Ensuring world class customer experience can ensure you hardly ever lose your prospect or existing customers to your rivals. This is why enterprises must up their game and create a roadmap beyond just UX strategy.
‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning‘ said Bill Gates. When it comes to enhancing the brand value or reducing churn rate, understanding the customer experience is paramount. Any business having a great product but a poor customer experience is likely to lose business to its rivals even if they offer a slightly lower quality product but a better customer experience program.
Many enterprises focus a lot of energy and attention on improving the user experience (UX) but overlook the need of having a similar approach for customer experience (CX).
User experience is a subset of CX in the larger scheme of things and comes into focus once the user starts using a product or service. CX on the other hand involves everything from once the user starts a price comparison of the product with its rivals, brand reputation, sales processes, pricing, product deliverability timelines and customer service.
Having a CX strategy is therefore paramount as it plays a direct role with customer churning and customer net promoter score (NPS) evaluation.
Understanding good and bad UX and CX
Every level of communication should offer comfort and not complexity to the end user.
The difference and impact of UX and CX can be broadly understood by following the example of say a travel business company. Let us assume the travel company initiated its app offering travel tickets and hotel bookings as a collaborative marketplace for all major carriers and hotels.
In today’s crowded business space, any new user is likely to compare the app and its reviews, rankings, pricing before making his or her mind to install the app. This in itself is the beginning of a CX program. Now let us assume a new user downloads and installs the app but finds the interface too complicated or not very user friendly. The user calls the customer care helpline and is assisted with all his bookings and help regarding navigating through the new interface. This is a case of bad UX but good CX.
Alternatively let’s assume the user finds the user interface good allowing him chance to proactively compare and book tickets. A request to upgrade or downgrade his bookings at a later stage in a communication with the customer care makes for a bad experience, making it a case of good UX but bad CX.
Don’ts for a winning customer experience (CX) roadmap
While every business enterprise has its own goals and roadmap for the future, there are certain common parameters when it comes to customer experience. By ensuring to stay away from the common mistakes, an enterprise can devise a seamless CX roadmap.
1. Don’t ignore customer data
The effective use of data should be a part of an effective CX strategy at all times.
The new techniques and digital insights allow enterprises to ensure that client data is available at all times. Analyzing and integrating the client data can help organizations to offer a proactive support to the customer.
Before the user reaches out to the company, if the data is showing the customer needs assistance, the use of an AI Chatbot for example offering help can enhance CX and the brand value immensely as a result.
2. Use an apt CX software solution
Choosing the right software is the key as the whole process deals with tons of data coming from different verticals per person or Digital transformation consulting.
CX involves managing data for every customer across various business verticals like sales, pricing, delivery, post sales care etc. The use of apt CX software should be implemented to help the enterprise plan its CX strategy minutely.
Customer experience is something that must be personalized for each business depending on the business and its goal. The use of optimum CX software that can ensure such deliverability can be a game changer.
3. Don’t ignore customer feedback
Ignoring them can potentially defeat the whole purpose.
Customer feedback can be used proactively for improving the CX strategy. Enterprises that ignore customer feedback run the risk of having a high churn rate owing to a bad customer experience across many verticals.
4. Don’t focus only at the front end
All the verticals are equally important; therefore the scope of engagement is much bigger.
Customer experience is not only about the front end and sales but should involve every aspect with equal measure. From price comparison support to sales and pre sales queries, feedback, possible return or replacements to customer care, every vertical should be well mapped in an effective CX program.
5. Don’t follow a reactive CX program
Proactive and not reactive is the buzzword.
A proactive CX strategy not only offers an improved customer experience it also helps the enterprise build its brand value and increase customer loyalty. For example, a CX strategy offering help only when a customer seeks assistance should be replaced by proactive one that offers periodic support irrespective of whether the consumer seeks support or not.
6. Never overlook root cause analysis of repetitive issues
As everywhere else, RCA plays a major role here as well.
If your CX program does not involve root cause analysis (RCA) of repetitive issues you need to upgrade the CX strategy. If too many users are witnessing similar problems, a CX program should be able to send alerts allowing for analysis and resolution of frequent issues.
