Let’s dive in.
CX starts with a promise. Your brand promise.
Your brand promise unites your internal team on how you build trust and purpose to your audience and announces to both strangers and customers your intention. The muscle behind your brand promise being fulfilled is your CX strategy.
It gives your brand promise credibility. It helps you differentiate (for real). It makes your promise more than words.
Internally, CX is a set of customer-centric processes to ensure your brand promise is kept over and over again no matter when, how, why or with whom interactions happen.
This requires a RevOps mindset to map your teams’ and your Buyer’s Journey and Customer’s Journey to engineer overall processes that dazzle.
Externally, CX manifests as the holistic perception of your brand and the delivery of your brand promise.
It’s a feeling people have when they first interact with your brand and the way you reinforce that feeling with each interaction after. From strangers to advocates and everyone in between (yes, even those you may have lost in the sales process), the people you engage with and their impression of your brand define your customer experience.
Customer experience interactions can present in a variety of ways:
While customer perception of your brand has always existed, the philosophy of CX is more prevalent now because brands have the tools and the need to be more intentional about their actions that contribute to their customer experience.
“Customer experience” isn’t just a new name for Customer Service.
Customer service is the support you give post-sale to current customers, whereas CX includes the support you give during pre-purchase (marketing), sales, and post-sale.
User experience looks at a single product and how it helps the user achieve a specific goal or complete a task
Example of UX: Apple delivering on their brand promise in-product with AirPods that pair with multiple devices but connect to the device you are currently using OR Apple’s copy/paste functionality, photo sync, and texting between iPad, iPhone, and iMac
Customer experience uncovers opportunities to delight customers and exceed expectations for their every interaction with your brand as it aligns to your company goals.
Example of CX: Apple delivering best-in-class experiences for purchasing devices, accessories, and services online through guided device setup through the Tips app on your device and hands-on skills labs at the Apple Store.
Customer experience is the overall feeling or impression your brand (not just one page or app or product) delivers to potential and existing customers. This feeling or impression is not singular, but rather collective over their entire customer journey with your brand.
Customer experience can drive brand loyalty and advocacy both positively and negatively. By consistently delivering a positive CX, a brand is more likely to exceed business goals and increase recurring revenue because customers and employees are happy, excited, and fulfilled.
According to a 2022 report from Emplifii, “Nearly half of UK consumers and more than half of US consumers left a brand to which they were previously loyal, due to bad CX.”
Not only that but customer experience is motivating and fulfilling for all the people involved (more on that in a bit).
This is where our perspective (as directors of the customer strategy team and sales and marketing team for our own company) may differ from other CX ideas floating around out there.
We believe your key stakeholders in your customer experience and perception of your brand are:
When building experiences and the processes, messaging, documentation, education, and more that powers these experiences, being customer-centric and providing the right amount of information and friction at the right times is critical.
But there is another side to that coin — your employees. After all, your employees are not just brand ambassadors but are customers of your brand. You provide them with the tools and procedures that build their experience working at your company to provide the interactions you lay out in your CX strategy.
Customer experience is not just about how people feel when interacting with your brand, but also about how your people are able to deliver those interactions.
Furthermore, studies have shown a strong and steady relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
Who are the people that create and deliver brand promises?
That’s you — and your marketing leaders and their teams + sales leaders and their teams + product/development leaders/teams + operations/customer success leaders/teams.
You need all of these people working together to create a unified experience that delights.
In your customer experience strategy you can’t control what people think or say but you can control how you engage, interact, and communicate.
Document and plan your:
You can be intentional:
Documenting and planning for your customer’s journey and how you want to provide a specific experience gives you a detailed road map to follow even when you don’t meet customer expectations.
You can’t always assume a customer will have a good experience even if these teams deliver their best.
Mistakes happen. Expectations on both sides can sometimes be misaligned. Certain circumstances can simply be beyond our control.
You can however turn the CX around by having processes established to counteract any negative experiences a customer might have.
CX planning means being proactive vs reactive.
For an organization to become a customer-centric and CX-focused company, it must start with auditing its existing CX landscape — think customer satisfaction (CSAT) and employee feedback (especially from sales and CSMs).
Once the gaps and opportunities are defined, establish goals to work towards and ultimately a form of ongoing measurement.
Our latest special project is a notebook designed to help you do just that. Your CX planning and eval notebook will help you connect your brand promise, your buyer’s and customer journey, your tech stack, and more.