If you're a marketer, you probably know exactly what it costs to acquire a customer in every channel you market to. You're probably always fine-tuning your marketing programs to minimize churn and re-activate lapsed customers. But have you ever thought about to measure how your customer experience (CX) is helping, or hurting?
It's not just placing an order or contacting customer service. CX encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand. So it's also waiting for your app to load, or trying to decipher your invoices, or even seeing your logo on a truck. If a customer experiences it, it's customer experience.
CX is how you keep, or fail to keep, the promise of your marketing. Your business can be powered by the most innovative tech, deploy the cleverest marketing, even offer the lowest prices: if customers don't walk away feeling good, it could all be for naught. CX is a company-wide effort, with every team working together to deliver the brand's vision for the customer.
And if you think CX is just about vibes, think again. Some relatively simple metrics can empirically tell you where your CX is succeeding and where it needs a rethink.
As the phases when interest turns to intent, consideration, and purchase should be frictionless, irresistible, and trustworthy. That means customers move smoothly from step to step through the experience. They're eager to move from awareness to purchase, and they re-engage soon after the initial purchase. They're confident in acting fast because the experience feels reassuring and trustworthy.
Indicators of the opposite will tell you where your CX needs tuning up. Moments in the journey when users struggle, high time-on-site without showing progress toward purchase, extensive onsite research, or customer care contacts: follow indicators like these to unearth opportunities for upgrading your CX.
What do you call sophisticated, innovative, powerful tech that nobody uses? Tech that nobody uses.
It's not just a punchline. The CX of onboarding and initial product usage often makes a decisive first impression. The first metric to track that impression is, of course, whether your customers are using the product, and how frequently. In a world where 44% of SaaS licenses go unused, many products fall at this first hurdle.
Metrics like time-to-first-action (TFA) and time-to-value (TTV) shed further light on the adoption experience. How long are those users taking to start using your product? How long before they get real value from it, using the capabilities that make the product indispensable? For a workflow management platform, for example, that might mean going beyond basic ticket tracking to automating approval queues.
You can also apply this lens to new features within the product. Even the most magical new tech is in a race against time before users give up and drift away. Make sure your CX is optimized to get them feeling the magic as quickly as possible.
Compare eating at your favorite restaurant to scarfing down something you grabbed from a convenience store. Both do the job of providing sustenance. But obviously, your relationship with that restaurant is more meaningful. You'll make a point of coming back. You'll recommend it to friends. You'll invite people along for important occasions. You're a customer in both cases, but the customer experience makes all the difference in your engagement with each business.
Engagement is more than simple retention. Are your customers continuing to have meaningful interaction with your products? Are they doing anything that drives growth or additional business value? Is your customer experience good enough to keep building and deepening that relationship? The specific metrics may vary from industry to industry, but you probably know what customer activities ladder up to greater value for your business. Make sure your CX keeps customers moving in the right direction.
A McKinsey report finds that 71% of users now expect personalized interactions. Customer experience and relevance are two sides of a virtuous cycle where each improves the other. The more a customer uses your product, the richer their data profile becomes, so the better you can use those insights to personalize your CX, and the more that customer will use your product. With a sound strategy and robust data inputs, today's customer journey orchestration (CJO) tools and platforms can deliver consistent, personalized experiences across the entire journey.
Are different customers' experiences of your product as unique as the people themselves are? How often do users have to search for what they need rather than having it served to them? You're probably already doing some personalization: are your personalized experiences delivering substantially better results than your anonymous ones? When you're happy with your answers to these questions, you're primed to benefit from the CX-data-relevance flywheel.
CX is fundamentally about technology and strategy coming together to positively influence human emotion. With our people-first approach to digital transformation, WNDYR has been living at that intersection for years. We've helped organizations of all sizes, across industries, put tech to work serving people. To dig into how customer experience can boost your marketing ROI specifically, contact our CX experts to continue the conversation.