10 Best Practices for Conducting Customer Experience Analysis

Customer experience is an important aspect of analyzing a business. Every business has the motive to grow their customer satisfaction to bring in more revenue. Without good customer experience, companies will go under loss and will eventually come close to perishing with time. Customer experience includes the experience that a customer has with both the products or services of a seller company. The increasing market competition has made it extremely crucial to always remain a step ahead when it comes to providing a good customer experience.

Conducting customer experience analysis will help gain valuable insights into the financial and competitive position of a company. Various practices help in conducting customer experience analysis. These effective ways can help greatly in making a business successful.

Key Elements of Customer Experience

Customer experience is not only about making business transactions. Customers need to derive satisfaction, a sense of trustworthiness, and positivity when they purchase a service or a product. Customer experience does not necessarily have to be positive all the time. Hence, this is also a reason why it determines the success and failure of a business. The better the customer service, the higher the revenue and growth of that company.

In general, customer experience is determined by the following key elements:

Customer preferences

It is not easy to sell either products or services without knowing what your customer prefers. If you are selling a niche product, it becomes easier to sell it to a certain group of customers. Likewise, if you don’t quite have a niche market, knowing about customer preferences still becomes important. For this, you need to conduct proper market research.

Active presence

Your business will not grow if you are not being felt by potential customers. Remaining actively present in front of them through advertisements, promotions, and branding overall will keep the customers directly or indirectly connected with your business. The active promotional presence of a company will also act as a reminder in case your customers are diverted away from your business’s presence.

Customer feedback and measurement

Only delivering your business’ products and services is not adequate to keep a positive customer experience. You need to actively take customer feedback. This will help your business grow and foster in the long run. Businesses can collect feedback through social media, online and offline surveys, etc. Measuring customer feedback can also help businesses align their products and service delivery with customer expectations.

Consistency

Businesses must be consistent in the quality of the products and services they provide. Make sure that your business is not offering a one-time purchase product. Whether it is good or not, the quality of both your business’ products and services should keep the customers interested and satisfied for a long period.

Cater to customers

Your business should not cater to any other factor than your customer. A customer-centric mindset of business owners can take their business to great heights. With smart implementation of promotion and delivery of products and services, business owners can bag a great amount of revenue by simply catering to their customers mindfully.

10 best practices for conducting customer experience analysis

Conducting customer experience analysis can determine how successful a business is going to be. The following are 10 best practices for conducting customer experience analysis:

Customer journey map

Tracking the journey of a customer through their own eyes can make it easier for business owners to conduct customer experience analysis. Besides getting an insight into one’s weaknesses and challenges, a business owner can also get an insight into the opportunities of his business during the time of journey mapping. To ensure that the customers are fully satisfied, it is just as necessary for businesses to initiate follow-up interactions with their customers. This helps businesses keep customers loyal to them for a long period.

Customer feedbacks

Businesses must never underestimate the strength of customer feedback. Implementing the suggestions and feedback to make changes in their business can help business owners grow in impressive ways. Customer feedback usually helps a company to grow positively. It is just as important for business owners to realize that customer feedback can be both positive and negative. Therefore, one should keep the aspects associated with positive feedback consistent while improving the aspects associated with negative feedback.

Customer reviews

One of the biggest mistakes that a business owner can make during customer experience analysis is that they tend to ignore customer reviews. Reviews play a big role in helping a company grow. Customer reviews, again, may consist of both positive and negative comments. A good business owner should be able to take both as either a hint to remain consistent or as constructive criticism. Besides his own business, a business owner can also check the customer reviews of the competitors for the same purpose.

Customer service metrics

Customer service metrics help businesses analyze customer satisfaction ratings, response time, and resolution rate. Using such metrics can help in identifying and addressing the issues that the customers may be having. It will also become easier for business owners to come up with a solution when they choose the right customer service metrics.

Research on online behavior

Digital transformation has made it easier for business owners to conduct customer experience analysis. Customers of a certain product or service can be found everywhere. Researching the online behavior and trends of potential customers can help businesses learn and grow not only from their own mistakes or best practices, but also from those of others. Besides consulting with your closest internal sales and customer service team, researching on the online trends of your potential customers can help determine what works in the market and what does not.

Usability tests

Almost every business has a website in the present day and time. However, not every website is user-friendly. Conducting usability tests on one’s business website can help determine how much ease a customer is having while they are using the platform. The main motive of a business website is to cater to their customers and improve their customer experience. Identifying the factors that are causing challenges among customers in using a website becomes easier with the help of usability tests.

Mystery shopping

It is not easy for business owners to find out how their employees are performing without actually becoming customers themselves. Mystery shopping refers to a business owner becoming a mysterious customer and shopping from his own business. This way, he can closely get to know how the customer interactions are going. Additionally, the owner will also be able to identify gaps and come up with solutions as to how he can fill those gaps. More often than not,

mystery shopping can be very effective in conducting customer experience analysis.

Benchmarking

There is always room for improvement for businesses regardless of how successful they might be. The industry standards in the business world are set high and they should be met to grow. Benchmarking the current customer experience against industry standards can indicate the gaps that are left to be filled by the business. When you don’t use benchmarking practices, you will most likely stick to the position that you’re in for a long time. But, when you benchmark your business’s customer experience with what is considered the standard in the industry, you’ll always find ways to become better.

Internal team discussion

While businesses need to be customer-centric, only focusing on customers while ignoring a company’s internal team (customer service executives and salespeople), there is almost no prospect of growth. Internal team discussion can help businesses realize their weak points and get a deeper insight into what customers want in more intimate conversations. Internal teams working to serve the customers directly always have a better insight into customer behavior than any other form of promotion or analysis.

Modern analytic techniques

There is almost no business in the world that has been operating in an old-fashioned manner. In the digital age, every other business has modern tools and analytic techniques to conduct customer experience analysis. You can always gain a competitive analysis against your competitors by using modern analytic techniques instead of traditional ones. You can deliver your business’s services and products uniquely and even offer customization to your customers with the help of these modern analytic techniques. Similarly, customers will be able to forecast future changes and trends with the help of predictive analytics. Such analytics also makes it easier to know the needs and demands of the customers better.

Conclusion

Customer experience analysis is mandatory in the business world. The experiences of a customer will forecast how long a business is going to stay around. Customer experience analysis helps business owners make better business decisions which will also prove to be positive for the health and longevity of their company. Conducting such analysis means initiating good experiences across every possible touchpoint. Doing this makes it easier for businesses to make a place in both the hearts and minds of the customers. Customer experience analysis tells a capable business from one that is not.

Pareshor Kharel is a customer service enthusiast and the managing director at Kantipur Management Private Limited.