Crafting the Customer Experience

Offering a better product than the competition is longer a reliable advantage. Consumers expect more. Smart companies today are thriving because they focus on providing a better customer experience.

Customer experience is quickly becoming the arena where savvy businesses choose to compete. According to a Walker study, by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Social media has played an enormous role in shifting the competitive landscape. For better, or for worse, social media has transformed the relationship between businesses and their customers.

The customer’s voice, now broadcasted across the internet, is the most influential marketing channel. Their voices echo not just the merits of the product, but more often it reverbs with the emotions tied to the experience.

Nobody is exempt from rising consumer expectations. Increasingly, customers expect from all players the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.

The good news is that small business owners have the advantage in the customer experience race because of their ability to adapt their processes and quickly react to unique customer demands and rising expectations.

Defining Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is the culmination of all the interactions between a customer and the organization through their business relationship.

Some examples of these interactions could include learning about a company for the first time, exploring their website, interacting with an employee, or purchasing a product or service. Every way that a consumer interacts with a company’s brand contributes to their overall customer experience.

While we may think we’re excelling at each individual touchpoint with a customer, we still may have a poor overall customer experience. This is because customer experience is a series of interactions, each built upon the one prior.

The key to understanding what makes for a great customer experience then, is realizing that it requires designing a cohesive, end-to-end journey.

Everything that we do to service our customers must work within the greater context of the journey.

Why Customer Experience Matters

Customer experience matters more today than ever before because of the power of social media.

Customers are engaging and connecting with brands in public through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. These channels give consumers a voice that can turn them into a public advocate or critic overnight.

For example, take what happened to United Airlines in April of 2017 when video of one of their passengers being forcibly removed from the aircraft went viral on the internet. $1.4 billion in value was wiped out overnight due to the ensuing outrage.

The United Airlines debacle is an extreme example of how a poor customer experience, when shared over social media, can have a profound impact on a business’s brand, reputation, and bottom line. But the good news is that the opposite effect can happen when we deliver a positive customer experience.

Positive online reviews are a huge source of free marketing.

An article from Forbes explains: “Consumers are putting more trust into online reviews and comments than ever before. Review sites like Yelp are a goldmine for small business owners. 90% of customers say that what they decide to buy is influenced by positive online reviews, and 94% will use a business with at least four stars.”

Online reviews on social media platforms can be a source of lead generation or a public warning to stay away. That kind of influence is a strong reason for businesses to start owning the customer experience.

The Handcrafted Approach

Small businesses have greater flexibility to adapt their processes to accommodate unique customer requests than large corporations. They can often make changes to their products or services overnight without causing too much disruption or worrying about how it will scale.

In this way, small business are more adept to competing on the grounds of customer experience.

One way to start improving the customer experience is to begin with a handcrafted mindset. Ask yourself, “How could I make this product/service/interaction the very best that it could be? On a scale of 1-10, what does an 11 look like?”

Questions like these force you to design your customer experiences with empathy.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and explore all the different ways they interact with your business.

For example, you could start from the perspective of a new customer who has landed on your website for the first time after a quick Google search.

What do they think and feel as they navigate your website for the first time? Does it immediately answer the questions they might have? Is it clear where they can go for more information?

Invest in the Opportunity

Designing with empathy and creating a world-class customer experience that delivers on the big picture is no easy task. It requires a committed investment over the long-term and a relentless attention focused on the customer.

Many companies recognize the importance of customer experience, but still have a hard time executing it well. According to an article by Bain and Company, a survey of 362 firms concluded that 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences,” but only 8% of customers agree.

It’s clear that there is a huge opportunity to bridge the gap between what customers expect and what businesses are currently providing. And although it may be a difficult challenge, small business owners should take advantage of their size and lack of rigidity to find opportunities to win over customers by providing that type of superior experience.

Start the Journey

Just as the customer experience is defined as a journey, so too is the process of delivering on that promise. We need to start by paying attention to what our customers are asking for. Then we need to react.

Sometimes that means doing things that are outside of our current process and don’t necessarily scale. It’s not going to be easy.

Patrick Collison, the founding CEO of Stripe, focused on the customer experience from the very beginning, even if it meant waking up in the middle of the night to answer questions.

From an interview on the Masters of Scale podcast, Patrick recalls, “We had a chat room where we would help customers with whatever issue that they wanted to ask about. We were very distressed after a while to notice that occasionally people would come into the chat room while we were sleeping and ask questions, they wouldn’t get any response. So we wrote a bot that would page one of us if somebody asked a question they didn’t get a response after 30 seconds, would groggily, bleary-eyed, wake up and help them and go back to sleep.”

But the hard work is worth it in the end.

Crafting a superior customer experience builds brand loyalty and encourages social sharing that generates referrals and sales. Nobody can improve all the pieces that need to come together for a great customer experience overnight, but here are couple things you can do today to start moving in the right direction.

The first step is to get to know your customers.

Collecting customer feedback is an easy place to start. Short surveys, delivered immediately after the customer interaction, or later through emails or phone calls, are extremely valuable data points that you can use to identify gaps in your service.

One of the best tools to measure the effectiveness of your customer experience is by calculating your Net Promoter Score.

Your Net Promoter Score comes from asking customers one simple question: Would you recommend us to a friend or relative?

As you can see in the graphic above, your NPS score is calculated simply by subtracting the percentage of people who respond with 0-6 from the percentage of people who respond with a 9 or 10.

Most companies have a Net Promoter Score between 10-20%.

Second, write a customer-focused mission statement.

There should be no question among your employees that the customer’s experience comes first in everything that they do.

Zappos is a great example of a company that has customer experience at the heart of everything they do. Of their 10 core values, number one is “Deliver WOW through Service.”

Your mission statement might seem like an inconsequential place to start, but over time the message that is consistently reinforced within your organization shapes the culture.

There’s a reason why Zappos is basically synonymous with great customer experiences. They made it part of their culture from day one with the help of a customer-focused mission statement.

Own the Customer Experience

Delivering a superior customer experience requires thinking big and small. You need to understand the journey your customers go through as a whole, while appreciating the detail of each interaction along the way.

It’s not an easy thing to do. The vast majority of company’s fall well short of customers’ fast rising expectations.

But while the task may be a difficult one, small business owners should recognize customer experience as a frontier they are uniquely equipped to handle. They can take immediate small steps to gather feedback, learn more about the people they service, and align their organization through a customer-focused mission statement.

Customers really just want what they’ve always wanted, and that’s to be taken care of. It’s time to start paying more attention.