Customer experience may be defined as the cumulative impact of all the touch points a customer goes through while in contact with your company. The aggregate of such interactions forms the basis for the preferences and loyalty of each individual customer. The willingness to become brand advocates is also at stake.
Altogether 89% of marketing professionals expect that by 2017 customer experience will be the primary differentiator for their company.
Nevertheless, a majority of companies are unable to generate memorable experiences for their customers, according to the business2community.com website.
Customer experience: expectation and reality vary
Securing outstanding customer experience for a customer base that is ever-changing is obviously not easy. At the same time, customers are usually already using several channels in order to do their shopping. They want to have an abundance of choice and across all the channels they seek a consistent, yet differentiated, experience.
You need to start with the basics: how is customer experience defined in your company and is the definition correct?
If you get it right, you will see that there are quite a few tools necessary in order to approach, design and manage customer experience with all its parts.
Customer experience is not the same thing as customer service. The scope of customer experience goes far beyond customer service (which consists of such transactional events when workers are actually providing a direct service to the customer). The practical steps to take in this regard will be described in the second part of the article.
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