How Customer Experience Drives Business Growth: A Recipe for Success

Maximum customer satisfaction is the name of the game in the contemporary, highly competitive business landscape. What makes the clientele happy? No doubt, people feel satisfied when they obtain a high-quality product at a reasonable price. Yet sometimes, even striking a great deal, consumers will never turn to the same brand again. Why? Because of subpar customer experience (CX) they received in the process of purchasing a product from it. Realizing this simple truth of how customer experience drives business growth, entrepreneurs make this aspect of their sales routine a top priority in their business strategy, placing it over improving the products and optimizing pricing.

This article will explore the ways how customer experience drives business growth, offer a system of measures to assess CX, and outline major trends that shape the contours of the customer experience domain today. But we will begin with some basic term definitions. 

Customer experience vs customer service: understanding the difference

Sometimes, budding entrepreneurs confuse these two notions. They are somewhat similar but quite distinct concepts that relate to each other as a part and a whole. 

Customer service is defined as a specific interaction between a client and a brand, usually occurring when consumers of products or services the brand offers have an issue or need assistance. Thus, customer service is all about answering questions, solving problems, and providing support. In fact, customer service is a single touchpoint (today predominantly AI-driven and leveraging AI chatbots) where clients and the enterprise contact during the entire customer journey.

Customer experience is a broader notion. It covers the full scope of client-brand interactions, starting from the moment the potential customer discovers you down to the post-purchase stage, customer service included. Among other pivotal elements of customer experience are customer satisfaction, customer relationship management, brand perception and image, communication channels, website’s user-friendliness, and more.

Why is customer experience important for a business, but not only customer service as its component? Because some people may never apply for help from support personnel or AI-fueled machines that increasingly replace them but they are sure to visit the company’s site, browse through its pages, pick a product they need, pay for it, and hope to receive it as soon as possible. All along this way, they expect to get maximum satisfaction, which is impossible without sounding out their needs, preferences, and pain points. It means businesses should obtain a 360-degree view of their clientele to resonate with them, turning one-time site visitors into loyal customers. 

Knowing how customer experience impacts the bottom line, CX specialists go to all lengths to meet them halfway and understand how satisfied they are with their interaction with the brand. They achieve such understanding by employing specific evaluation techniques.

Gauging the Quality of Customer Experience

The best practices for assessing the quality of customer experience include three bread-and-butter methods.

Creating customer personas

As a survey by McKinsey revealed, 71% of consumers expect businesses to conduct individualized interactions with them, and an even greater percentage of people are frustrated when it doesn’t happen. 

The best way to personalize services lies via building customer personas – fictionalized images of your ideal clients that portray a representative of the target audience with their demographics, income levels, motivations, concerns, values, and attitudes. Having this information at your fingertips, you can tailor your product recommendations, marketing messages, and other interactions, attaining a maximum degree of personalization and making each customer feel unique and appreciated.

Analyzing customer feedback

Another source of valuable insights into customer experience is client feedback. By sifting through their social media posts, direct communications, and the results of surveys and polls, you can discover what you are doing right and – more importantly – where you fail to meet their expectations. After meticulously analyzing all this information, you can make knowledgeable data-driven decisions and introduce improvements into customer experience areas where your brand underperforms. 

The major challenge in this task is the huge volume of data coming from multiple sources. Since the amount of customer-generated data is only going to grow, its fast and error-free processing can be implemented only by involving disruptive machine-learning solutions that handle big data efficiently and increase their performance accuracy while doing their job. 

Customer journey mapping

It boils down to visualizing every step a customer makes while interacting with your company. When you do it properly, you will pinpoint actual and potential bottlenecks that prevent clients from enjoying your products or services. Then, you can implement a series of steps to eliminate these roadblocks at every touchpoint, improving customer experience to increase sales, lower the cart abandonment ratio (which reaches the appalling 70% on average), and generally minimize customer friction along the journey. 

When applied by competent CX professionals leveraging innovative tools and advanced approaches, these instruments augment customer experience immensely and create a pool of satisfied clients who enjoy buying from you and interacting with your team, thus becoming loyal customers.

How does the customer experience impact the company’s business success? Let’s find it out.

Satisfying Customer Experience as an Ultimate Growth Driver

What perks does first-rate CX bring to companies across various verticals?

Augmented customer satisfaction

Customer experience and customer satisfaction are closely related. Every time CX increases, the satisfaction of the clientele grows as well. By providing a smooth customer experience across all touchpoints customer journey contains, you will get a satisfied customer who is likely to return and buy more. 

Increased customer retention

Poised to enlarge your client reach, you should spare no effort to retain your current customers and persuade them that your brand is better than your competitors. If a person is satisfied with the quality of CX they obtain cooperating with your brand and feels valued, they are sure to stay with it and continue the interaction they enjoy so much. 

Minimal customer churn

No matter how hard you may try to keep your clientele, they will leave you anyway. Some may do it for reasons that are totally out of your control, while others do it because they are dissatisfied with the price or quality of your products/services and believe your competitors outstrip you in either of these aspects. Poor CX is another trigger urging them to seek the item they need elsewhere. However, if the customer experience is seamless and enjoyable, 87% of people will stay with the brand and buy more. 

Positive brand perception

Public image and brand awareness take a long time to build, and top-notch customer experience impacts this process directly. But if you fail to satisfy your clientele, your company's reputation will plummet immediately, and you will have to rebuild it from scratch. That is why you should monitor social media and other platforms to see what people think of you and take preventive steps to retain a high standard of customer experience. 

Unwavering brand loyalty

Loyal customers keep purchasing from you even if they realize that your competitors offer something better or cheaper. To make people act like that, you should build an emotional connection with them. Companies whose excellent CX succeeded in establishing such rapport outperform their rival in sales growth by 85%. 

Strong brand advocacy

A loyal customer not only keeps coming back for more. They advertise and promote your products or services to their family, friends, and colleagues. This referral strategy (that costs you nothing, by the way) is considered to be one of the most efficient since 92% of people trust more word-of-mouth recommendations than those received through other channels, especially when they come from their close social environment.

Improved customer lifetime value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the pivotal KPIs that manifests how customer experience drives business growth. It represents the total sum a company can obtain from a client as long as they cooperate. The length of this period critically depends on the quality of customer experience people get. By providing dedicated onboarding, valuable advice and assistance during and after purchase, and personal communication at all stages of the customer journey, brands manage to foster customer satisfaction and convince clients to stay with them indefinitely.

High CSAT scores

CSAT stands for customer satisfaction score – another vital KPI organizations strive to increase. It is a numerical representation of a consumer's belief that an enterprise's services or products live up to their expectations. Naturally, the higher it is, the happier your clients are. And their satisfaction is achieved (among other things) by providing an outstanding customer experience.

Boosted sales

Delighted customers’ impact on business is straightforward: they spend more time browsing your site and buy more products. If they are satisfied, the cycle repeats itself with your sales indices soaring.

Additional sales opportunities

If people enjoy cooperating with your brand, they are sure to look beyond your core products or services. Thus, they are open to cross-selling and upselling offers, and your marketing team just can’t miss this favorable opportunity to make an extra buck. 

Greater revenues

The exponential increase in sales (including upselling and cross-selling profits) that satisfied customers translates into a greater stream of revenues that fill the company's coffers.

Competitive edge

Today, the market in any vertical is full of high-quality products with similar capabilities that their manufacturers sell at affordable prices. All else being equal, it is the customer experience brands offer that becomes a competitive differentiator. By providing a seamless customer journey and displaying to people that you care about them and consider each of them a valuable partner, enterprises can outsell their rivals and carve a greater market share. 

Lower expenditures

Satisfied customers are less prone to apply for help or advice from your support team just because there are fewer issues that require professional assistance. That is why the top-notch customer experience you provide will enable you to rely on a smaller support crew and keep related expenses to a minimum. 

Satisfied employees

Outstanding customer experience benefits not only your clientele. In an indirect way, it also makes your personnel happier. Companies with greater revenues, a strong position in the niche, a sharp competitive edge, and high performance KPIs ushered in by satisfied customers report lower employee churn, better workforce productivity, and excellent performance efficiency. 

As you see, there are plenty of ways how customer experience drives business growth, so developing and implementing a robust CX-building strategy makes perfect sense. While doing it, you should be aware of current trends in this realm.

Customer Experience Trends Scrutinized

Let’s analyze the factors and tendencies that condition the CX landscape today and will persist into the foreseeable future. 

Cut-throat competition.

In the oversaturated product and service market across most industries, customer experience can become a game changer in the client hunt and let organizations stand out among other players in their niche. As Gartner claims, five years ago, 81% of businesses competed mostly or exclusively on the basis of CX, and this percentage is likely to have increased by now. That is why companies with big-time aspirations invest heavily in their CX initiatives, focusing on intensive collection and comprehensive customer feedback analysis.

Expansion of omnichannel customer service.

Businesses poised for success should leave no stone unturned in their attempts to reach out to potential clientele across the globe. They should have a robust customer interaction system encompassing professional sites, social media, telephones, emails, live chats, and more. Naturally, it will require the employment of advanced technologies and leveraging real-time language translators (for companies operating on an international scale), but all these efforts and expenditures will pay off at the end of the day.

Mobile CX reigns supreme.

For companies that offer products and services to the global audience of smartphone users, ignoring their mobile experience is a surefire recipe for failure. As a survey reports, a poorly designed mobile version of a site is a valid reason for 57% of people to recommend their environment to stay away from it. Doubtlessly, if you want to enter the major league of business, you should optimize your digital footprint to perform equally well on desktop and mobile. 

Self-service is a must.

Two-thirds of customers prefer self-service options if they need help or have some issues with the product. Living up to this call of the times, companies increasingly include self-service functionality in their site’s customer support section. Given the multitude of tasks and queries it is meant to handle, it should leverage innovative AI-fueled technologies in the realm of customer support to bring maximum value both to users and business owners.

Immediate response matters.

On average, it takes companies 12 hours to respond to customer service emails. In today’s fast-paced world, it is a felony. People won’t patiently wait for your support team to deal with their request in their own time. The odds are that they will find another company whose support team is more agile in this aspect. To put it squarely, no one cares how great your service or product is if you can’t tackle the problem related to them on short notice. 

Move ahead of the curve.

You may not worry about minimizing your response time if you don't have to respond. And it can happen when you anticipate possible reasons for customers to get in touch with you and adopt a proactive strategy in providing support. And this is what 85% of customers expect, in fact. In such a way, you will solve issues before they turn into problems and nip adverse developments in the bud. 

Evidently, providing first-rate customer experience is a tough row to hoe that requires a joint effort of multiple teams within your workforce. In case one of them lacks experience or qualification, the result will be substandard. However, you can always make up for a deficit of competent staff by outsourcing your support service as the mission-critical element of customer experience. 

SimplyContact is a perfect candidate for this role. Our professional support personnel work as a close-knit team that can be upscaled or downscaled on demand. It has the necessary expertise with established pipeline processes and advanced technologies in place to provide first-rate customer support services that will keep your clientele satisfied. Drop us a line to elevate your customer experience to a new level. 

Summing It up

Customer experience embraces all interactions (including customer service) a client has with the brand across multiple touchpoints in their customer journey. When provided consistently, the best-in-class customer experience increases customer satisfaction and retention, reduces client churn, creates a positive brand image, fosters brand loyalty, improves CSAT and CLV indices, boosts sales and revenues, hones competitive edge, and reduces OPEX. 

Companies that aim to raise the level of their customer experience should create customer personas, analyze client feedback, map customer journeys, and steer by dominant trends in the CX domain. A team of qualified customer support professionals is a crucial component of a comprehensive business strategy that will maximize the value customer experience brings to the organization.