With a global economic turmoil taking a toll on growth worldwide, whether in emerging or advanced economies, the corporate sector is tipped to boost customer experience to improve business results and maintain profitability.
For starters, customer experience, or CX, has become a pillar of long-term strategy and planning. The term is now deemed to be the core of business culture worldwide.
For producers, CX refers to what a customer thinks about the product’s sale experience and post-sale stage, i.e. maintenance and post-sale service. For service providers, it would be if a customer is happy with it or not. Furthermore, would this customer use the service again or go to another provider.
In fact, CX is not controlled by producers or service providers. However, an organisation can measure, and even influence it. CX is defined by the customers and their own journey. Such a journey may be measured by their loyalty to a certain product or service.
For instance, if a customer is pleased with food, service and atmosphere at a certain restaurant, he or she would repeat this good experience and even would recommend it. Here we dare say that a positive CX is fundamental to the success of a business in the long term.
How to measure CX?
First of all, there should be a customer journey map, which lays out the stages customers go through when interacting with an organisation, i.e. from learning about the products to purchasing and accessing customer service.
An efficient CX management is definitely customer-centric 24/7. Organisations use CX metrics to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. These metrics include five categories: Customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer loyalty, advocacy, quality and employee engagement.
CSAT includes a wide range of measures such as survey questions and product reviews. As for loyalty, there are a number of ways to measure whether a customer will remain loyal like purchase frequency and order size.
As for advocacy, there are ways such as price sensitivity, sentiment scores on social media, and, of course, trust ratings. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures if customers will recommend a certain product or service to their family and friends in light of their experience.
Profitability
It goes without saying that CX is crucial for boosting an organisation’s profitability. A good balance sheet is a sum of high-quality products, services and CX.
For small enterprises, CX is the foundation of survival and achieving any possible growth. For well-established corporate giants, CX is inevitable to ensure stability and advancement.
Higher sales reflect customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is by itself evidence of a positive CX.
Good management is reflected in a positive CX. The Covid-19 pandemic and emanating supply chain crisis posed serious challenges for businesses all over the globe.
By all means, CX plays a key role in business success stories, and vice versa, a negative CX denotes mismanagement and ill-advised responses to market conditions that might lead to the inevitable: closure and liquidation.
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