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The Benefit of Understanding the Customer Experience

Updated: Sep 21, 2022


Don't you love when you walk into your favourite shop, it smells great, everything is perfectly displayed, and you can always find exactly what you want? The person serving you creates an inspiring, relaxing environment. They're passionate and knowledgeable about their product. It doesn't happen very often, but the experience is one you'll rarely forget. How often have you gone to a site, can't find what you want and when you go to check out, it's a mess with ridiculous pop-ups asking if you wish to stuff you don't care about? You finally press the check-out button, and it doesn't work. This happens often and is another experience we've all had and won't forget. We rarely go back to those sites. One reason Amazon works so well is its quick, simple checkout, and you can typically always find what you want. It's just easy.


How Can you Develop a similar Experience for your Customers?

Understanding your current "Customer Experience" can take time and patience, but the reward will make you question why you didn't do it earlier. I'll start by helping you understand the definition of the customer experience and then take you through a step-by-step process. This is a process that Aqua Blue Marketing can take your team through if time or expertise is a concern for you. Fundamental transformation starts with understanding your customer. Build strong relationships with your customer through understanding them.


What is "Customer Experience"

According to Holbrook & Hirschman, "customer experience can be defined as a whole event that a customer comes into contact with when interacting" with your business. This experience often affects the emotions of the customer. The customer experience (CX) is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioural consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process, including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.


There are many definitions, but at its core, it's your customer's experience when it interacts with your business. It starts at the customer realisation of a need in the post-purchase or interaction phase with your business. Depending on your business, this experience may be a repetitive experience or a one-off.


What's the reward


McKinsey found that for every 10% point increase in customer satisfaction, a company can increase revenue by 3%. In 2018, experience-driven businesses grew revenue 1.4 times faster and expanded their customer lifetime value 1.6x more than other companies (Forrester, 2018).

  • You can charge more - One in four customers is willing to pay up to 10% more in almost every industry if they know they will receive excellent customer service. This result was irrespective of income. Read more

  • Competitive advantage - When customer service gaps are identified, working with customers will help you Identify gaps in your service and even develop innovative solutions to transform your business.

  • More outstanding customer and staff satisfaction - Not only will you learn how to provide a better experience to your customer, but staff will also feel a sense of purpose which helps them understand their role in your business.

  • Customer Satisfaction improves word of mouth and loyalty- According to Temkin, customers who had an excellent experience are 3.5x more likely to rebuy and 5x more likely to recommend the service or product to friends and relatives than if they had a bad experience.

If you need more proof read more here


Getting Started - Gathering insights

You can take many different approaches to this phase, and here are some of the most inexpensive ways for small businesses.

  1. Face-to-face workshop/focus group with your customers: Bring in various customers. You want advocates through to casual customers that aren't engaged. Pay these customers for a couple of hours of their time and take them through the following steps in the process. I would recommend this immersive approach to help you truly understand their experience.

  2. An online questionnaire: There are many forms of online questionnaires you can get customers to complete, and they may help you get anonymous information and feedback from more customers. Here are some resources, but Survey Monkey is another good tool.

I recommend taking both approaches if you have the time, as it will make the information richer and more insightful. This step will take the most time, so I'd plan on one month if you take both approaches, as recruiting your customers will be the most challenging element.





Customer Experience Mapping

So you have lots of information from your customers; what do you do will all this information? This is just information until you dig deeper to understand what it truly means.



STEP 1

Map the journey. Above is a map of a trip for a fictional business with a basic example but don't hesitate to add more steps and create more detail. Detail will help you create a better experience for your customer.

  1. What are the key steps your customer takes from the point they're looking to their thinking about a service/product and beyond to loyalty and advocates? Here we have only to purchase, but I'd add repurchase/advocate if this suits your business model. Customers may find you very different ways from online, to walk past, mail drop or word of mouth, so capturing all this information is essential.

  2. Add a description of what's going on at each point with any data you have. It's great to add all your google analytics data, especially"drop-out data", as this will ensure you can see where leaks or pain points occur in the customer journey.

You now have the foundation of your map, and it's time to start filling the gaps with insights from your customers.


STEP 2

  1. Now start looking at your research and add "insights" into what is going on in your customers' heads when making their decision. This is not about data; it's about the emotion people experience, e.g. confusion, frustration or relief. What do they love in "green" where there are problems in "red"? You can add more here; the detail is your friend. An exclamation mark will help identify problem areas/pain points you need to fix. A tick will symbolise what's working well.

  2. It's time to sit with your staff and customers and start discussing these areas. Start to write detailed examples of bad and good sites so you can identify and prioritise the areas that need attention.


STEP 3

  1. Now that the fun starts, you'll get to look at the journey in its entirety and see areas you want to focus on. Prioritise the top 3 places you want to focus on

  2. After you have these areas, please work with your staff and customers to ideate how to fix them. What would great look like? What will the ideal scenario look like? Don't worry about the budget. Just identify what the journey is today at this pain point for the customer and what the perfect experience could look like. Write what this excellent experience is

  3. Now that you have the perfect experience look at how you make it happen.

  4. You need to put this recommendation into an action plan and then reevaluate the following completion to ensure it's improved the customer experience.

ACTION PLAN AND CONTINUALLY REASSESS

You have an action plan that you need to put in place. Constantly measure and assess if it fulfilled your goals and improves the customer experience. Test ideas and be open to throwing them out if it's not working. You want to make positive change, and change is constant, so ensure you keep monitoring and implementing change to adjust to your customer needs.


Additional Resources for Small Business


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