Guide: Customer Experience and its applications to your business

Customer experience is the sum of everything a customer lives with your brand, from the first search to the last service call, in every channel and in every business process. Managing it well means understanding who your customer is, mapping how they buy and aligning marketing, sales, service and operations around that path.

Imagine the quarterly review of a company that sells industrial supplies to businesses and consumer versions of the same products through an online shop. The chief executive shows two charts. Satisfaction in the store is stable, while complaints from online buyers have doubled. The head of sales says the product is the same. The head of service says the answers customers receive depend on who picks up the phone. The head of operations says deliveries are on time according to the system. Everyone is looking at their own process, and the customer is living all of them at once. This scene is illustrative, but it is the day-to-day reality of many companies that discover customer experience the hard way.

It is no secret that in this new digital era businesses have been affected in many ways, both positively and negatively, in their business processes, whether they serve B2B or B2C customers. New perspectives have emerged to understand how our clients behave, because the way people buy products and services is no longer the traditional one. Today customer experience is of high importance for the future of our brand. This guide explains what customer experience is, how to understand it in your business, how to improve it and what benefits to expect, and it gives executives a way to start.

What is customer experience?

Years ago we assumed that the customer would follow three simple steps. In the first, the customer would contact us to check schedules, our location and the ways we send products. In the second, the customer would come to our physical or virtual store to look for a product or service of interest. In the third, the customer would make the purchase. At first glance that sounds simple, and it is how we used to think it worked, but nowadays it is not so simple.

Why is it not so simple anymore? Because we still tend to think that our customer buys products and services in the same way they did five or ten years ago, and the truth is that customers change. Their decision making changes, their tastes and preferences are different, and the whole customer experience has changed in recent years. What we thought was our buyer persona a few years ago has been changing a lot. It is at this point that we must ask ourselves how well we know the customer and the experience they have with our brand.

It is true that we can find many definitions. In a simplified way, the B2C customer experience can be understood as the process of satisfying all of a customer's experiences with a brand, regardless of the channel or the business process being executed. For the B2B customer there are also different definitions, but in short, the B2B customer experience is the objective of satisfying marketing, sales, customer service and operations processes in order to achieve customer satisfaction. For a fuller definition, see our article What is customer experience and what is it for.

An outstanding customer experience is critical to the continued growth of any business. A positive experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers and encourages brand advocacy. The evidence that customers feel this is strong. Salesforce Research, in the sixth edition of its State of the Connected Customer report based on 14,300 consumers and business buyers worldwide, found that 80 percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. PwC reached a similar conclusion in an earlier survey of 15,000 people in 12 countries, in which 73 percent called customer experience an important factor in their purchasing decisions.

How do we understand the customer experience in our business?

Our customers can be businesses, consumers or, in some cases, both. These two types of customer care that their experiences are excellent. Although they are different in nature, they follow the same buying process, and it is important to categorize our customer through a buyer persona in order to distinguish them from any consumer who is not relevant to our business. If your company serves both audiences, our article on the differences between a B2B and a B2C buyer persona will help you separate them.

Customers also follow the same path, better known as the customer journey, so it is of the utmost importance that we understand the customer journey before the purchase of our products, during the purchase process and after it. It is also important to consider that today's customers have more power than salespeople, not the other way around. The decision making that ends with customers coming to us in search of satisfactory experiences is crucial, and it is an advantage for our business to understand the factors that characterize, distinguish and shape our ideal B2B and B2C customer.

We can dimension our customer, their way of thinking, the way they are informed about us and their decision making, very simply. Today's customers are more informed, because they have all the social networks and channels at their disposal, and they have their interests clearer than before. They have no problem buying from the competition, whether in B2C or B2B, because they have many options at their fingertips and can interact with them very easily. They also have greater access to information and are cooler when it comes to making a purchase decision. With this understanding we can identify where customers tend to have problems and at which points of contact an optimization is required to streamline sales, marketing, operations and service. We also encourage the improvement of business processes, which should be focused on customer satisfaction in every area of the business.

The customer is not only more empowered but also more appreciative of the experience they receive, and that is why it is so important that they receive an extraordinary one. The customer is the best element to increase awareness of the company and its brands in a positive way. A customer who promotes you, who is loyal and who shares by word of mouth the products and services offered by a brand is the most profitable way to market your business. All of this is possible by applying customer experience well. The first test of whether it is applied well is consistency. Salesforce found that 79 percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 55 percent say it generally feels like they are dealing with separate departments and not with one company. That is exactly the situation of the company in our opening scene.

In what ways can we improve our clients' current customer experience?

Now that we have a broader understanding of the B2C and B2B customer experience, let us look at how to implement strategies to improve it. Today we have seen how many businesses around the world have failed to adapt to the new digital era because they did not implement clear and well-structured business processes, because they had not yet defined their buyer personas, or because they had not focused their marketing, service, sales and operations efforts.

It is important to understand that by improving customer experience processes across our different channels, departments and business activities, we can deliver memorable experiences in a holistic way. A customer who receives a satisfactory experience in one process, such as sales, but an unsatisfactory one in another, such as support or billing, ends up with a distorted impression of the brand. For that reason we should focus our efforts on improving the experience at all touchpoints where the customer interacts with us.

Three tools deserve particular attention. The first is the development of buyer personas. Without a buyer persona a business cannot claim to have an improved customer experience, because the buyer persona is the semi-fictional representation of the target customer to whom all of a business's efforts are directed. A well identified buyer persona simplifies the efforts of a business. Instead of selling to every consumer in the market, the business focuses on selling to those customers who are relevant to its brand.

The second is the customer journey and the customer journey map. These tools describe the consumption habits, the map and the path that each prospect follows with our brand before, during and after the purchase process of our products and services. By implementing them in our customer experience improvement strategies, we can personalize the experience and identify where in the buying process we have opportunities with our prospects. The third is a customer relationship management platform, better known as a CRM. This platform helps us manage the registration, activity and statistical data of each customer in real time, from the first moment they interact with the business. Through the omnichannel capabilities of the tool, the business can manage every contact process with the customer in the same system in an agile and efficient way.

What are the benefits of customer experience?

Once we understand what customer experience is, the series of processes that lead to understanding how important it is to our customer, and the processes involved in giving them a memorable experience so that they can fall in love with our brand, we can see why experiences are defining the current business and consumption of our B2B and B2C customers. This is true across all our touchpoints, channels, social media, shops, online sites and departments. Several benefits stand out.

The first is loyalty building. In a day and age where we have more and more competitors, and our customers relate to so many types of business, it is of the utmost importance that the customer is aware of our value proposition, of how important our brand is to them and of their loyalty process with our brand. The second is innovation. By needing to implement strategies that focus on the customer's experience, we foster innovation in our services, and we apply an omnichannel approach to the efforts of the different areas of our business. The third is a better understanding of the needs of our customers. If necessary, we redesign the way they experience our brand, including the way we sell, the way we provide services, the experience they have on our portals, social networks and campaigns, and one-to-one contact, among other aspects.

These benefits reinforce each other. A company that listens to its customers learns where its processes fail, fixing those processes makes the experience more consistent, and a more consistent experience earns the loyalty that lowers the cost of selling in the future. The reverse is also true. A company that ignores the experience pays for it twice, first in customers who leave and then in the extra spending needed to replace them. That is why customer experience belongs on the executive agenda and not only in the service department.

What this means for the C-level

For a chief executive, customer experience is a question of ownership. In most organizations each department owns a piece of the journey and no one owns the whole, so the customer experiences the sum of the gaps. The practical decision is to name an executive sponsor for the end-to-end experience and give that role authority over the metrics that matter across departments, such as retention, effort and repeat purchase.

A chief marketing officer should make sure that the buyer personas used in campaigns match the ones used by sales and service, because inconsistent segmentation produces inconsistent promises. A chief operating officer should treat service levels in delivery, billing and support as part of the brand, and not only as costs to control. A chief financial officer can help by tracking the value of retained and referred customers, which makes the return on experience visible. A chief information officer should ensure that customer data is shared across systems, since a CRM that only the sales team uses cannot deliver a coordinated experience.

How to start on Monday morning

Choose one customer type and one journey, for example the first order of a new business client or the first purchase of an online shopper. Gather the people who touch that journey in marketing, sales, service and operations, and ask them to describe it step by step as the customer would. The differences between their descriptions are usually the first findings, because each department will assume a slightly different customer.

Next, listen to the customer. Review complaints, call recordings and survey comments from the last quarter and note where customers repeat information, wait for an answer or receive different messages. Select the three moments that cause the most frustration and agree on one change for each, with a named owner and a date. Measure the result before extending the work to other journeys. To organize this effort, the Customer Journey Toolkit helps describe the stages and emotions of the customer, and the Persona Playbook Toolkit helps define the buyer persona that anchors the whole exercise.

Keep the cadence simple. A monthly meeting where the cross-functional group reviews the same three indicators and the status of the three changes is enough to build the habit. Teams that begin small and show a result within a quarter earn the credibility to take on larger journeys, while those that start with an enterprise-wide program often spend the first year aligning vocabulary and never reach the customer.

How ICX helps

At ICX Consulting we help businesses improve the experience of their customers. We start by listening to the customer and to the teams that serve them, and then we map the journey, define the buyer personas and identify the processes that most affect satisfaction. From there our consultants design the changes, supported by our customer experience and customer journey map services, and we help implement the CRM and the measurement that keep improvements in place. If you would like to know where your customers are experiencing the most friction, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

Customer service is one part of the experience, the help a customer receives when they need it. Customer experience covers everything a customer lives with the brand, including marketing, the buying process, delivery, billing and support, and the feelings those interactions create.

Is B2B customer experience different from B2C?

The principles are the same, but the context differs. B2B involves several decision makers, longer cycles and deeper relationships, while B2C is usually faster and more emotional. In both cases the customer follows a journey, and in both a clear buyer persona is the starting point.

How do you measure customer experience?

Combine satisfaction, effort and loyalty indicators with business results such as retention, repeat purchase and referrals. The most useful measures are those tied to a specific journey, so the team knows what to change when a number moves.

Do small companies need a CRM to manage customer experience?

A CRM is not mandatory on day one, but some shared record of customers and interactions is. As the number of customers and channels grows, a CRM becomes the way to keep every department working from the same information.

Customers do not divide your company into departments, and the businesses that grow will be those that stop doing so as well. If you want to talk about what customer experience could mean for your organization, talk to an ICX consultant and we will help you turn your customers' everyday moments into reasons to stay.