When looking up ways to improve your business, acronyms and jargon often confront you you may not understand, especially if you are a small business reading information intended for large corporations or industry professionals. One of those acronyms which are essential to your business is CX or Customer Experience.
Understand Different Facets of Customer Experience
The customer experience offered by your company is about more than just the quality of products and services you provide; it also includes how easy it is for customers to deal with your offerings, the type of customer service you offer, and your sales tactics. Understanding how the different parts of CX work together to influence your customers is critical in improving customer satisfaction and sales. Your CX involves the entire pipeline from source materials to product end-of-life because each stop will impact the customer and how they interact with your company. For instance, if your supplier has your products on backorder, the speed they catch up will mean the difference between your customer sticking around and leaving.
Track CX With Metrics
Your customer effort score, or CES, is how easy it is for customers to deal with your products and services. CES is measured on a scale from one to seven, where higher numbers are better. You can also track the ratings customers give your company on your site and third-party review websites, how well your website performs and other metrics. Track the same metrics for a month or two before evaluating which ones are helping you see where the company stands with the customer and which are just taking up space on your dashboard. This will refine the data you use to evaluate CX and improve it.
Experience Your Company’s CX Yourself
The best way to understand your company’s customer experience and where improvements can be made is by experiencing it yourself. By sending people at all company levels through your CX, you can get a more varied idea of the problems and even solicit customer feedback. Not only can you go undercover or send another member of management through the CX, but you can also hire secret shoppers to give an outsider’s view of the experience.
Follow the 3 Ps of Customer Service
The three Ps of customer service are People First Attitude, Patience, and Professionalism, qualities you should teach in your training materials. This does not mean you let your customers do whatever they want because you and your employees are also people. Still, it does mean approaching every customer interaction with the understanding that they have a life going on outside of that situation which may influence their attitude. For instance, the impatient customer may have a hungry child pulling at them to leave the store. Approaching every problem with this attitude will help give you the patience to handle even the worst interactions with professionalism.
Involve the Whole Team
When trying to improve your customer’s experience, involving as many employees as possible in generating suggestions, identifying bottlenecks and designing solutions is best. Not only does this help your staff feel valued by management and invested in the company, but it can also bring unique perspectives to the issue.
Set Clear Goals and Benchmarks
Once you have a list of things that need improving and ideas to help accomplish them, it is time to set clear goals and benchmarks for your company, your team and yourself. These goals should outline the current problem and the picture of successful completion. They should also have deadlines and benchmarks to keep everyone on track.
Your CX, or customer experience, is vital to your company and can lead to increased sales or bottoming out. This experience includes how easy it is to navigate your processes as a customer, how well-trained and friendly your staff is, and even how helpful your troubleshooting team is. You can identify problems in this experience by reviewing it yourself, soliciting customer feedback and asking employees for input. You can then design solutions as a team and set goals with benchmarks to improve.
