If you have been in business for the past few years, you have probably heard the term ‘customer experience’. It’s time to discover what the new sales and marketing buzzword really means.
So What is Customer Experience?
There are many opinions about when customer experience first became a concept, but the two-way relationship between buyer and seller really opened up with the invention of the switchboard, which allowed for communication between both. Sellers could tell buyers about their products, while the technology opened sellers up to critiques and criticism from their buyers.
However, ‘customer experience’ emerged as a business buzzword earlier in the decade and its prevalence has snowballed since. It is a term designed to encompass everything involved in the entire interaction between a customer and a brand. It goes far beyond the one transaction; it is used to reference the entire relationship. For a customer going to the cinema, the customer experience could incorporate the website, the device for printing tickets, the interaction with the staff member at the candy bar, the seats inside the cinema and the movie itself.
What’s the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience?
Customer service principally revolves around the interaction between two people – typically, the purchasing transaction, while customer experience incorporates every transaction, touchpoint
How Broad is Customer Experience?
Considering the definition of customer experience, Forbes points out that it will include what a customer will “think, see, touch and smell” as well as the service they will experience. It is anything that will influence what a customer thinks of a brand. In the cinema illustration above, it includes the speed of the website, how user-friendly the credit card payment is, the taste of the butter in the popcorn and even the quality of the pre-movie trailers.
However, mapping customer experience goes far beyond even this. More than 50
The Importance of Personalisation
Perfecting the customer experience involves considering almost every facet of your business. In addition, every customer comes to your business with their own perceptions and prior experiences – meaning he or she expects to be treated in a personal way. The importance of
What would a
It’s Easier to Focus on Retention
A Lee Resources survey (quoted here by Econsultancy) found that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than retain an existing one. On a logical level, it is easier to retain these customers because you already have a relationship – and, hopefully, the data that will assist you with marketing yourself to them. A report by KPMG found that businesses in the modern era are
Bringing it all together
Delivering incredible customer experiences involves designing almost every part of a business to satisfy customers and ensuring its efforts are
So how is that possible?
Be different
– this allows an SME to stand out from its competitors. A product or service with a point of difference has a clear place in the mind of consumers. Don’t copy competitors. Shockingly, in a Forrester survey published in Harvard Business Review, 58
Try account-based marketing
–
Use your customer relationship management (CRM) tool
– the CRM is the foundation of an SME’s efforts to create incredible customer experiences. Using the data collected from every touchpoint, including those created through website browsing trails and online ad clicks, SMEs can create customer profiles, allocate content or change website preferences based upon these. A powerful CRM system, like Sales Cloud, can even deliver unseen insights about your data, make predictions, or allow functions to be automated.
What Blirt does
At Blirt, we help SMEs deliver amazing customer experiences through the entire customer journey through a process of digital transformation across sales, marketing, services
We
If you would like to get started or find out more, we can book a discovery call to find out what you need and tell you more about our approach.
Want to know more, you can talk to us here, blirt.co/hello