Customer experience is a hot topic. But when it comes down to it, there’s a lack of structured direction and guidance on how to build a customer experience program. Worse yet, most discussions or guidance on the subject are either geared toward consumer goods companies or point solutions (e.g., CRM). As someone who has spent nearly my entire career working in B2B technology, I feel there’s also a need for structured direction and guidance for building customer-experience programs specifically for the B2B market. Therefore, this post provides some thoughts on building a customer-experience program — both from the company-level and product/service-level perspectives.
Building a customer experience program is not the easiest task. It is a commitment to understanding how each and every employee can deliver an exceptional customer experience.
How to build a customer experience
In a world where consumers have more choices than ever before, companies must go above and beyond to provide an exceptional customer experience.
In a world where consumers have more choices than ever before, companies must go above and beyond to provide an exceptional customer experience. This can be difficult for many organizations because the process of creating a powerful experience isn’t always easy or straightforward.
Fortunately, there are some best practices that can help you create high-performing customer experiences — from relationship building to onboarding to retention. Here’s how it works:
First, define your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? You might want to increase sales revenue or improve customer loyalty through engagement and advocacy. Next, consider the actions you need to take to achieve these goals. For example, if you want to increase revenue by 10 percent in 12 months, then you’ll need to develop a strategy that will get more customers buying from your company instead of your competitors’. Finally, create measurable metrics that align with those goals so that you can track progress along the way and identify when adjustments may be needed along the way.
A customer experience program is an organized effort to deliver a consistent experience to your clients and customers.
A successful customer experience program will build trust, loyalty and advocacy for your brand.
The key to a successful customer experience program is knowing what you want your customers to feel when they interact with your business.
You can then develop strategies to achieve those feelings through each touch-point between you and the customer.
How do we build a Customer Experience Program?
Start by identifying the three most important touch-points between your company and its customers:
1. The website – where people find out about your company, products and services, prices etc.
2. The phone – how people contact you if they have questions or concerns, who they speak with etc.
3. The store – where people visit in person if they like what they see online or in an ad etc
You can build a customer experience program in four steps:
1. Understand your customers’ needs and wants, then create a strategy for meeting them.
2. Create a plan for measuring customer satisfaction, engagement, loyalty and other KPIs.
3. Develop a team that will execute the program.
4. Implement the program and measure its effectiveness (or lack thereof).
Customer experience is a term that is frequently used, but rarely defined. It’s important to understand what exactly customer experience means and how it can be applied to your business.
Customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand over time. It encompasses all touchpoints: web, social media, sales teams, customer service agents, packaging, and even what you say when answering the phone or responding to emails.
The good news is that there are plenty of ways you can improve your customer experience program. Here are some tips for getting started:
Define your target audience and their needs
Who are you trying to attract with your products or services? What problems do they have? What are their behaviors? How do they interact with brands? Think about these questions before moving on to the next step.
Listen to customers’ feedback
It’s important to engage with customers so you can learn more about their needs and interests. Use social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social and Brand24 to keep track of what people are saying about your brand online so you can respond in real time. You can also use surveys or focus groups to find out what customers want from you as well as what they think about specific products or services.
The customer experience is the sum of interactions that customers have with your company, the products and services you offer, and the people who work for you. It’s easy to see how important it is for businesses to get this right — after all, there are plenty of alternatives out there.
The good news is that there are a number of ways you can improve your customer experience and build better relationships with your customers. Here are six ways to do just that:
1. Customer experience is more than just customer service
While customer service is important, it’s not enough on its own. Your entire organization must be focused on providing customers with a great experience — from how well trained your staff are, to how effectively they communicate with each other and their customers, to how well they respond to complaints or concerns.
2. Don’t confuse activity with progress
It’s tempting to measure success based on metrics like response times or call center volume, but these aren’t necessarily indicators of positive outcomes for customers or business financials (and certainly not both). Instead, focus on improvements in key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction and loyalty; reduced churn rates; or increased referrals from existing customers.
It’s not enough to create a great customer experience. You have to manage it, too.
You need to integrate your customer experience program into your entire business strategy and make sure it’s working with other key initiatives. And then you need to measure it, improve it and celebrate it.
Here are five important steps for building a successful customer experience program:
1. Start With Strategy
The first step in building a successful customer experience program is to understand what your customers want and expect from your brand. Why? Because your customers’ expectations will drive the type of experience you deliver — whether through digital channels or in person — and those expectations will determine how much effort you need to put into measuring the results of your efforts (more on that below).
2. Create Your Strategy
Once you know what your customers expect from you, you can create an actionable strategy for delivering against those expectations. This strategy should include not only how you’ll meet but exceed those expectations, including where and when certain interactions need to happen across all channels (online or offline). This is also when you should consider integrating other business initiatives such as sales support or product development into your overall strategy so everything works together seamlessly across channels.
Customer experience is all about building relationships with customers. It’s a combination of the touchpoints that customers have with your company and how they feel about those interactions.
Customer experience is not the same thing as customer service. Customer service involves solving problems and responding to complaints. Customer experience involves making sure that customers are satisfied with the entire process, from their first contact with your brand to their last encounter.
Customer satisfaction is a key measure of customer experience. But it’s more than that: It also includes loyalty and advocacy. That’s why companies should invest in creating positive experiences for their customers, even if those experiences don’t lead directly to sales or revenue.
Companies need to understand their customers’ personal experiences with their brands, not just what happens when they buy something from them or use one of their services. They need to know how people feel about them across all platforms — including social media — and what types of interactions they want more of (or less of). Then they can work toward creating better experiences for those people in a way that improves their bottom line over time
The customer is the most important person in the company.
The customer is not your friend, your relative or a distant acquaintance. The customer is a person who buys something from you and pays money for it.
You may have heard this before, but it’s true: You can’t build sustainable business without customers.
If you want to grow a business, you need a steady stream of new customers coming into your business.
At its core, customer experience (CX) is about understanding and meeting the needs of your customers, no matter how simple or complex they are. CX is an essential part of any business that wants to succeed today — and tomorrow.
It’s not enough to have a great product or service. You need to have a great experience as well.
If you want your customers to come back and refer others, you need to provide them with an unforgettable experience every time they do business with you. And that experience should be consistent across all channels: offline and online, in person and on the phone.
Here are five ways to build a customer relationship:
1) Go beyond the basics of customer service
2) Build loyalty through personalization
3) Leverage new technologies for better communication
4) Create meaningful relationships with employees
5) Nurture relationships over time
It’s a common misconception that customer experience is something you deliver to your customers.
The truth is, it’s something you build with them.
This is why the term “customer experience” has become so popular. It provides a framework for thinking about how we can create experiences that are meaningful for our customers and help them achieve their goals.
There are many ways to do this, but the most effective ones have three main components:
1) Customer data: We need to collect as much information as possible about what our customers want and need. We also need to know how they interact with us and our competitors so we can stay ahead of them in the marketplace.
2) Experiences: These are interactions between a customer and your business that are designed to deliver value or solve a problem for them.
3) Service model: The service model describes how you deliver value through experiences across your organization’s touchpoints — from marketing to sales to support — and defines what makes each of those touchpoints unique so they can be optimized individually and collectively