What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the concept that all of the touchpoints between a business and its customers contribute to the customer’s overall impression and emotional connection to the business. This connection is a critical factor in driving customer retention and net promoter score improvements over time.
CX encompasses every interaction across all stages of the customer journey, from discovery and awareness to decision-making, transactions, and retention.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management is the process of intentionally creating, continuously tracking, and proactively managing the customer experience. In other words, it’s how businesses put the core concepts of CX into action.
At the day-to-day level, an effective CX management process allows you to tailor the experiences of your highest-impact customers, as well as to proactively reach out when any customer experiences a negative interaction.
Over the long run, collecting feedback at critical points in the customer journey gives you the data and insights you need to make strategic and iterative improvements to your service.
What is a customer feedback loop?
A CX process generates data and insights through customer feedback loops. These cycles involve a few steps:
- Identifying a touchpoint or customer problem to study
- Collecting customer feedback about that touchpoint
- Making strategic improvements based on customer feedback
- Tracking changes in the feedback and making more iterative improvements over time
This continuous process, supported by a robust CX strategy, surveys, customer advisory boards, and other tools, allows you to continuously monitor the impacts of your improvements and make targeted changes over time.
How is CX different from customer service?
Understanding the difference between CX and customer service (CS) is vital for creating an effective CX strategy.
- CX refers to the sum of a customer’s interactions with your company.
- CS refers specifically to the process of helping to solve customers’ needs and problems, oftentimes after that problem has already occurred.
Think of CS as a part of a complete CX journey. Some touchpoints (like calling your support line to ask questions) involve customer service while others (like using your website to learn more and make a purchase) do not.
An effective strategy takes both types of touchpoints into account, including those that do not involve direct interactions between customers and your employees.
How is CX different from market research?
In the context of large-scale marketing and product development strategies, the difference between CX and market research is also important to understand.
- CX involves continually gathering feedback from all customers and allows for individual two-way communication to learn more and resolve issues.
- Market research is time-bound and focuses on specific strategic questions through surveying small samples of customers and one-way communication.
Depending on the exact context in which they’re being used, these are often fully separate processes. In some situations, however, companies are seeing incredible results and increased efficiency by periodically inserting their market research questions into continuous CX feedback collection cycles.
How is CX management evolving today?
The field of customer experience is constantly evolving alongside the broader business environment. Here are a few trends we’re seeing:
- Increased investments in AI technology, like text analytics and automated service recovery, to streamline elements of the CX process.
- A subsequent leveling of customer experience across all segments (despite their varying expectations and value for your business).
- The continued convergence of CX and market research as organizations embrace the continuous feedback model of CX.
