Customer Experience

A strong customer experience is a prerequisite for building solid relationships and loyal customers. If you fail to deliver a good customer experience, it becomes difficult to create returning customers – unless you are in a monopoly market or are willing to be significantly cheaper than your competitors.

On the other hand, when you succeed in creating loyal, returning customers, you will typically also gain:

• Higher revenue per customer
• Customers who are less focused on price
• Customers who recommend you to others
• Customers who stay with you for much longer
• Customers who are less costly to serve

Poor customer experiences are downright toxic to companies and their brands. A bad experience will often cost you the relationship immediately – and if it is bad enough, your disappointed customer will be sure to tell the whole world about it. Face to face as well as online.

In the past, the focus was more often on good customer service than on customer experience. Today, however, customer service is only one -but important – part of the overall customer experience.

Good customer service may be a knowledgeable, friendly, and flexible employee who provides the customer with a great experience. Customer experience, however, encompasses much more. This includes, for example, the condition of the store, delivery time, and thoughtful initiatives that make the purchase more memorable.

In other words, customer service is just one element of the overall package – the customer experience.

There is no single formula for great customer experiences, as both customers and industries differ significantly. However, there are some common denominators and timeless truths. To start with, these might include:

• Be ambitious. Customer experiences where everything unfolds exactly as expected are mediocre—or at least not memorable enough to build lasting customer relationships. Expectations must be exceeded if CX is to become a true competitive advantage.
• Be genuine if you aim to build personal relationships. Customers quickly see through anything else.
• Be authentic and true to your brand. If you are an accounting firm, for example, there is a natural limit to how casual or jovial your tone can be in order to connect with customers.

To be more clear, we recommend that you:

• Carefully consider and plan your efforts. Think about the experience you want your customers to walk away with—and identify the most effective path to get there. You can read more about the user journey on this page.
• Equip your employees – and set them free. Authentic customer experiences do not thrive on rigid scripts. If you clearly communicate your vision of what a great experience looks like in your company, your employees will know how to deliver it. Otherwise you should help them!
• Listen to your customers – and measure their feedback. Understand what your customers expect from you and systematically measure whether you live up to those expectations. There are many different measurement methods that can help you tune in to the customer’s voice.

There is no single measurement method that provides the full picture of customer experience. Just as customer experience is created through the sum of many initiatives, the assessment of customer experience is also the result of combining multiple sources of feedback.

This may include, for example:

• A simple metric that indicates customer loyalty.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The monetary value of a customer can help indicate how well you are performing on customer experience
• Customer satisfaction surveys – such as CSAT. Strong customer experiences are reflected in customer satisfaction.
• Customer Effort Score (CES). A simple method for measuring the perceived complexity of interacting with your company.
• Churn rate, which is a strong indicator.
• Abandoned carts and incomplete purchases.
• Feedback from customer service and front-line employees.

It is important to be cautious about drawing conclusions based on just one or two metrics. However, when viewed as a whole, these inputs can provide a clear diagnosis of your customer experience.

A large part of the world of customer experience and customer satisfaction revolves around expectations—the expectations your customers form through your brand promise, your value proposition, and any specific customer promises you make.

Your brand promise is high-level and, at its core, defines what you do—and for whom. For example: “Denmark’s best car leasing.”

The value proposition sits one step further down the ladder and explains which problems you solve for your customers. For example: “We make car leasing easy.”

The customer promise operates at a very concrete level, for example:

• We deliver the car to your address
• The car comes fitted with all-season tyres
• We have an insurance offer ready for you to simply accept

Because of its concreteness, the customer promise is critically important to deliver on. It sets very real expectations – and those are expectations you cannot afford to disappoint.