What Is Customer Experience?

What Are the Benefits of Managing Customer Experience?

Today, your customers have more choices than ever before. In addition, every choice they make has become more complex. From text messages to customer portals to live support, there are many ways that they can interact with brands. A cohesive customer experience that simplifies processes and delights your customers shows your company cares — and is worth continuing to do business with. Similarly, a poor customer experience can cost you customers. In fact, in PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey, bad experiences with products/services or with customer service were overwhelmingly the top two reasons cited for leaving a brand.

What Is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management entails monitoring how your company is being perceived and improving customer interactions with your business across all channels that may affect your customers’ opinion of you. Evaluating how you can improve customer experience across all touchpoints is a critical part of this role in your company.

 What Can I Do to Optimize the Customer Experience?

• Collect feedback on your customer service. Customer service is the natural starting point for knowing how your customer experience is being perceived. Does your team resolve issues quickly? Are your customers treated with empathy? Is your communication professional and on brand? Asking these kinds of questions in a customer survey can help you find areas of your customer experience that need improvement.

• Unify across departments. With the increase in automation, it’s even more critical to ensure that your company presents cohesive messaging across every channel. While collecting customer feedback is a good place to start, it’s ineffective unless you share the findings with the appropriate departments. Marketing or care teams can’t be the only departments concerned with feedback on the customer experience. Product development, operations, and sales must work together to deliver a better experience for your customers.

• Personalize wherever possible. Customers expect you to know who they are, whether they’re calling, emailing, texting, instant messaging, or posting on social media. For example, they hate having to repeat their contact information or issue over and over. Anything you can do to speed up the recognition that they’re an existing customer, including using their name and referencing their specific concern, will make your customer experience more positive.

How Do Customer Engagement and Customer Experience Complement Each Other?

While both customer engagement and customer experience are important for attracting and retaining customers, they aren’t the same thing. Customer engagement includes interactions between a business and its customers, with the goal of strengthening your relationship. Emails, texts, and social media posts are examples of common customer engagement.

The customer experience is about the perception of your business across every single customer engagement interaction. In essence, it’s about how your customers feel about your brand when they engage with you.

How Does a Loyalty Program Affect Customer Experience?

Your customer loyalty program plays an important role in both customer engagement and the customer experience. Offering thoughtful rewards reinforces your image as a company that values their business, and it can also incentivize your customers to provide the feedback you need to improve customer experience. In addition, you can use customer rewards to capitalize on your great experience by encouraging actions of advocacy, such as submitting referrals, posting online reviews, participating in case studies, and more.

BHN Rewards is a digital rewards platform that can help you implement and manage your customer rewards. It integrates directly with customer management tools such as HubSpot and Marketo, as well as community platforms like Krealinks and Verint.

Related Topics:

Here’s What the Best Customer Rewards Programs Have in Common

Do’s and Don’ts for an Effective Customer Engagement Strategy

Customer Feedback Survey Best Practices: 30 Smart Questions to Ask