What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience refers to the experience of customers with a business’s products and the overall brand.
When offering products and services to a group of people, a business needs to understand how their consumers feel and think during their interactions. Customer experience refers to the complete set of thoughts and feelings they experience during their interaction with your business and services.
Customer experience is usually based on psychology behind a consumer’s actions. Shards of customer experience first appeared during 1920s, and famous psychologists tried to understand the relations between how customers felt and how they interacted with businesses. At first, the customer experience was utterly important for creating better acquisition techniques.
This was the time when first market researches were made and user profiles were established.
It wasn’t until 1980s when the whole concept of customer satisfaction had importance in the success of a product. And going into 1990s, the customer satisfaction metrics were introduced as a way of learning how successful the product or the service is.
The perspective to customer experience change drastically with the introduction of the metric Net Promoter Score (NPS). It didn’t only measure the satisfaction of the customers, but asked whether they would share the product with friends and colleagues. With the introduction of NPS in 2003, many initiatives and startups were established to make the end-users of customers more satisfied.
Why is Customer Experience Important?
The customer experience is an extremely important concept because it is the only experience that matter from a business standpoint.
If a company has satisfied customers, this indicated three things.
- Your product is doing great: If most of your customers are satisfied with the product, it is extremely likely that there is nothing wrong with the product. Companies with high NPS for example, can ensure that the product experience they offer is top-notch and superior to their competitors; and look for ways to expand their audiences by enabling new marketing campaigns and adding new functionalities to the product.
- You have an audience that loves your business: Some argue that having customers that love your business is not a must, them paying for your product is enough. This is wrong in 2 points; if customers love your business, they tend to stay longer. If they like your business enough, they will recommend It in their environments. So, there is no harm in improving the relationship with your product, there is actually many more benefits you’ll have.
- Your LTV is extremely high: As we have mentioned above, the more satisfied the customer is, the more likely they will stay using the product or the service. For example, if a user doesn’t have any complaints about an online shopping platform, and has actually liked the experience so far, there is no reason for them to quit using it. The more a user uses a product, the more money they will pay, resulting in increases in the Lifetime Value of customers, therefore revenue.
How can I measure Customer Experience?
There is not a single metric that can give you everything that you need to know about Customer Experience (CX), but with a combination of multiple metrics, you can.
First and foremost, to measure the overall satisfaction of customers, most companies use Net Promoter Score (NPS).
NPS measures the likelihood of your customers promoting your product, and customers who didn’t enjoy their experience with your business would not promote it. So calculating and benchmarking your NPS is a solid way of understanding how the overall experience is perceived by customers.
The next step is to set up user analytics, and measure the quality of the overall experience. You can use various analytics tools to understand what your customers are doing inside your product and how elements are performing.
To get the best insights on customer experience, you need to also track:
- Retention,
- Churn,
- Product adoption,
- Support tickets.
Also, you can ask them just like you asked in NPS. Not every customer will answer a page-long survey, but those who do can provide insights that can help you understand how satisfied your average user is.
