What is customer experience? Find out what it is and why it matters!

Customer experience is a feeling. A feeling that represents how you, as a customer, actually feel as a customer. Has the organization where you purchase a product or service done its best to make it all as pleasant as possible for you. Is your experience (perception) positive or does it even exceed your expectations? Good chance you will buy something more often.

Why is customer experience important

In addition to the question, What is customer experience? the question, of course, is why customer experience is important. Customer experience is important because it represents how an organization meets a customer's expectations. In the best case, expectations are not only met but exceeded. In addition to all the distinguishing features of products or services, the customer experience often proves to be an important reason to become or remain a customer somewhere. Customer experience stands for an experience, a feeling. Working in a customer-focused way and thus aligning your business processes with the needs of your customer is an important aspect in the experience customers have. Customer service is an important part of how a customer experiences service. Sometimes outsourcing customer service has great benefits. In many cases, this can easily and quickly improve the customer experience.

How do you do it? Improve the customer experience?

To optimize customer experience, it is important to first identify your customers' wants and needs. In order to exceed expectations, you will always need to know the expectations first. Therefore, we always recommend identifying these expectations with your customers. Look from the outside in and simply ask you customer what they expect from you as a supplier. That often works very enlightening and gives a very clear direction to the improvement process. Then you will align internal business processes with the needs or experience of your customer. In this way, you are constantly working to improve that experience by taking a critical look at your own performance and asking your customers to do the same.

What is customer experience poorly executed?

There are lots of examples of non-optimized customer experience. Examples of companies that have designed processes with an internal approach and thus not from the customer perspective. Think of a webshop that does not have a phone number. Think of a return process in which you have to print out a return form yourself. Think of a delivery time that is much longer than indicated. All examples of processes that may be logical from the organization's point of view. The customer is irritated by this and will order next time at a webshop that is accessible. Poor customer experience is a negative distinguishing factor in the long run.

The importance of customer contact at customer experience

What is customer experience without good personal contact moments? A good customer experience depends on the quality of the contact moments. Customers who call with questions, email with a complaint or potential customers who have questions about the ordering process. These are the moments when you, as a customer-oriented organization, must excel; this is where you make the difference. To ensure that customers do not have to call you unnecessarily, you must ensure that your business processes are optimized on an ongoing basis. Continuously ask your customers how they experienced certain things and see what could be improved. Improving customer experience is not a project, it is an ongoing process where your customer's needs are at the center of everything you do. Read our blog on customer service as a marketing tool here. So herewith the answer to the question: what is customer experience? On wikipedia there is also a nice piece on customer journey. You can read that here

Tips to improve customer experience and reduce costs? You can read them here!