What is CX? - Customer Experience in Marketing & Why it’s Important

Customer experience - otherwise known as CX - is the perception that customers have of a company. 

They’ll form this based on how they feel throughout the various interactions they have with you - from the initial advertisement they see to post-sales support, and all the various marketing touch points in between.

CX is important because it ultimately determines the success of any company - the better it is, the easier it is for people to do business with you. 

Improve your customer experience, and your company will experience more customer loyalty, more repeat business, and more brand advocacy from them. 

Just look at the figures - 76% of people will move to a competitor if they have just one bad experience (Acquia), while 87% of business leaders see CX as their priority for growth (North Highland).

By improving the customer experience, your company will benefit from higher customer loyalty, better retention rates, and increased revenue.

This is reflected in the statistics; 83% of companies that place value in making customers happy experience growing revenue (Hubspot), while businesses with better CX bring in nearly six times more revenue than competitors (Forbes).

Digital transformation refers to the incorporation of the internet and its related technologies into everything a business does. 

Simply put, the internet is central to modern life and this forces all companies to adapt their business models accordingly. 

Customer experience is an essential part of this process and is actually driving digital transformation - rather than the other way around. 

This is because the nature of the digital world actually puts the customer firmly in control, and it’s up to companies to keep up with their expectations if they’re to remain competitive. 

Ultimately, they expect an excellent CX or they’ll look somewhere else. 

Just look at the internet today and you’ll understand that people expect relevant content in relation to whatever they’re doing online, on whatever device or platform they’re using. They expect data security, immediate replies from customer support, next-day doorstep delivery - the list is endless.

Furthermore, digital transformation enables companies to better understand what customers want and this helps them meet their expectations. When done right, success online drives down operating costs and gives companies a distinct competitive edge.

While CX can be divided any number of ways, it is generally broken down into three main components:

1. Success - is the customer able to get what they want from each specific interaction they have with you?
2. Ease - how much effort did the customer have to invest into each specific interaction?
3. Positivity - how did the customer feel emotionally after each specific interaction?
    

Customer experience management, often referred to as CXM or CEM, is a marketing strategy that prioritizes customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience. 

Ultimately, this comes down to surveying, analyzing, and enhancing customer interactions with your business.

Beyond the all-important revenue generation, there are four key benefits to providing a good CX:

1. Your customers will advocate on your behalf and you’ll have more new customers as a result
2. Increased customer satisfaction means that you’ll get more repeat business
3. You’ll understand your customers better, which will increase efficiency, and drive down costs
4. Your customers will trust you more, enhancing your brand reputation and mitigating any damage done in the face of negative attention

CX encompasses the full customer journey, from marketing to post-sales care. This means that there’s no shortage of issues that can reduce the customer experience, but you can find the 10 key issues below:

• A website that is poorly designed, slow, or frustrating to navigate
• Poor personalization that means customers are not being given the content they need
• An inability for customers to pick up where they left off at the end of their last session
• Poor cross-device compatibility or a poor omnichannel strategy
• A clunky sign-up process, or unexpected demands for credit card information
• Poorly-conceived pricing levels
• Products/services that do not meet customer expectations
• Substandard tutorials that stop customers getting the most out of their purchase
• Unresponsive, uninformed, or unfriendly customer support
• Inadequate data privacy and/or security that puts customer data at risk

Good CX can be achieved by following this 5-step roadmap:

You need to be able to explain to your company what vision you have for its CX - something that is best achieved by creating a series of guiding principles. 

This could be anything from resolving complaints as quickly as possible to having positive can-do customer support. 

Once these principles have been decided, you can then use them to underpin every policy and process across your organization, so that everything you do revolves around making your customers happy.

In order to offer the best CX possible, you need to know who your customers are and what they want - so that your customer support team can meet their expectations.

Practically speaking, a good way of doing this is to segment your customer base according to their age and product knowledge, and to then use these customer profiles to help your customer support team.

You may think you have CX nailed, but you can’t be sure without customer feedback or visitor communication. . 

As such, it's vital that you use things like surveys and polls to get real-time advice from them about what you’re doing well and what you could improve. 

Crucially, it’s important that you act on this information, pass it to everyone at your company, and use it to guide your CX optimization work.

Simply put, customers will remember positive interactions they have with a business because these are all too rare today. Taken further, they’ll happily advocate for your company if they feel like you have gone above and beyond to help them. 

Take Tesla, who literally send mechanics to their clients houses to fix their vehicle at the time of their choosing. Or Nordstrom, who have a policy of doing what customers want every time - even if it means refunding them for a tire the customer bought somewhere else.

Such policies make these companies stand out from the crowd and enable them to build a strong emotional connection with customers - there’s a reason why Tesla cars are so sought after, despite Elon Musk not being everyone’s cup of tea. 

You may be following this advice to the letter, but how do you know if you’ve actually built a good CX? 

Simply put, customer experience can be assessed by using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) - a valuable KPI that asks one single straightforward question: “How likely are you to recommend us?” The higher the score, the more successful the customer experience optimization.

In order to effectively analyze the customer experience you provide, you’ll want to complete the following 4-step process

The best customers are those that, if they experience an amazing CX, are most likely to return to you again and again. 

You can find out who they are by using surveys and other customer contact tools to assess who your website visitors are, what they do, and what they would use your products for. 

You can then improve this list further by focusing on the most active internet users -  or those that have been active most recently - and then use this information to create the user personas that you will need for the two steps that follow.

Once you’ve created your user personas, you’ll then want to decide what exactly you want to focus on in terms of your CX optimization work. 

To this end, you could focus on users that are appropriate to touchpoints that warrant special attention, such as those that:

• Have just visited your website for the first time
• Recently purchased a product from you
• Failed to onboard after sign-up, or asked for a refund after purchase
• Frequently contacted customer support 
• Regularly referred friends to your company

Now that you have segmented your customer base in a way that will make your analysis useful, you’ll want to collect the customer feedback you need and this can be done in a number of ways:

• Website data analysis
• Surveys and/or polls
• Unscripted interviews
• Track user sentiment

Once you’ve completed these steps and have collected the data you want, you’ll then want to analyze it effectively - both in terms of individual customer issues, and any broader issues with your company’s policies, processes, products, and so forth. 

You can analyze this data by using any of the following CX metrics:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) - this takes the form of a single survey question, and asks customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your company to people around them
• Customer Effort Score (CES) - this measures how easy it is for a customer to do business with you, and is done through a CES survey
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) - this tracks how satisfied customers are with your company’s products and/or services
• Response time - this is the amount of time it takes for a customer to get a response from your support team
• Sentiment - this uses machine learning to analyze social media posts to determine how people feel about your company

If you want to become a customer experience professional, then you’ll need to develop the following 7 skills if you’re to become successful:

CX professionals need to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t, but you can’t make effective improvements unless you can accurately measure whether customers are getting what they want. 

This is why data analysis is so important, and why website statistics, visitor behavior analysis, and feedback/communication tools should be central to everything you do.

Great customer experience can only be achieved if it is integral to the wider objectives of your company. 

As such, all work should take into consideration both the current effectiveness of the company in a given CX area and the goal that you’re working towards. 

Priorities do change as companies develop, and could be anything from building a customer base to focusing on customer retention, but it’s important to know where your company sits in this process and develop a CX strategy accordingly.

Since customer experience includes everything from marketing to after-sales care, it’s vital that your strategy pulls together all the different departments at your company - to ensure that everyone is working together towards a common goal, and that no work is siloed. 

For CX professionals, this means that the ability to build in-house relationships should be an important skill to have in your pocket.

It is certainly true that the ability to effectively take ownership and manage a project from planning to completion will distinguish CX professionals from others in their field. 

Success here ultimately depends on your ability to take an end goal, break it down into manageable tasks, and allocate work to the others at your company who are most capable of completing it. You can utilize documents like project proposal to outline objectives, track progress, and ensure alignment with end goals within the specified timeline.

The work of CX professionals largely revolves around responding to customer issues and complaints. 

It’s certainly good to try to resolve these as quickly as possible, but it’s important to approach this work with empathy - since this will build loyalty and drive your business forward. 

No two customers are the same; you’ll face the full spectrum of human emotions, and it’s important that you build the skills to respond to them in a way that makes them feel heard and valued.

Identifying problems and building responsive strategies are certainly important, but these skills won’t count for much if you’re unable to explain what you want effectively to those working next to you. 

And, given just how customer-centric this work is, you get an idea of how important developed communication skills are to the success of CX professionals.

Make no mistake, customer experience is an industry of constant flux, and CX professionals have to keep pace with both technological advancements and fast-changing customer expectations. To be successful, CX professionals need to keep up-to-date with these changes, and to be able to switch quickly to new channels, initiatives, emerging technologies and so forth.

Given the many potential benefits, more and more companies are prioritizing CX, and we’re now seeing a widespread trend towards hyper-personalized customer journeys. 

Hyper-personalization refers to the most highly developed way that companies can tailor their outreach to individual customers, and the importance of this for businesses will only grow as we move forward.

Omnichannel marketing refers to the provision of a seamless customer journey across multiple channels and devices. 

This is more important for business than ever before, and is seen by experts as the foundation of the strong customer relationships needed to succeed.

As the digital world grows ever more important for business success, consumer data privacy and security will increasingly dictate whether companies can attract and keep hold of customers. 

In practice, what this means is prioritizing compliance with GDPR and other global data privacy laws, by constantly monitoring and updating whatever data privacy measures you have in place.

Customer-facing functions refer to any business activity that involves direct interaction with a client or customer. 

Up until recently, customer support, chatbots, polls, and surveys - for instance - have remained largely siloed off from each other. 

However, that is fast changing, with the increasing popularity of unified tech solutions enabling companies to make huge strides in their CX strategy.