What is Customer Experience?

Concepts such as “Customer Experience”, “Customer Journey” and “Customer Insight” have significantly changed both business processes and future planning for corporations today, where digitalization is accelerating all over the world. We are observing that companies with “the brand/product first” approach are now changing their attitude to “customer first”.

“Customer Experience” refers to all the emotions of your customers about the experience they have had with your products/services starting from the beginning of the purchasing process. As we understand from this definition, the customer experience process is a continuous one and it imposes a great responsibility on the institutions. In addition to producing a good product, providing a good service to the customers in this process paves the way for the full development of customer loyalty. Research results also support this view. 32% of customers stop doing business with the brand after only one bad experience with a brand they love.

Why Is Customer Experience So Important?

After the pandemic, the economic problems have led businesses (especially hotels and restaurants) to maintain their market shares. At this point, it becomes very important to increase existing customer loyalty, maintain the audience and provide a good customer experience for new customer acquisition. Research conducted by Gartner also supports this view. Results show that 80% of companies’ turnover comes from only 20% of their current customers. The cost of retaining existing customers is much less than the cost of acquiring new customers. So, a good customer experience can save you lots of money and it is also a key to gaining new customers.

Some of the research results below also help us better understand the importance of “Customer Experience”.

• 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience (PwC)

• 76% of customers expect their needs to be understood by organizations (Salesforce)

• Customer-oriented organizations are 60% more profitable than others (Deloitte)

• 74% of consumers form their buying habits only based on experience. (Forbes)

The Ways to Measure Customer Experience

Analyzing the Voice of the Customer is the basis for measuring Customer Experience. Customer Experience is often described as a difficult and complex process to measure. We see that institutions that can manage this process very well, increase their customer loyalty and revenues at a very high rate.

Many of the companies prefer traditional surveys. These surveys include questions to get the general feedback of the customers about the processes they experience, as well as questions for improvement and suggestions. Following these questions, the Net Promoter Score (recommendation score) question is accompanied by the Customer Satisfaction Score questions. Net Promoter Score is used to determine the percentage of customers who promote or detract from the company/product. However, it is very difficult to measure the “real” customer experience with just NPS. Surveys need to include a free text box where customers can really write what they have had.

Customer Journey Analytics is one of the methods used in Customer Experience measurement. In order to do this, a clear customer journey map must be drawn. Organizations that have fully prepared this process can easily analyze the problems their customers experience at what stage, what kind of support they need in which processes, and can go to improve the processes in which the problem is found.

Some companies are also trying to measure the Customer Experience from the support systems they use or from the emails they use. According to the subjects and frequency of the incoming support tickets, it is aimed to analyze and solve the problematic parts and to increase the experience by reducing their frequency.

In addition to all these efforts, comments and scores on complaint sites, social media, e-commerce platforms, and product comparison platforms now contain important data for institutions to make sense of Customer Experience. However, scaling this data is challenging for institutions. If you want to scale and improve your customer experience, please feel free to get in touch with us.