What Is Customer Experience?

WHAT IS YOUR NPS® – NET PROMOTER SCORE®?

The True Definition of a NPS®

What is Net Promoter Score® and why should you know your NPS® ? When it comes to measuring Customer Experience, there is nothing quite as relevant as your organization’s NPS® or Net Promoter Score®.

Your Net Promoter Score® is a score on a scale of 1 to 10 that your customers choose to indicate how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal Customers who will keep buying and refer others, thus these are the people that really help improve your revenues.
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and destroy growth through negative word-of-mouth.

As global Customer Experience Consultants, we find the Net Promoter Score® is an excellent metric for your organization’s Customer Experience. It not only helps you see what you are doing right and with whom, but your Net Promoter Score® also provides a report card. Moreover, unlike other metrics for measuring success, an NPS® has an emotional element to it, which reinforces how important it is to emotionally engage with your customers.

Having said Net Promoter® is a good measure, it is only one measure of a number of measures that you need to have in place to truly measure your experience.

Any effective improvement in your Customer Experience also needs a change to how you measure your experience. For example, what emotions are you trying to evoke? Which emotions drive most value for these. Both of these should be measured alongside your Net Promoter Score®.

Our Pyramid™ helps you do just that with your strategy and implementation. It addresses these common challenges creating a foundation strengthened by the principles of excellence in Customer Experience Management. It is designed to communicate your goals to your team from top to bottom, defining the standard by which to measure your success.

WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN?

Improving User Experience Design Will Improve Your Customer Experience
For many years, the User experience and the Customer experience were separate entities, developing separately and addressed in different ways. However, both concepts work to produce the same effect, positive interactions with your customers that facilitate customer loyalty and retention.

WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE?

A User Experience Designer (UXD) creates easy or pleasant websites or applications for the end user experience. User Experience designers enhance the website or application to be easy and pleasant for the customer thereby increasing their overall satisfaction with their experience.

In this way, User Experience is not so different than Customer Experience, nor is the job of a User Experience Designer that different from a Customer Experience Designer. The main difference between the two is that User Experience is restricted to website or application interface, while a Customer Experience encompasses all parts of the customer’s interaction with an organization, including the User Experience.

Therefore, understanding how your User Experience makes your customers feel is a significant factor in improving not only your User Experience but also your Customer Experience.

Behavioral Journey Mapping shows your user experience in detail

When trying to understand how a User Experience makes your customers feel, there is only one tool that can do an adequate job. Our Behavioral Journey Mapping exercise can show you the moments of your User Experience and the emotions your users feel during them. We developed this comprehensive tool for understanding your present Customer Experience for our global Customer Experience Consultancy. It takes the traditional Journey Map to the next level. Behavioral Journey Mapping acknowledges the steps of your User Experience and addresses the emotional moments these steps create. Not only that, but it also defines the emotions each moment evokes and why.

Behavioral Journey Mapping takes an outside-in view of your User Experience, looking at it from the customer’s point of view. With this insight, you can experience the conscious, subconscious, and psychological influences that affect how your Customers Feel about the User Experience you have today.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY?

The true definition of Customer Experience Strategies
Customer Experience Strategies are essential to improving your present experience. Customer Experience Strategies are as varied as the experiences they produce. Choosing one requires you first to ask yourself what kind of Customer Experience you want. Your answer is what we call a Customer Experience Statement (CES).

YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY IS THE ROADMAP TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SUCCESS

The CES informs everyone involved what the focal point is and the Customer Experience you want to deliver. It defines the desired effect of your Customer Experience Strategy, including the way you want the customer to feel after the experience. For example, if the CES states you want your Customer Experience to make the customer feel valued, then your Customer Experience Strategy will address the actions needed to make customer feel valued. If it is to make customers feel special, then your plan will work toward producing that emotional outcome.

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” A CES is foundational to creating effective tactics in your Customer Experience Strategy, which is crucial to your success. By asking the right key strategic questions, you can design the tactics to help you achieve success in your Customer Experience improvement efforts on the fast route.

However, even if you have the right tactics identified, all Customer Experience Strategies are ineffective without proper implementation. Your Customer Experience Strategy will guide you through the roll out and address common areas of concern such as:

• How to build momentum in the organization for your desired experience
• How to measure your progress toward your goal
• How to reward success throughout the team

WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT (CEM)?

The True Definition of Customer Experience Management

Defining CEM, Customer Experience Management is not a precise task. What you include in your definition often has a lot to do with where you are on your Customer Experience Journey. Some sales organizations define it as the processes that people use to track their interaction with Customers from start to finish. Others say it is the reactions provided to the interaction with customers designed to exceed their expectations. Some say it is taking control of the interaction with their customers. However, none of these definitions for CEM defines what the role will be for the Customer Experience Manager.

So, What is Customer Experience Management Really?

Without any elaboration, Customer Experience Management is the name given to the process and discipline of delivering a great Customer Experience. What we would add is that it requires a robust examination by the Customer Experience Manager of the current experience they provide, as well as an in-depth understanding of what the most successful Customer Experiences provide. Moreover, it includes the Customer Experience design process, the way you measure success, and, perhaps most importantly, the level of customer centricity you have at your organization.

As CX Consultants, we see that many Customer Experience Managers lack this understanding of the whole Customer Experience Management concept. Additional training on the overall Customer Experience movement is vital to their contribution in their role, as well as an honest look at why the organization produces the experience it does at present. Few organizations have undertaken this training.

We cover many of these essential concepts in our Customer Experience Management training called The Customer Experience Essentials. Designed to provide a Customer Experience Manager with a foundational grasp of Customer Experience concepts needed to produce results for your team, we help you find the right questions to ask about your experience as well as the frameworks to get you started on your path to success.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT?

Customer Service is providing backup to customers. Typically, there is a Customer Service department, a manager, and, in less enlightened organizations, some mantra that includes some version of “the customer is always right.” This lacks the comprehensive definition needed when describing a Customer Experience.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE SAME!

Many people are confused between the difference. It’s understandable; they start with the same word after all. The difference starts when you consider the scope of the definition of Customer Service vs. Customer Experience.

A Customer Experience is a much more holistic thing. CX includes not only the backup provided to customers but also the way the organization handles the customer on the phone or through its website or mobile experience. However, it starts earlier than that, with the brand promise and how the advertisement sounds and where it appears. CX includes how a customer feels entering and exiting the customer  interaction, the moment when a customer uses the product or service, and even the way they feel when they remember the experience. In short, it’s everything.

Customer Service Excellence is an integral part of the overall experience, but too few organizations take the time to train their customer-facing employees properly to deliver it. Customer experience training in the soft-skills needed to produce a higher level of satisfaction is a critical element missing from too many Customer Experience strategies.

In our global Customer Experience Consultancy, we work to help provide this missing link for Customer Service Training. From Front-Line Managers to Customer-Facing Employees to Call Center employees, any member of your team can benefit from programs that can help them deliver Customer Service excellence consistently. Our proprietary programs, like our Memory-Maker Training, use the principles of behavioral economics, which is the study of how psychology influences our thinking during buying decisions, and are designed to take your Customer Experience to the next level.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAPPING?

The True Definition of Customer Experience Mapping

Customer Experience Mapping is a vital tool to discover what your customers want and is essential to any organization. However, the most prominent mapping, called journey mapping, doesn’t address the entire Customer Experience. It addresses the flow of the Customer and the rational, physical parts of it, but it leaves out how those emotions make a customer feel—and in many ways that is the most important part.

Accurate Experience Mapping must include the emotions of the journey

• We have long held that the interaction many organizations consider the entire Customer Experience, the rational side, are only a part of the overall experience. The remaining parts include the emotional, subconscious, and psychological reactions a customer has to our experience that influences how they feel about your Customer Experience.
• When you leave these essentials out of your experience mapping, you leave these significant influences unaddressed and up to chance. Not only that, you miss out on the best opportunity to engage emotionally with your customers, an effort that is proven to increase customer loyalty and retention.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAPPING THAT GETS THE JOB DONE

In our global Customer Experience Consultancy, we emphasize the importance of a comprehensive Customer Experience Mapping exercise, called Behavioral Journey Mapping. Our experience mapping includes the emotional journey seen from the customer’s point of view along with the step-by-step interaction that occurs. Designed to take traditional journey mapping to the next level, our Customer Experience Mapping finds the particular moments of your experience that evoke specific emotions and analyzes why. We also include the genuine start of the Customer Experience, which is long before they buy your product or call customer service. Not only that, we take it through to the end, which is long after they hang up, log off, or exit the brick and mortar location.

By looking from the outside-in, as if you were a customer, it provides the insight you need to understand the the conscious, subconscious, and psychological parts of the Customer Experience you currently provide. Our Customer Experience Mapping makes every effort to include a robust analysis of the all the parts of an experience so you have a complete understanding what you customers want.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS MANAGEMENT (CRM)?

The True Definition of Customer Relationships Management

(CRM) Customer Relationships Management used to mean managing the relationship with Customers, much like Customer Experience or Customer Experience Management. However, today, most organizations think Customer Relationship Management is the centralized computer system that holds all the information on customers, often referred to as the CRM.

It’s not surprising that today CRM means computer software system rather than customer relationship management. When senior management asks for the analysis of Customer Experience, they want to see facts and figures arranged in reports. What they aren’t expecting is a list of touchy-feely adjectives that describe a person’s feelings.

While Customer Experience qualitative information can hardly be reduced to a list of emotions, it is also not only facts and figures. Customer Relationship Management that requires emotional information represents a new frontier for those c-suite occupants that came up the corporate ladder before we entered the experience economy.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS MANAGEMENT CONSULTING

It’s a shame that technology has overtaken the concept of CRM. When it comes to Customer Relationships Management, relying on a computer system to manage human relationships will only end in tears. CRM software might have the statistical information about customers, but it is strictly quantitative.

When it comes to CRM Consulting, meaning the actual work of managing a relationship with customers, quantitative data is not enough. Numbers don’t tell the whole story. One must have the qualitative information as well.

• Customer Relationship Management requires a hard look at the softer side of the business.
• Experiences have many layers and vary with every situation.

In our global Customer Experience Consultancy, we employ a hearty qualitative research effort to uncover the information we need to manage customer relationships effectively. Our CRM consultants do not only look at the numbers; they also look at the reasons the numbers turned out the way they did.

For many organizations, the beginning of Customer Relationship Management starts by getting every member of the team on the same page as far as what relationship with customers they want. Our consultants advise our clients to undertake a Customer Experience Statement (CES) exercise, which defines that relationship in specific emotional terms. A CES can not only rally the team around a specific goal for the softer side of business, but it can also serve as a basis for proving ROI in the CRM for analysis by the C-Suite.