Customer Experience: What It Is and How to Improve It

Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset and a lot of careful work. This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to measure it, how to improve it, and more. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to deliver an exceptional experience for your customers.

Summary

• Customer experience (CX) is a term that describes your customers’ overall perception of their interactions with you. It goes beyond customer service to encompass all touchpoints along the customer journey.

• If you want to reap the benefits of increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, and engagement, you’ll want to focus your efforts on improving your CX.

• Your customers know better than anyone what a good CX and a bad CX is: make sure whatever strategy you use to deliver an outstanding CX incorporates customer feedback, and learn how to effectively measure and analyze CX data gathered using metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) or Net Promoter Score®.

• Discover 7 more ways to understand and improve CX, including Journey Analysis, Session Replays, and A/B testing.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. It’s the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you.

Every customer-facing thing you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not. Whether it’s providing responsive real-time support or maintaining seamless omnichannel experiences and messaging, a great customer experience is your key to success.

Customer experience vs. customer service

Customer experience is broader than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer has with your company, from the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your support team to ask for help with your product (and, hopefully, get a prompt response).

Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the end-to-end experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help. For example, calling a contact center operator to request a refund, getting support from a self-service chatbot, or interacting via email with a service provider.

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

Why is CX important?

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

• Increased customer loyalty

• Enhanced customer satisfaction

• Improved customer engagement

• Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

Delivering a great customer experience is important for any business. As a better experience gives way to more loyal customers and positive reviews, while simultaneously reducing customer complaints and returns. Moreover, providing a great customer experience gives you a competitive advantage over businesses that maybe aren’t doing so hot with their own CX.

All business models can benefit from improving customer experience:

• Subscription businesses can increase customer retention and reduce customer churn rates

• Ecommerce marketplaces can facilitate purchase decisions, increase repeat customers, and reduce returns

• Service industries can elevate customer interactions, gain recommendations, and reduce complaints.

In fact, we challenge you to think up a type of business that doesn't benefit from providing a positive customer experience.

What makes a good customer experience?

There’s no universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience—your business is unique and so are your customers. However, we've found a number of common principles. In short, good customer experience can be achieved when you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority

• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers

• Implement a system to help you regularly collect, analyze, and act on feedback

• Reduce friction and solve your customers' specific problems and unique challenges

It's not rocket science: a good customer experience comes from asking your customers questions, listening to their responses, and acting on their feedback.

What makes a bad customer experience?

Bad customer experience is primarily caused by:

1. Long wait times

2. Employees who don’t understand customer needs

3. Unresolved issues/questions

4. Too much automation/not enough of a human touch

5. Service that doesn’t provide a personalized experience

6. Rude/angry employees

If you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer—it's quite likely that one (or more) of the above was the cause.

Ultimately, though, what counts as a poor customer experience in your business will be unique. And you'll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback.

→ Check out CX stats and trends or learn more about improving your CX strategy

Why you should use customer feedback as part of your CX strategy

You may know some theory behind what makes good and bad CX, but for it to make an impact on your business, you need to have a reliable method of collecting insight from your customers so you can take action and make impactful changes.

Customer feedback is information you collect from your customers about their experience with your product, service, website, or business as a whole. You can use this feedback to improve customer experience by removing or reducing areas of friction, cultivating positive touchpoints, and creating pleasant in-store or digital customer experiences.

You're probably already collecting customer feedback without realizing it: when a customer sends an email, calls your support team, or leaves a review on social media, that's feedback. But if you don’t measure and analyze that feedback and other valuable voice of customer data, you're missing out on the opportunity to use it to improve customer experience and leverage its growth potential.

→ Read more about the CX surveys you can run to collect feedback from your customers

How to measure and analyze customer experience

From what we've described so far, customer experience might sound like a subjective concept that's difficult to measure. That's why you need to rely on a number of different customer experience metrics that can be used individually or together to get an indication of CX in your business. You can also get more detailed feedback on customers’ expectations by engaging them in interviews—and Hotjar by Contentsquare can connect you with customers for one-on-one interviews.

By having a measurable indicator of CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use customer behavior analytics to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might affect your customers.

Here are five top metrics used by customer experience management (CXM) professionals and customer relationship management (CRM) teams to track and measure customer experience over time, at different points along the entire customer journey:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

• Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

• Time to Resolution (TTR)

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score measures the experience with a product or service in terms of how ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ it is for your customers to complete an action.

CES surveys are usually sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as "How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?" and a rating scale going from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’.

These surveys also work well after customers reach important milestones in their journey, particularly the customer activation moments when a customer actively engages with your product or service (for example, after they sign up for a free product trial or successfully conclude a transaction).

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s CES survey template (available within Voice of Customer) to discover how hard or easy to use your site or product is. Or run exit-intent surveys to get to the heart of user values and discover why people leave your site.

Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score® is a customer loyalty score derived from asking customers a simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”

You can choose to adapt the question slightly to better suit your business and use a follow-up NPS question to get more insight, but the point of NPS is to get a simple numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience or brand loyalty.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

💡Pro tip: use our NPS survey to gauge your customers’ loyalty.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They can be expressed with a 5- or 7-point scale (with ‘1: very unsatisfied’ and ‘7: very satisfied’), or through binary ‘yes/no’ questions.

Unlike the Net Promoter Score®, which asks customers to consider their overall feeling towards the brand (and thus, their likelihood of recommending it or not), CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on specific touchpoints they were satisfied or dissatisfied with.

Taken in context with CES and NPS, customer satisfaction is a meaningful indicator of whether your customers are cultivating a pleasant emotional connection with your business—what product teams like to call customer delight.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare has a CSAT survey template to measure how satisfied your users are with your site, product, or service.

Time to Resolution (TTR)

TTR is the average length of time it takes customer service teams to resolve an issue or ticket after it’s been opened by a customer. It can be measured in days or business hours, and is calculated by adding up all times to resolution and dividing the result by the number of cases solved.

And the shorter your TTR, the higher the chances your customers won’t experience frustration when they reach out for help.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s TTR survey template to evaluate the effectiveness and perception of your support.

Customer experience example using NPS

Here’s a practical example of what tracking a CX metric and acting on the insight can do for customer experience.

One of our customers, jewelry ecommerce Taylor & Hart, specializes in bespoke engagement rings—not the kind of product people usually think about buying online, and also not the kind of product customers typically buy more than one of.

The company’s goal was to turn reluctant visitors into one-time buyers, and one-time buyers into lifelong promoters who would recommend the same service to their family and friends.

After choosing Net Promoter Score® as their primary CX metric, Taylor & Hart identified two essential customer touchpoints and set up NPS surveys at each milestone:

1. The moment a customer places an order

2. The moment the customer receives their order

The resulting NPS numbers were kept visible on metrics dashboards in the office, and everyone's focus was on improving the scores. It wasn't an easy feat, but the team used each piece of negative feedback to fix parts of their business, from manufacturing to shipping methods, to give customers the best experience they could (if you're curious about the logistics, you can read a full write-up of this NPS case study).

With a focus on providing a better customer experience, Taylor & Hart grew their NPS score to over 80 (the highest in their industry). Annual revenue followed suit and doubled to €4.5M.

7 ways to understand and improve customer experience

Learn about how Contentsquare’s all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform can enhance your understanding of customers:

1. Identify high-drop off pages

Use Journey Analysis to identify unusually high churn rates in your most important flows, and watch Session Replays of users who didn’t make it to the next step. Uncover the pain points in their user journey and improve their website experience.

2. Discover how users engage with your page

Zone-based heatmaps help you understand how users click, scroll, and move on a page. With zoning analysis, see which areas of your page users most interact with. If you notice some rage clicks on a non-clickable element, improve user experience by making it clickable, or revisit your page’s design.

3. Watch session replays of frustrated users

Filter Session Replays by frustration and intent-driven behavior to dive into sessions where users rage clicked, u-turned, or generally had a bad time on your site. Filter by errors to review sessions in which users encountered a JavaScript error.

4. Gather in-the-moment feedback

Floating or embedded widgets let you collect feedback from users as they experience your site. Discover how they feel when running into blockers or interacting with something they love on your site, then review their feedback to spot pain points and ‘aha moments’.

5. Interview users for nuanced feedback

When written feedback from users leaves you wanting more, give Hotjar by Contentsquare’s Engage a spin to get to the bottom of why users love their experience with your business (or why they don’t love it). Gather insights on how they would improve their experience so you can better meet their needs by implementing user-led changes.

6. Test changes made to improve CX

Speaking of changes, of course you’ll want to know what CX updates to make, and how each one performs, based on all the user feedback you collect. Contentsquare integrations make it easy to act on that digital experience feedback: conduct effortless A/B testing with Optimizely or Omniconvert, then filter your session recordings and user feedback by experiment to understand how users interact with different versions of your site.

7. Share findings with your team

Last but not least, spread the word: you’ll be sitting alone on a mountain of information unless you clue in your team. Share live CX insights and use them to collaborate on initiatives by integrating Contentsquare directly with Slack or Microsoft Teams.