What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is something that defines your business. It helps you gain happy customers who will gladly recommend your services to others. And that’s the best type of marketing. You can spend thousands on creating advertisements and for other marketing activities. But it will never be as efficient as the recommendation system. So customer experience is basically your customer’s view on the product, service and overall, your business. And it’s very important to make it great. Now that you know what customer experience is, let’s find out how to use it. 

So how to get as much as possible from a happy and loyal customer? 

E.g. ask to write a review on different portals, get a testimonial on your website, comments on social media… They can promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing as well and that’s also a good way to go. 

People and products

The two primary points that create the customer experience are people and products. Firstly, your client has to be happy about the particular product or service. It's a top priority, out of the question. But let’s imagine that the customer gets a great product that they’re really glad of but during it’s creation the communication with the team building it was rather bad. Will the client be happy and leave a good review? Maybe. But they definitely won’t say that they're happy with the service. It can include good words about the product, but nothing about the experience with the company. And that wouldn’t be a very positive review. Good customer experience management means finding a way to make the client happy and recommend your services further. 

The importance of communication in Customer Experience

So as we now know — the experience with the product and the whole service is very important. So good communication is essential here. If customers are happy with the customer service apart from the delivered solution, they'll remain really loyal. They’ll probably gladly leave a review saying that everything was great from the very beginning — before the programming even started. The team — people — are the fundamentals of a good relationship between the company and the client. 

For the ones that handle their software development remotely — see how to communicate remotely with your team in an effective way.

Difference between Customer Experience and User Experience

User experience (UX) is basically how a user experiences a product. This is about the utility, ease of use and the efficiency of the product. So it actually considers the product itself or a service but within the same concerns. 

Customer experience is a more broad concept, referring not only to the performance of the app itself but to the entire customer service. 

Long story short:

“User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and (since we deal in digital) clicks to completion.

Customer Experience (CX), in contrast, encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand. It might be measured in: overall experience, likelihood to continue use, and likelihood to recommend to others. In essence, UX is part of a broader CX, but CX contains some aspects outside of a product that UX does not.” (source)

Why is customer experience so important?

That might seem quite obvious. Great CX will simply bring more clients to you. But there’s something more. Good reviews about your product and customer service make your company look reliable and make people trust you. It’s worth mentioning that good customer experience is also satisfactory for the team and for the company. Being happy about the finished product is very important as it gives a lot of motivation to do a good job again and again. It’s also not only about getting new customers. Every business should also focus on retaining the existing ones. 

80% of companies rate customer experience as a top strategic objective. Why? Simply because no business can exist without customers. Because if they can be treated better somewhere else, they’ll go away. So let’s find out how to keep them satisfied with our service and product. 

How can I check its performance?

There are many ways to measure customer experience, apart from observing and listening to your customers. There are many things you might not be able to see. So how can you know if the customer has a good experience of the service, is likely to continue to use it and is likely to recommend it to others? Well, for example, you can try to ask. 🙂 But that won’t be enough, right? Clients are often scared to say that they aren’t fully satisfied with the project or a part of it. Actually, customers expect from you to find a way to get their opinion. They often don't really like giving it by themselves.

Tools to measure customer experience

You can try different things — surveys, questionnaires, talking… Simply anything to get their honest feedback. There are also different metrics helping to understand customer experience and the user’s journey on your website. Sometimes it's very easy. For example, if an e-commerce client records a revenue growth and is satisfied with the customer service, it means that all works fine.

Now that you know what Customer Experience is, you can learn how to use it and make it great from this article.

Here we write about different ways of gaining feedback on your product from users. You can use them to get reviews on the whole experience with your company as well.