Improving the customer experience is a hot subject in corporate boardrooms as C-level executives push for new initiatives to drive revenue and increase customer loyalty. No longer can you simply create a great product or provide great customer service to be successful. And yes, while great is better than average, that doesn’t cut it in today’s world. With customer expectations only increasing, you either provide an exceptional customer experience (CX) or your competitors will.
Over the next several blog posts, we’re going to look further into CX within the contact center environment.
Defining CX
According to a Gartner survey of CX leaders, CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined. With so much influence, what exactly is customer experience and how is it defined? The answer…it depends on who you speak to. This widely-used phrase is not as clearly set in stone as you might think. Let’s look at how some thought leaders and analysts define the phrase.
Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with an organization over the life of the “relationship” with that company… and, especially, the feelings, emotions, and perceptions the customer has about those interactions. –Annette Franz, CX expert and author
How customers perceive their interactions with your company. – Forrester CX team
Customer experience considers everything the customer goes through—it’s everything the customer touches, tastes, smells, hears, sees throughout the experience with the brand. What are they going to feel or think? It’s being almost obsessive about the experience the customer has with the brand—the attitude of ‘I want to be here,’ rather than ‘I have to be here. – Blake Morgan, CX futurist, author, Forbes columnist
Customer experience is the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, system, channels or products. – Gartner
Each definition above differs but the common theme remains the same. Customer experience is the feeling a person has when they interact with your brand. Every interaction, every touchpoint, every mention shapes a customer’s view. It’s the umbrella that hangs over the customer journey. And the ability to understand it and meet customer expectations is the ultimate game-changer for businesses…which is why they continuously devote time, money and resources towards improving the CX.
While customer experience might not be clearly defined, it’s essential in the contact center world to have a solution that can listen, capture, analyze and report on customer interactions in a meaningful manner. The data should be easily accessible in real-time. However, if it’s there, why do so many miss the mark in delivering a higher CX? More to come.
If you’d like to learn more about our cloud-based contact center solution or schedule a demo, email us at ccaas@leap.tel.
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