Learn about customer experience and why it's so important to the success of your business.
Written by: Rami El-AbidinOutline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.
There aren’t many genuinely unique products in today’s market. No matter what you’re looking to buy, likely multiple companies are offering the same thing at similar prices.
In a world with many options, customer experience is often the deciding factor. Personally, I’d rather give my business to a company that offers a top-notch customer experience, and I’d probably be willing to pay a little extra for it, too.
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Customer service and customer experience are not the same thing. However, they are related. Customer service is a narrower term for helping customers solve problems and better use your products. Meanwhile, customer experience is an umbrella term that encapsulates every interaction a customer has with your brand throughout their customer journey.
In a HubSpot survey, we asked over 1,500 companies about their top challenges when crafting the customer experience. Top responses included:
What do these data show? These responses make it clear that aligning with customer needs is the main challenge and key to customer success.
A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.
Today, customers have the power. Thanks to the internet, customers have the necessary resources to educate themselves when choosing from various product options.
This is why providing a remarkable experience is important.
With so many options, I only want to do business with companies that provide a top-tier customer experience. So, how can you measure your customer experience to determine what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement?
Using customer satisfaction surveys (which you can easily create in HubSpotor one of the integrated tools like Survicate) regularly — and after meaningful moments throughout the customer journey — provides insight into your customer’s experiences with your brand, product, or service.
In our 2024 State of Service Survey, the majority of respondents from companies across the world indicated their intention to increase their investment in collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
Analyzing customer feedback remains one of the most straightforward ways to understand customer needs and craft a great CX. So, it is no surprise that most companies plan to continue investing in the process.
A great way to measure customer experience is by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measures how likely your customers are to promote you to their friends, family, and colleagues based on their experiences with your company.
When measuring NPS, consider data in aggregate across teams. Since multiple teams impact your overall customer experience, you’ll need a clear picture of performance — and that comes from numerous data points.
For example, what is the NPS for in-product usage? For customer service teams across communication channels (phone, email, chat, etc.)? For sales? For attending a marketing webinar? And so on.
Analyzing NPS from multiple touchpoints across the customer journey will tell you what you need to improve and where you’re already providing an excellent experience while showing customers you listen and care about what they have to say.
With your NPS score, dive into your team-by-team performance to ensure you perform well across the board. Also, you may follow up on customer feedback — whether positive or negative — to connect with customers, deepen your relationship with them, and improve your retention and loyalty.
20% of companies in our State of Service 2024 survey identified preventing churn and boosting retention as a challenge when creating a great customer experience.
Churn happens — it’s part of doing business. But you must learn from churn to prevent it from happening again.
Ensure you’re doing regular analysis of your churned customers so you can determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing, the reasons for churn, and actions your team may take in the future to prevent a similar situation.
Creating a great customer experience is all about giving customers what they need. One of the best ways to figure out what their needs are is to ask them!
Create a forum for your customers to request new products or features to make your offerings more valuable and helpful for the problems they’re trying to solve. Whether that forum is shared via email, social media, or a community page, allow customers to offer suggestions proactively.
While you might not implement all the suggestions you receive, it’s worth looking into recurring trends or requests that pop up.
You should also analyze the customer support tickets your support reps are working to resolve every day. If there are recurring issues among tickets, review possible reasons for those hiccups and how you can provide solutions across the board.
Doing so allows you to decrease the total number of tickets reps receive while providing customers with a streamlined and enjoyable experience.
We asked over 1,500 companies what they felt was their most effective customer service channel, and results pointed to AI chatbots (15%) followed by online chat with a human rep (14%), which I think is telling. Not only is chat-based support quick and easy for customers, but the analysis of the data is much simpler on the company end.
Customer experience management (CXM) is the process of surveying, analyzing, and enhancing customer interactions with your business. CXM monitors customer touch points and evaluates how you can improve the experience related to each.
Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.
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Click this link to access this resource at any time.
While these examples give us a good idea for creating a positive customer experience, they’re focused on more traditional, brick-and-mortar businesses. If you’re running a SaaS company, you’ll need to consider a few additional factors during your analysis.
Let’s review those components in the section below.
Online or digital customer experience management refers to the experience your business creates online or through a mobile app.
As more businesses take their companies online, building relationships through digital channels is becoming increasingly important. Companies that don’t have brick-and-mortar locations need to rethink touch points in their customer journeys to build brand loyalty.
If you’re a SaaS company or launching a website or app, here are a few details to remember when considering the customer experience.
We asked 701 consumers which device they most often used when searching online. Results are as follows, organized by age.
The data show that people overwhelmingly use their smartphones to search, so a mobile-optimized website should be a top priority.
If you’re online, you’re accessible via a smart device, which means customers can find your company anywhere there’s cellular or Wi-fi service. The experience these customers have should be nearly identical to those using standard desktop devices.
This means your website should have a comprehensive, well-working app. If it doesn’t, your site should be responsive and user-friendly cross-device. There’s nothing more disappointing than a company with a fantastic desktop website, but it’s cut off and unresponsive on mobile.
Additionally, your app or mobile site should be as effective as your desktop version. You should be able to accomplish the same amount of tasks using either a mobile or a traditional device.
Don’t sacrifice features for your team’s convenience. Instead, put in the extra effort and resources — customers will genuinely value an omnichannel experience.
It doesn’t matter how effective your product or service is if your customers can’t navigate their way around it. Websites and apps should be intuitive, making it clear to the user which steps to take to achieve their goals.
Your team can create a user-friendly design by running usability tests on your website or app. Usability testing evaluates how easy it is to operate your product or service. By running these tests before production, you can create a website design that’s easy to use and ensures every customer can achieve their goals.
For some companies, customers need to be taught how to use their website or app. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and many SaaS businesses provide onboarding to users who aren’t familiar with their products or services.
Onboarding is the process of teaching new customers how to use your product or service. A representative from the company’s customer success team works with the user to ensure they understand the value and purpose of their purchase. This way, customers don’t have to go through a time-consuming learning curve and can get value from your business immediately.
Whether or not you’re a SaaS company, it can be difficult to improve upon your customer experience. That’s because you must make changes across multiple departments and ensure every employee is on the same page. This is where software can simplify the process for your team.
There are plenty of tools available that can monitor and analyze customer experience. Let’s review a few options.
1. Understand your customers. I’ve found no substitute for putting yourself in the customer's shoes. To create a great customer experience, you need to experience what it's like to be a customer. That can mean many different things depending on your company, but when I worked at HubSpot Support, it meant knowing the product inside and out and using it myself.
I used my HubSpot portal to host my blog and as a CRM when booking shows for my band. Using the product myself gave me a unique insight into the customer perspective that I don’t think is possible to understand otherwise. In doing so, I could foster great customer experiences through a shared understanding of customer needs and goals.
2. Optimize your website. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as a slow or poorly designed website. Ensure your website is aesthetically pleasing, fast, and designed with the customer in mind.
You want to make it as seamless as possible for customers to access their accounts and locate relevant information. When you execute your website correctly, no one will notice. But that’s what you want. When the UX is optimized, everything will be where the customer expects it, which makes for an effortless customer experience.
3. Listen and engage via social media. Social media is often where customers go to voice concerns, delights, and desires regarding their products and services. You’ll miss valuable insights that can improve your customer experience if you don't listen. When I worked in HubSpot Support, we used social listening software to monitor HubSpot mentions and offer customer support across social channels.
In my experience, monitoring and engaging with customers via social media is crucial to understanding their needs, which is the cornerstone of customer experience.
When creating content for social media, it's essential to ensure that it is both high quality and authentic. Customers know when they are being sold something, and they can tell if your brand truly cares about solving their problems and meeting their needs. Check out the chart below to see how different age groups prioritize quality versus authenticity in content.
4. Anticipate customer needs. As customers progress through their lifecycle with your company, their needs will change. If you pay close attention, you can identify these changing needs before your customers realize them. Keeping regular contact with your customers lets you keep a pulse on their journey with you as a customer.
As a customer service representative, I found that customers appreciated it when I identified their needs/challenges and suggested new features to optimize their workflow. So, if you notice a way to help customers as they grow and their needs change, let them know.
5. Clear communication. The ability to communicate technical details in a way that anyone can understand is a cornerstone skill for customer success. As a technical support representative at HubSpot, I worked with many customers, from the savviest IT professionals to the least technically concerned mom-and-pop small business owners.
What do these groups of people have in common? They just want everything to work.
The key is understanding your customers and communicating clearly on a level they expect and understand. Clear communication doesn’t just mean simplifying your explanation as much as possible (although sometimes it does). Instead, you must have a comprehensive enough grasp of your products and services to level with anyone.
6. Honest communication. You know what they say – honesty is the best policy. Being honest and authentic with your customers is a recipe for customer success.
No one wants to feel like they are being given the runaround. Let’s say your product is experiencing a service disruption, or maybe a shipment got lost in the mail. These things happen. Be upfront instead of burying your head in the sand and ignoring customer complaints.
Let your customers know exactly what has gone wrong and the steps you are taking to address it. Sure, issues like these are frustrating for everyone. Still, customers will feel valued and respected if you can level with them honestly, which is necessary for long-term customer success.
7. Respond promptly. In my experience, responding to customers as quickly as possible bolsters customer success. It makes customers feel like their time is valued and their concerns are being addressed seriously.
However, if you’ve worked in customer support like me, you know you can’t solve every issue at the drop of a hat. That doesn’t mean you can’t respond quickly, though.
My strategy was to respond to customer email tickets as quickly as possible, and even if I needed extra time to solve an issue, I would send out an email along the lines of:
I wanted to let you know that I’ve received your support request, and I’m looking into it. I see you are encountering an issue with [describe customer issue].
I will dive into this on my end, which will require a little time. However, you can rest assured I’m actively working on this and will update you within [describe anticipated time frame].”
See what I did there? I could have just placed this customer inquiry on the back burner and waited to respond until I had approached a resolution. However, I’ve found that giving a timely initial response and setting expectations go a long way in creating a positive customer experience.
8. Leverage AI. We asked over 1500 companies how their investment strategies would change in 2024, and responses overwhelmingly pointed towards incorporating AI into the customer experience.
71% said they would increase their investment in AI chatbots for customer service, 70% said they would increase their investment in generative AI for crafting customer communications, and 72% planned to increase investment in AI/automation throughout the customer experience.
So, I think the data are rather clear. AI tools allow for streamlining multiple business processes, and the customer experience benefits significantly from the increased efficiency.
9. Let customers help themselves. Hands-on support will always be a cornerstone of customer success. However, younger generations are moving towards a preference for self-service. See the data below from our survey of 701 consumers.
As shown above, most Gen Z consumers prefer self-service, and if you ask me, that number will only grow over time. Consider investing in a thorough knowledge base and other self-service tools to empower your customers to help themselves.
We also asked over 1500 firms whether they would prioritize offering service reps better tools to solve issues for customers or offering customers better tools to solve issues independently. The response? 68% indicated they would be prioritizing self-service tools.
10. Offer value. Offering a valuable product should go without saying. We all want the most possible benefit out of a product for the least possible cost. However, I’m not saying you should offer a cheap product.
Instead, focus on creating something that genuinely benefits people's lives and is worth their hard-earned money. Especially today, as the cost of goods rises and purse strings tighten. Check out the data from our research below.
Every age group feels the effects of today’s economy. Now more than ever, offering value to your customers will be a top factor in determining customer satisfaction and success.
HubSpot’s Service Software is a customer service platform that includes various features used for customer experience management. For example, the tool offers ticketing and help desk automation to help record customer inquiries, track recurring support cases, and more.
It also has customer feedback capabilities to determine NPS® for customer interactions. These features make it easy for your team to identify common customer roadblocks and roll out changes that help users overcome them.
Price: Free plans are available. Starter plans cost $45 monthly. Professional plans cost $450 monthly. Enterprise plans cost $1,200 monthly.
What I Like : I like that HubSpot is continually integrating and iterating on AI features in the product to help you streamline and scale your service efforts.
Infobip is an omnichannel communications platform that enables businesses to build personalized customer experiences on any channel, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Live Chat, SMS, and more.
With a customer engagement solution, chatbot building platform, and cloud contact center, the Infobip platform makes it easy to engage, notify, and support customers at each stage of their journey.
Price: Pricing is available upon request.
What I Like : I like Infobip’s WhatsApp chatbot, which is especially useful for companies that do a lot of business outside the U.S.
Tealeaf is an analytics engine that monitors and evaluates online customer engagement and website interactions. It uses AI to identify recurring problems and provides insights into how you can correct them in the future. It offers timely updates to help your team fix bugs and glitches before they become a widespread issue.
Features like real-time data processing, intelligent data management, and seamless integration with other tools in your tech stack make Tealeaf a great CX tool for companies.
Price: Pricing is available upon request.
What I Like : I like that Tealeaf lets you capture and replay customer interactions in real time, so you can gain insights into customer behavior when it matters most.
Nice Feeback Management provides you with a summary of your overall customer experience. It does this by comparing direct feedback, indirect feedback, and KPIs — all in one report. This gives you a complete picture of the customer experience from the customer’s perspective and how it relates to business impact.
Price : Pricing is available upon request.
What I Like : Nice allows you to create automated triggers based on customer feedback to get ahead of potential churn.
WalkMe is a customer experience management solution for businesses primarily interacting with customers online.
It has self-service features that empower users to find their solutions, saving your support team time. It also has an extensive onboarding program, so your team can quickly get up to speed on the software.
With WalkMe, you get to build a satisfying relationship with customers from when they first become aware of your brand till they become brand advocates.
Price : Pricing is available on request.
What I Like: I like WalkMe’s DeepUI feature, an AI-powered element recognition feature that ensures it can continually adapt to UI changes in other apps it integrates with.
Khoros is a customer experience management tool that helps businesses monitor their social media engagement. It has omnichannel features that allow you to communicate with customers wherever they’re most comfortable.
Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.
