever your client says about you, whether online or down the pub, is CX being shared. Bigger brands recognise the importance of CX and are at a higher risk of their brand perception being damaged by negative comments originating from a bad experience of their customers.

What about smaller businesses?

A large company with good sized following on social media can easily get their reputation damaged, sure. But what about smaller and medium businesses?

Growing an SME is nothing like working in a conglomerate. Focusing on the actual product and pushing for sales becomes your primary focus, often forgetting about the “why” – customer experience. If your customer journey is not efficient enough, your prospect might not even get to the product itself – no matter how good it is.

So instead of trying to find ways to do more, change the focus. Try a different route. Get feedback from your existing customers and invest in improving their experience. Whether that means new technology or different distribution of your resources, the result might well be increase in revenue.

More sales without investing in sales? I’d buy that for a dollar!

Where should I start?

Start from within. Retaining your customers really is in the same basket as retaining your employees, so in house is the place to start.

They say that if you’ve got great employee experience (or EX if you will, a slightly unfortunate abbreviation we here enjoy), you’ll nail your CX as well. After all, your employees shape the customer experience. Everyone has their own take on how the business should work. But the more perspectives you get, the more of an informed decision you can make about what to improve.

Starbucks is a cracking example of drawing your CX from EX. Pair excellent employee benefits with well thought through communications and a nice touch of referring to your employees as partners and voilà! Starbucks staff feel valued and taken good care of.

A giant coffee conglomeration isn’t the only one practicing that rule. Cambscuisine, a successful group of restaurants across Cambridgeshire, also believes that looking after your people well is the key to growth – whether you’re a start-up, SME or an international franchise.

Once you nail the EX, step onto the next level. Deliveroo believes the devil’s in the detail; from registration to completing an order, they identify key touchpoints and tailor the experience to be quick and easy. They seem to effortlessly meet customer expectations and they do so by clearly defining it first. Once you know what the standard is, it’s easier to keep it up.

A few more things to think about

To start off…

Understand your audience and establish clear profiles of your customers. We can’t stress enough how important it is to know who your customers are, so as part of your marketing strategy make sure you get into the nitty gritty of their headaches and needs. But watch out! Don’t get used to that customer profile too much – it will change over time, so keep your research up to date. To spot the early signs of a changing core demographic, pay attention to the wild card type of a customer.

And once you do…

No rest until you test! Your customers’ digital journey is as important as real human interaction. Three seconds feels like forever online, so don’t make your customer wait for the website to load. Make the images smaller, don’t overload your website with plugins and remove any extra line breaks and spaces. Once the visitor lands on your page, make sure their journey is frictionless: can they quickly get to where they need to go? Is your content readable? Are your calls to action clear and all your links working?

And if things go wrong…

Handle any negative feedback like a pro – don’t delete or argue with negative comments. Do respond but remember that more than three messages is an argument. Take things offline or into direct messages before it even starts getting ugly.

Make sure your customer feels heard and valued, regardless of what they say about you. Ask how you can fix the problem or improve the experience for the next time. See if there’s a way to sweeten the situation by making it up to the unhappy fella – throw in something extra for free or get to know them better to see how else you can help. Making them feel special will set you apart and might even turn the situation around.

When you’re doing things right…

Take a closer look at how you frame your comms and keep your content fresh and relevant. What you’re doing is working – brilliant, keep it up! Be careful about resting on your laurels and taking that for granted. The digital world changes in a blink of an eye and you can stay on top of things only by constantly monitoring and analysing your own activity.

What makes for a good customer experience?

If only there was a “one size fits all” answer to this!

Again, it depends on your business and your customer. It also depends on your processes and the customer’s expectations.

Take a step back and think about what you would expect in their situation. There are a few non-negotiable things, like a frictionless purchasing journey, responsiveness, a usable and accessible platform, quality human interaction – or maybe the option of not having to interact with anyone at all.

So instead of focusing all your attention on ROI, start measuring ROX – return on experience. Identify key touchpoints in the customer journey and record your current performance. This will help you monitor changes and understand what’s working and what needs your attention. To measure is a marketer’s greatest pleasure, so why not set some KPIs and get cracking with CX improvement? Oh, and do have a read through this helpful blog on setting KPIs for marketing (and business).

CX in communications

Good CX can be found beyond excellent service and customer journey. CX is also shaped by everything you put out on social media, via email and other channels. Relevant content and two-way communication equal happy audience. Meaningless content and lack of customer engagement equals no business for you, mister.

Listening is such an underestimated part of communicating. We get so wrapped up in what should we put out there that we forget to ask our customer and really understand what tickles their fancy. How can you be useful to them? How can you lessen their headaches?

Looking to whip your marketing strategy into shape this year? Give us a shout and let’s chat about how we can help you with your headache. Paracetamol included free of charge.