The Importance of Excellent Customer Experience and Success
In today's customer-driven world, customer experience (CX) is the new competitive battleground. In order to be successful in this landscape, companies need to focus on customer success and customer experience now more than ever before. CX is a natural extension of your company culture, mission statement, and vision - it is not an add-on or an afterthought.
What is Customer Experience (CX)?
Customer experience is an individual customer's perception of their interaction and relationship with your company. Loyalty is created or lost with customer experience, and with new brands going live daily and news traveling quickly, it is more important than ever before to focus on great CX.
CX as a Unique Value Proposition
The customer experience stories that everyone talks about are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale - and that's the whole point. Your company's relationship with its community should be a defining aspect of your organization and a unique value that creates a higher barrier to entry. The way that your customers talk about you and share stories about their engagement with your brand should be perceived as so over-the-top wonderful that your competitors will spend hours trying to figure out how to meet the perception.
Take, for example, the Ritz-Carlton. They have empowered their employees to "spend" up to $2,000/day to delight or make right their guest experience (https://www.inc.com/sonia-thompson/3-ways-your-team-can-make-your-customers-love-you.html). This does not mean that they will do it for everyone, but it does 2 very important things:
Sets the expectation that all employees have the ability to improve the guest experience.
Creates buzz without much actual spending, generating loyalty.
Learn to do Better CX by Doing Amazing CX
It is scary to wonder where to start. It's easy to get bogged down by the details that we often face as experience designers:
What will everyone want?
How much will it cost?
Can I scale this quickly and easily?
Will it actually make the ROI improvement we are looking for?
This is where you need to challenge those questions. Start doing amazing customer experience by focusing on specific individuals and going above-and-beyond for them. The next time you receive a question, dig deeper and determine the best possible resolution you can provide. Then repeat. And again.
You will not be able to repeat this process for everyone, but you will learn how to elevate the general customer experience for your entire community. Shortcuts will be identified, improvements will be codified, and as a team, you will begin to realize that you can, and you should, provide a superior customer experience.
Easiest Way to Provide Great CX: Make it personal (“I”, not “we”)
Instead of responding to customer emails with "we" statements, switch to empathetic, personal "I" statements. It is immediately a more intimate experience and helps put your customer support person in the shoes of the customer. You can't always make things right, but you can help by understanding why they are wrong and working to make things better.
Example:
Instead of:
We are very sorry that you had this experience. We will email you a return slip to the email associated with the order.
Use:
I am really sorry that this happened to you. I understand how frustrating it can be to look forward to getting your new shirt only to realize that it was misprinted. I am going to send you a return slip immediately so we can get you a new one right away. If there is anything else I can do, please let me know.
The end result is the same: just a return. But the second creates a sense of camaraderie and understanding that elevates the customer experience.
What Next for CX
Today's customers want to feel like they are the driving force behind your company. They don't want to be unappreciated, or they will quickly jump to the next brand with a similar offering. By focusing on customer experience and learning and sharing the learnings from over-the-top CX, your brand will slowly elevate the experience for everyone.
