Voice of Customer – Customer Experience

Want to know everything about Customer Experience?

Below you will find everything about what customer experience means and why customer experience is important. With many tips on how you can not only measure customer experience, but also improve it. And what tools do you need to put this into practice:

• What is Customer Experience? A definition
• Why is Customer Experience important?
• The benefits of Customer Experience
• How can you measure Customer Experience?
• Achieve more with ‘Experience Management’
• How do you improve Customer Experience?
• Customer Experience Software
• Essential Features of Customer Experience Software

What is Customer Experience? A definition

Customer Experience is the experience of the customer that is related to the feeling that is experienced, the resulting emotion. It’s about how your customers experience the culture, behavior, people, communication, products and services of your brand and organization during their customer journey. With the unique experience that the customer experiences, you distinguish yourself from the competition.

Why is Customer Experience important?

In markets with increasing competition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish yourself on the basis of, for example, price, product or service. You make the difference by offering a unique customer experience. How does the customer experience your organisation, product or service? While 80% of managers in organizations think they provide an excellent experience, only 8% of their customers agree. These developments in the market have created Customer Experience Management. If you implement a proactive Customer Experience Management (CXM) program, you prevent these percentages from applying to your organization.

Distinctiveness

Everything revolves around winning the heart of the customer. With the aim of helping a customer to become a loyal customer. A customer who is loyal to your organization and who recommends your company, brand, product or service to others. The distinctive experience of your customers must align with your brand and brand promise. This is how you build the brand. Shaun Smith, one of the Customer Experience Management gurus, says:

“The experience you deliver to your customers every day, through every contact, direct or indirect, increases or decreases the value of your brand.”

Traditional business no longer exists with increasingly empowered customers who express this through various public channels such as social media and review sites. Customers are gaining more and more insight and the market is becoming more transparent. So you can no longer make a distinction based on price and product. Service and customer experience are your opportunities to distinguish yourself as a brand.

The benefits of Customer Experience

Focusing as a customer-oriented organization on improving the customer experience, based on a sophisticated customer experience strategy, provides you as an organization with a lot, such as:

• More satisfied customers
• More loyal customers
• More ambassadors
• More positive online image
• Lower failure costs

How can you measure Customer Experience?

Customer Experience can be measured in different ways. Depending on what you want to know about the customer and at what point in their customer journey. If you carry out several measurements, you will gain insight into your strengths for each ‘process (step)’ and which points you can improve further. Depending on which objective you want to measure, you will arrive at the different methods/metrics.

Which Customer Experience KPIs are there?

In practice, we see that the deployment of KPIs and analytics is most successfully implemented when a single KPI is chosen. Everyone within the organization is directed at, for example, the NPS, CES or the CSAT.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures your customer’s loyalty through the recommendation question: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend product/service/company X to friends or family?’ The NPS is the most commonly used KPI for measuring Customer Experience. This gives you quick insight into how loyal your customers are to your brand or organization.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES gives you insight into how your customers have experienced the service through the question: ‘How much effort did you have to put in to get your question fully answered?’ With CES you can measure various contact moments. For every step in which the customer has contact with your company, you can see what he or she thinks about this contact. CES shows how you perform in this and on the basis of this you can manage and improve contact moments.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT measures the satisfaction of your customers with the purchased products or services. With the CSAT, the customer is asked to rate your product or service in the form of a score on a scale of 1 to 10. The CSAT is mainly used when asking for a recommendation is not a logical question or when asking for a recommendation is not appropriate, for example for questions about healthcare institutions or questions about the government.

Achieve more with Experience Management

Nowadays, if you really want to optimize your Customer Experience, you will not only have to focus on the external CX, but also on your internal organization and the employees. After all, happy employees also mean happy customers. And to make and keep your employees and customers happy, the foundation of your organization must be in order. Think of delivering the best quality and service and that there is a healthy business operation.

With only ‘Customer Experience Management (CEM)’ you can no longer stand out as a brand and organization. ‘Experience Management’, on the other hand, looks at customer orientation and what this yields from 3 pillars as a holistic whole:

• Voice of Customer (VoC)
• Voice of Employee (VoE)
• Voice of Business (VoB)

How do you improve Customer Experience?

Listen to your customers’ stories!

Ask your customers why they gave a certain number in an open answer field. After all, a story says so much more than just a number. You can derive much more from this to optimize the customer experience.

Continuously measure, analyse, activate and motivate

Continuously and automatically measure the feedback and provide feedback (Closed Loop Feedback). Continuously analyze, prioritize and implement follow-up actions that motivate employees and meet your customer’s needs.

Customer Experience Software

As a Customer Experience manager you have a challenging task. How do you keep a grip on all data, customer and employee feedback processes? How do you convert all that data and feedback into the right insights for the organization? How do you ensure that you take the step from measuring to improving?

By automating your CX processes, you save a lot of time and you can focus on what really matters. With innovative CX programs, questionnaires and analyzes you get the insights you need. Smart and automated reports on various devices ensure that you and your colleagues can make customer-oriented decisions and you can take the step from measuring to improving.

Essential Features of Customer Experience Software

• Automated and continuous research
  Set up your system in such a way that you automatically and continuously get the right insights into customer loyalty and the involvement of your employees. Make the right decisions for a customer-oriented organization.
• Smart data collection across all channels
  Customers are on many channels and platforms. Use the medium that suits them and make giving feedback as easy as possible (via multiple devices, mobile app iOS, Android, tablet, smartphone, desktop).
• Ask as few questions as possible
  Do not overload your customers and employees and do not ask unnecessary questions. You do this by drawing up short, powerful questionnaires (preferably based on predetermined KPIs). Just make sure you can find out why they give a certain score.
• Label open answers
  Find out exactly why they gave that answer by asking customers to categorize their answer (root cause analysis).
• Customer story central
  Why did the customer or employee give that rating? Set up your software in such a way that you gain insight into this by supporting the scores with real stories and emotions. Use open answers or ‘storytelling’ as a strength.
• Real-time reporting
  Let your system update the reports in real time with the latest data. In the fast-paced world we live in today, you can no longer get away with outdated data.
• Activate fans and promoters
  At the same time, ask customers for feedback and to post a review or social media message via one e-mail and in this way get a grip on your online reputation.
• Share positivity!
  Share compliments directly and automatically via the software to the right employees. That is very motivating.