TELL ME ABOUT "THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE"

What looks good to the customer? Here we will join a prospect on the journey to becoming a loyal customer.

It is about the things you and your customer do together. These are called "touchpoints".

From first contact with a customer, through to final delivery and payment, you meet on specific occasions, called "touchpoints". Touchpoints lie on the consumption process. There are other points where you or the customer must do things - tasks - but they are not touchpoints.

All the touch points, in a line, make "the customer journey" along the consumption process, the "buying journey", from marketing process, to sales, to customer service.

And overall, we talk about "the customer experience", CX, of this journey.

What does "good" feel like for the customer? Because your customer's experience is not just about tasks or a set of actions. It is also about feelings.

How do prospects or your customers feel about your brand?

At every customer touchpoint, you can improve—or destroy—how your customers feel about you.

So there are important decisions to make at each touchpoint, and those decisions have an impact on  your business results.

In all humility, we must recognise that often  one company's products or services are often like another's. So the difference is in the customers' experience of you and your brand.

A good CX might come from attention to matters like:

Does your marketing respond to your prospects' and customers' wants and needs in ways that they can understand and relate to?

Is your website easy to find, navigate through? Is it helping and guiding and assisting the visitor?

Do you have clear objectives, a strong CX strategy, adequate resources, to support the customer on the consumption journey? From this derives the level of customer satisfaction, which is measurable.

Your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy will explain how you intend to marshall resources to deliver an experience that will "delight", meaning that at each touchpoint, the customer will have a valuable, positive and differentiated good time. Front and back office departments will work together to deliver this.

"Good" means the customer walks away from each touchpoint feeling happy and satisfied. Marketing campaigns are well targeted, products and services are clearly explained, buying is easy, no problem to contact someone when needed, a customer's loyalty is rewarded, they feel the interactions have been personally tailored to them.

In the back office, all the data supporting the journey is joined up under the process phases and steps and the company benefits from these interactions to improve the process.

And that is how you create a win-win customer experience.