In the competitive world of today, businesses must compete to attract and maintain their customer base. Customer experience performance matters and businesses are becoming aware of just how much it matters, and so starting to do something about it.
Businesses are particularly starting to focus on the digital experience they are providing to their customers and measuring how this experience is impacting the company’s overall business success.
Actual and Perceived Customer Experience
There are two aspects here – the customer’s actual experience and their perceived experience. The customer’s click or swipe that results in a digital transaction is the perceived experience. However, this click or swipe sets off a cascading digital trail. This is the customer’s actual experience and it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to merge these two aspects to create comprehensive experience performance.
Businesses need to combine the information regarding the number of pages a customer visits, cart abandonment and online trends together with efficiency, load time and system health in order to create a bigger picture.
Measuring Customer Experience Performance
To understand the complete customer experience, businesses need to develop ways of processing that experience performance. Businesses need to begin by measuring the effectiveness of the customers’ experiences and then measure how this experience impacts the business’s financial performance.
It is important for all aspects of the business – development, IT operations, marketing, customer analytics and social media – to use the same data set, rather than each aspect having their own separate set of data. The same set of data can be explored from different angles, depending on the focus of that aspect of the business, but they should all have access to common data to provide an experience performance service of the highest quality possible.
Collaboration of Business Divisions
Using a single tool to produce data that all aspects of the business have access to, means that different aspects of the business can begin to collaborate with each other and work towards the same goals. The customer experience can be optimised in real time as issues arise. This can result in personalised customer service, real-time insights into the customer’s digital experience, improved business decisions and the strengthening of brands.
For many businesses, a focus on experience represents a shift in mindset that changes the culture of the business. The executive level of the business must be on board to drive these changes as businesses can no longer move forward in the digital age with a fractured view of their customers and their experiences.
Experience Performance and Business Revenue
More and more businesses are seeing a direct correlation between their customers’ digital experience and the revenue of the business, together with a decrease in the cost of customer support and improved efficiency of the IT department.
Customer experience is becoming not only one business measure to take into account, but a yardstick for measuring the success of a business. In other words, to be a successful business in today’s world, companies are starting to equate a positive digital performance with improved business performance.