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Customer Experience (CX): What is it?

The term “customer experience” (CX) describes how consumers view their encounters with a brand at different points in time during their journey. Every engagement a customer has with a brand, whether it be through social media, chat with a bot, or just using a website, influences how they perceive it.

52% of consumers will go to a rival after just one bad encounter, according to Zendesk, underscoring the significance of putting customer experience first. Strong client loyalty and excellent ratings might result from a satisfying encounter.

This article explores what CX is and offers useful tactics to help your company differentiate itself from rivals by emphasizing:

  • What is customer experience?
  • What is a customer experience pyramid?
  • What is customer experience management?
  • What impact does CX have on performance?
  • What does a CX Manager do?

What is customer experience (CX)?

Putting the customer at the center of everything is the essence of customer experience, or CX. It entails paying close attention to how a consumer engages with a brand at each touchpoint.

Every interaction a consumer has with a product, service, website, or communication is included in CX. Businesses must sincerely care about their clients and work to provide them with the finest service possible.

It’s crucial to first ascertain what clients actually desire in order to deliver an outstanding CX. You can gain a deeper understanding of your consumers’ characteristics, interests, and difficulties by developing explicit buyer personas.

With CX at its center, the graphic below shows the intersection of business, brand, and customer experience.

Businesses who are excellent at CX:

  • Make their clients happy
  • Establish a sentimental bond with their audience
  • Make people devoted supporters and advocates

What is a CX pyramid?

Once an organization understands its customers’ needs, the next step is to focus on fulfilling those needs.

A useful tool to guide this process is the CX Pyramid, which is built upon three key steps:

Utility: The Utility phase, which is at the base of the pyramid, is concerned with providing prompt, comprehensive, consistent, and valued customer service.

Usability: The Usability step is located in the center of the pyramid. By lowering friction and enhancing interactivity, the company makes its services easier to use and more accessible.

Pleasurable: The company can go to the top of the pyramid—creating experiences that are enjoyable and assessing the emotional impact of consumer interactions—after laying the groundwork with the first two phases.

A common mistake made by organizations is to put the enjoyable step at the top first, without first making sure that a strong utilitarian basis is in place. Establishing solid, dependable customer service is crucial before trying to improve the entire experience.

What is customer experience management?

Whether intentional or not, every organization has an impact on the customer experience (CX).

There aren’t any strict guidelines for what you have to do. It’s about realizing that in order to provide an exceptional experience, a number of procedures, instruments, and duties must cooperate.

Businesses that excel at customer experience know that managing customer experience (CX) is a continuous process and more of an organizational attitude than the responsibility of a select few employees.

CX management entails:

  • Controlling the expectations of customers
  • Adopting a constant CX perspective
  • Increasing awareness of a brand or product
  • Guarding against the race to the bottom or shrinking margins
  • Increasing client loyalty and retention

Rival Components
When considering the entire client experience, a number of aspects are involved:

  • What are the top business aims for your company, such as boosting sales or conversions?
  • What makes your company unique, what makes it stand out from the competition, and how does it operate differently?
  • How can you minimize friction while meeting the functional and emotional needs of your customers?

Despite their apparent simplicity, these factors frequently cause conflict with one another. For instance, your business objectives may not always coincide with what your customers desire, and occasionally they may even be at odds.

Finding the ideal balance between these three components is the responsibility of customer experience management.

What impact does CX have on performance?

Because customer experience involves so many moving components, from sales to service, it can occasionally appear hard to quantify.

According to Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index research, CX quality for US firms fell to an all-time low in 2024, the third consecutive year of decline.

Underwhelming digital interactions (such those utilizing chatbots), consumers’ growing anxieties about their financial circumstances, and organizations’ inability to deliver seamless experiences for both customers and staff are the main causes of this downturn.

The clear connection between customer experience (CX) and financial performance is among the strongest arguments for businesses to prioritize CX.

Compared to brands that don’t prioritize it, those who do well in CX typically enjoy higher revenue and shareholder returns. Measuring customer experience (CX) within your company, comparing it to competitors, and pinpointing areas where performance is deficient are therefore crucial.

What does a CX manager do?

Some companies might be curious about the duties involved in customer experience (CX) and who should be in charge of it.

Digital marketers are frequently in the greatest position to assume the role of CX Manager and advocate for the customer experience throughout the company, given the significance of digital channels in the customer journey.

Although it is everyone’s duty to provide outstanding customer service, many team members may not understand their own responsibilities or the significance of their work.

The job of a CX Manager is essential to making sure that the firm as a whole prioritizes the customer experience. Among their primary duties are:

Before starting any CX transformation, the brand should assess how it now provides the customer experience, including the tools and technologies it utilizes.

evaluating the company’s digital maturity in order to establish reasonable objectives based on its ability to satisfy client demands.

serving as the client’s voice and making sure that their opinions are taken into consideration while making decisions at all corporate levels.

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