Why Customer Experience is Important for Business Success

Customer experience is the conscious and subconscious relationship that a customer has established with a brand. The perception formed is based upon comparisons, past experiences, and value for money derived. Competition in every industry is forcing companies to seriously think about revamping their customer service experience. One typical example is the customers of the airline industry who are continuously offered better deals, packages, discounts and offers.

Why Managing Customer Experience is Important?

While customer experience didn’t receive much attention in the past, it has grown to become one of the key indicators of customer satisfaction and repeat sales. If a customer’s experience journey is not managed properly, with focus on each touch point, then there is a high chance of losing the customer to a competitor. The world is changing fast and companies who would like to become successful in a highly dynamic business environment must seriously consider making customer experience part of their organizational processes.

How Quality Customer Experiences Help an Organization?

• A major advantage that organizations can gain through monitoring the customer experiences is the reduced cost of dealing with unhappy customers. The idea is to create a user experience that reduces number of complaints and improves quality of interactions with the customer.
• Happier customers are more easily convinced to buy add-on services or products offered by the company resulting in increased sales volume.
• An important part of customer retention strategy is to ensure that they get maximum value of their investment in a product or service. Quality experiences linger on in the customer’s mind who automatically wishes to repeat business with the provider, because of how he or she felt.
• Lastly, happier customers tend to share their stories with others. Social media gives them magnified voice, enabling them to share their experiences with friends and family members. The word of mouth marketing has become even more powerful with the advent of social media.

Challenges Faced In Improving Customer Experience

Internal Organizational Resistance

The process of implementing well thought out organizational policies is a difficult path. Change in overall attitude and implementation of customer experience improvements take a lot of effort. The change in culture starts from the top and flows to the bottom. The mere notion of improving customer experience will not be good enough. In order to bring true change, customer-facing employees need to own the concept and practice it in their day to day dealings.

Employee Job Satisfaction

The biggest challenge faced by organizations is ensuring employee satisfaction. Frontline staff members have to deal with all kinds of customers directly every day. Sometimes this direct interaction results in decreased levels of motivation which can directly impact their performance. Therefore, when considering improvements in customer experience, an organization must keep their employees charged at all times. One of the keys to ensuring high levels of motivation is hiring the right people. Provide your customer service employees with growth and recognition. Lastly, try to make their job more interesting through better management, training and empowerment.

Increasing Sales Volume

Business organizations are always looking for opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products. However, it is not a good idea to try and push a new product or service to an already annoyed customer. The training given to customer-facing employees should make them understand when they can add to the sales and when this is not possible. Being too pushy will agitate a customer and ruin the experience for them.

Cost of Customer Experience Management

One other difficulty faced by organizations is the cost incurred in improving the overall customer service experience. This can include costs of installing a new software or adopting new technologies for better management and streamlining processes. It can also entail within it the cost of hiring more staff or experts who can help make the process smoother and quality oriented. Despite the fact that costs might be high in the beginning, it is essential to focus on the goal at hand, and ensure that customer satisfaction is not compromised, and enriching customer experiences are created.