What Is Customer Experience (CX)?

The customer experience (CX) is the customer's holistic perception of their experience with your business.

It refers to how a brand or business engages with its customers throughout their buying journey — from marketing to sales and customer service.

In large part, it is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business. It could be from navigating your website to receiving the product they bought and engaging with you on social media.

At every touchpoint, you can impact your customer's perception and influence their decision to come back or not. In other words, CX defines the success of your business.

Why Customer Experience (CX) Matters?

With increased competition, customers differentiate based on the experience they had with your company rather than comparing specific products or features.

The better the customer experience you offer, the more repeat customers you will receive.

Customers want brands to make them feel special and valued, and they prefer to buy from businesses they trust. This is why CX is critical for any company.

Some of the key benefits of offering a superior customer experience:

• Increase in custom loyalty fan base
• Better word-of-mouth marketing and positive reviews
• Increase in customer satisfaction
• Reduction in customer churn rate

How to Measure Customer Experience (CX)

CX is a subjective concept that relies on certain metrics that indicate customer experience in your business. It is the process of surveying customers to collect data on their satisfaction level across various touchpoints.

This data is then analyzed to arrive at a conclusion — understanding the CX across multiple channels, departments, product usage, and more. These data-driven insights help businesses further enhance their customer experience.

Customer experience is measured using three different ways:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a customer loyalty score that is derived from asking customers a simple question:

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or company to a friend?"

These scores are then categorized to understand how happy customers are with your company.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The CSAT score survey measures the satisfaction level with the product or service they receive from you. The survey asks a simple question:

'On a scale of 1 to 7, how satisfied were you with your experience with us today?' (of which one indicates the lowest satisfaction and seven the highest).

Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey

The CES survey asks — 'How easy was it for you to solve your problem with us today?'

It measures the customer's experience with a product or service in terms of how 'difficult' or 'easy' it was for them to complete an action.

There are five responses to that question: Very easy, Easy, Neutral, Difficult, Very Difficult.

How to Improve Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is dynamic and requires constant improvement. Here are some practices to be followed to continue providing excellent CX:

• Have clearly defined CX goals that are measurable.
• Integrate all your front and back office systems to provide a seamless experience to your customers.
• Collect both customer and employee feedback and data and analyze them to understand what needs to change.
• Implement digital tools like marketing automation or CRM to be able to track every customer's buying journey.
• Create a customer-centric culture to make your customers feel valued and engaged.