Amplifying one’s CX is a sure-fire way to get what is essentially free marketing. Even though, in general, unhappy people shout louder than those who are content, if people have had a wonderful experience with a company, they’ll be happy to wax-lyrical about it.
Boomtown surveys showed that a quarter of customers said that they’d tell more than ten people about a positive interaction they’d had with a company, while a further 30% said they’d post on social media about the very same thing.
Relatively regularly, word of mouth is cited as the best form of advertising, and well-implemented CX is the way of cultivating just that. Whether or not it’s true that word of mouth actually works best is yet to be determined – it’s very hard to quantify how many people have come to your company because they’ve had a good review from a friend (without asking them to complete a survey, which they just won’t) – but in any case, it can’t hurt for people to like you.
So how do you implement CX in the best possible way?
First and foremost, you need to make sure that everyone in the company is on the same page when it comes to great CX. It can still work to a degree if managing the CX is the job of just a few, but it will be far more efficient and effective if everyone’s at least got one eye on it.
Having a CX culture from top-to-bottom in the company is invaluable and it’s even more important that CEOs, managers and line managers are seen working on and caring about the company’s CX.
More than that, there’s not one way to approach improving a company’s CX. It takes all sorts of methods and attitudes and angles. As mentioned, everyone needs to be fully aware of what’s happening in that regard and that’s because CX happens at every step of the customer’s journey.
Every element of finding and buying is part of the CX and even step of that, in theory, should be the job of a different person in the company. After that, once the product of service is bought, then the CX continues whether it’s a subscription model – like an Adobe product – or whether the customer returns for customer service.
Great CX doesn’t end when the customer has come in through the door and left with a shiny new thing, it continues way past then to get them to regularly return and get their friends, family, colleagues and followers to do the same.
Why’s it so important though… honestly?
People aren’t so loyal as they used to be. Not in a bad way – I’m not picking a fight with humanity here – but back in the day it would be all “the men in my family have been getting hats from Donald and Sons Hat-Making Co. for centuries and we won’t stop now!” These days it’s more of a “the Branston Beans are a quid cheaper than Heinz today. Might as well get them.”
Having a great CX is the difference between your company being the former and it being the latter… to a degree. If a customer enjoys their experience of their buying journey with you, they’re more likely to return, even if they can get a comparable product or service for cheaper elsewhere. This would also raise the likelihood in them recommending you to a friend or even posting about you online.
Meanwhile, Acquia reports that a whopping three-quarters of customers will give up on a company or brand after just one bad experience. The world isn’t particularly fair in the sense that if you do things right, most of the time it goes unnoticed whereas, if you do something wrong, then everyone finds out, but a great CX will still make sure that a quarter of prospects don’t bail on you after one experience.
So what then?
In general, it’s hard to imagine anyone would start a company without the express intention of people not at least enjoying dealing with them to some extent so actually making the step to working on an admirable CX shouldn’t be so much of a chore; it’s more about making sure everyone in the company is on the same page about what needs to be achieved and how to do that.
Of course this wouldn’t be a martech article if I didn’t say that of all of the over 8000 martech solutions out there, there’s going to a be a few that could help you on your journey, so you don’t need to do this completely blind.