The Overall Importance that Customer Experience Has for a Business

Importance Of Customer Experience April 29, 2022

Mary Kate Morrow

Writer

Introduction

The importance of customer experience cannot be understated with 89% of consumers reporting they would never return to a business after having a negative customer experience.

he Drawbacks of a Poor Customer Experience

One poor customer experience can have disastrous consequences for your business's bottom line and reputation. With the rise of social media usage and increased customer feedback opportunities, ensuring positive customer experience is more important than ever.

Customers who do not have a positive experience will cost your company more than solely the financial amount of their continued business. Replacing a customer is much more expensive than retaining existing customers is. In fact, case studies estimate that acquiring new customers is 5-10 times more costly than keeping existing customers.

Another cost that is difficult to measure is the reputation damage your business can suffer from a negative customer experience. Each bad customer experience is on average shared with 10 other people. This number skyrockets if the customer goes to social media to vent, or has a large network they share with.

Consistent negative customer experiences have the opportunity to decrease a net promoter score severely. A business with a low net promoter score should establish a customer experience strategy as soon as possible to attempt to salvage their score.

Thankfully, there are concrete steps that a business can take to increase their promoter score over time. However, resolving bad customer experience issues is not only costly. but many of these issues could have been prevented with a proper experience strategy in place.

Considering how costly a negative customer experience is, improving customer experience should be a main business focus. With rising customer expectations it is even more urgent to keep high levels of customer engagement and customer loyalty to avoid losing business to your competition.

The Importance of Customer Experience

It is crucial to understand that customer experience involves every interaction in the entire customer journey regardless of how small or insignificant the interaction seems. Whether a customer is paying a bill, watching a commercial, or directly interacting with your customer support staff, the importance of customer experience cannot be overlooked.

In such a competitive market, customer experience and customer service are crucial to retaining existing customers and acquiring new customers. Customer service and customer experience are often mistakenly used interchangeably. However, customer service is only one portion of the entire customer journey while customer experience includes the entire customer journey.

Customer service is an immensely important part of the customer experience. Many times the only human contact that a customer has with companies in this technological age is through a call to a customer support line If a customer feels that you do not value them because your customer support is difficult or impossible to reach, they will likely switch their business over to a competitor and not return to yours.

The most successful customer centric businesses have great customer experience strategies in place. The best businesses rise to meet the challenges of customer expectations and seek to exceed them. Great customer experience is created strategically and maintained through consistent customer feedback and customer support.

Good customer experience creates brand loyalty long term with existing customers. 52% of customers report that they will put in additional effort to buy products from a brand they feel brand loyalty towards. Customer loyalty is invaluable in both customer retention of existing customers as well as improving your bottom line profitability long term.

A customer experience strategy should focus on the ease a customer has doing business with you. The entire customer journey should be a positive experience and customer expectations should be exceeded whenever possible. Some examples of great customer experience best practices include-

- Marketing sales teams being truthful about costs of products or services
Easily accessible customer support and customer service lines
Requesting and meaningfully implimenting customer feedback
Monitoring and engaging with social media
Encouraging brand loyalty long term
Researching case studies about improving customer experience
Understanding customer needs and wants
Reaching out to customers who have had bad customer experiences

A best practice is to make sure your entire team is on board with your customer experience strategy and works together to create a great customer experience. A bad customer experience could be the fault of a customer perception that your company is disorganized or is not a united front.

For example, your financial services should work with your marketing sales team if there is a place for both to improve their customer service capabilities. Perhaps these two departments require duplicative forms to be filled or do not effectively transfer customers between them. Make the customer journey as seamless as possible by encouraging departments to work with one another towards an end goal of exceeding customer expectations.

A customer experience management technique can be very helpful when getting your teams to work together. Instead of looking at each part of the customer journey as separate, companies must look at the entire journey and how to improve it comprehesibly. Organized customer experience management and a great customer experience strategy will help you provide a good customer experience every time.