Positive customer experiences are essential in order to build a long-term and lucrative relationship with your customers. But how do you win over customers in the long term?
According to PwC's Global Service Study 2023, 88% of respondents said that their experience with a company is just as important to them as its products and services. 60% said that they are less loyal if there is a lack of personalization. Good reasons to deliver excellent and personalized experiences. We provide important tips for building an unforgettable customer experience that will help you to increase your growth.
Table of contents
What is Customer Experience (CX for short)? A definition.
The term customer experience is best translated as customer experience or customer experience. In general, however, the English technical term has become established, sometimes also in its abbreviated form CX. User experience (UX), which specifically describes the experience of users with digital products, must be distinguished from CX.
This refers to all experiences that your customers have with your company as long as they have a relationship with it. The various experiences have a decisive influence on how your company and your brands are perceived - and therefore also influence purchasing decisions. Experiences between customers and companies occur at all touch points: during a sale or consultation, as well as on the website or over the phone.
Why is CX so important?
CX is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in customers deciding for or against a product. There are numerous studies that show that an outstanding customer experience can increase sales. The effect can be explained by stronger loyalty: in 2024, 43% of respondents to Marktforschung.de's global Consumer Experience Trends survey stated that they tend to make repeat purchases from a company with excellent service. But that's not the only benefit of a good CX. You can find more benefits here:
- Customer Loyalty: In the long run, it is significantly cheaper to do business with existing customers than to acquire new customers, as they already have trust in your brand, reducing marketing and acquisition costs and increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
- Referrals: Providing enjoyable customer experiences increases the likelihood that you will be recommended and rated highly, whether online or in person. In this way, CX contributes to acquisition.
- Competitive advantage: If you offer better experiences with your brands, you gain an advantage over your competitors. Because price and product features alone are not enough to stand out in a market with many very similar products.
- Sustainable growth: The combination of loyalty measures and increasing positive reviews can ensure sustainable growth.
- Increasing sales: Ultimately, the key benefit of a well thought-out CX strategy is always business success in the form of increasing sales.
Key elements of an excellent customer experience
An outstanding CX is based on understanding the expectations of prospective buyers and the effective use of touchpoints. If you know your shoppers and which channels they use to reach you, you can develop an effective strategy for each touchpoint. The following aspects are crucial:
- Personalization as a key element: prospective buyers want an individual approach and tailored solutions. They expect companies to know their specific needs and be able to meet them.
- Seamless omnichannel experience: The customer journey should be consistent and smooth across all touchpoints - from social media to face-to-face meetings. Once a consultation process has begun, it must be possible to continue without any loss of information.
- Consistent communication: From marketing to customer service, all departments should convey consistent messages. This strengthens the relationship of trust between the buyer and the company.
- Technological support: CRM systems such as Gedys CRM enable the intelligent bundling of all relevant information. This forms the basis for personalized and consistent customer care across all departments.
Important KPIs for the customer experience
When people talk about good, excellent or outstanding customer experience, they get the impression that CX is an emotion-based value without clear quantifiability. However, you can actually assess customer experience objectively using various KPIs. The following metrics are often used for this:
Customer Experience
With knowledge of a persona's wants and needs, touchpoints, journey and lifecycle, the company can focus on ensuring or even exceeding the satisfaction of potential and existing customers in all aspects. This can be done via relevant content on websites and landing pages, social media, newsletters, mailings, events and much more.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Key figure that you determine by asking your customers how likely they are to recommend you to others. A typical scale ranges from 0 to 10, with 9 and 10 being promoter levels.
- Customer churn rate: The churn rate is the churn rate. It indicates the percentage of customers who have churned within a certain period of time. A high churn rate can indicate a poor CX.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): The FCR is a KPI from the service. The value indicates what proportion of inquiries could be resolved on first contact. In general, the higher the percentage, the better.
- ROI: In marketing or sales, key figures such as ROI (return on investment) or the conversion rate (how many interested parties became buyers within a certain period of time) can also provide conclusions about the buying experience. However, there are other factors besides CX that influence these KPIs, not least price.
Customer Experience Management (CXM)
The specialist area that is specifically dedicated to the management of customer experiences is called Customer Experience Management, or CXM for short. It is designed to analyze and improve customer experiences. Customer Experience Management looks at the experience from the customer's perspective and develops ways to improve customer loyalty. By consistently implementing these CXM strategies, companies can increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn rates and build long-term customer relationships.
- Holistic approach: CXM looks at the entire customer journey and ensures optimization at all points of contact between the customer and the company.
- Emotional connection: By putting the customer at the center (customer centricity) and focusing on positive experiences, CXM builds a stronger emotional bond with the brand. This promotes loyalty and recommendations.
- Proactive communication: CXM relies on proactive communication to positively surprise and inspire prospective buyers. Instead of just reacting to inquiries, buyers are actively approached with added value.
- Personalization and relevance: By using data and analytics, CXM enables a highly personalized approach. Prospective buyers receive relevant information and offers that are tailored to their individual needs.
- Fast feedback management: An important component of CXM is the prompt closing of the feedback loop. Feedback is taken up and processed immediately, which conveys appreciation and solves problems at an early stage.
- Continuous optimization: CXM is an ongoing process of measurement and improvement. Regular analyses are used to identify weaknesses and continuously optimize experiences.
CXM and CRM: two sides of the same customer relationship coin
CXM and CRM are two complementary approaches in modern customer management that differ in their perspective and objectives. CRM focuses on the company's internal perspective and optimizes processes for managing relationships. CXM, on the other hand, takes the buyer's perspective and concentrates on how they perceive and experience the company and its services.
While CRM is primarily aimed at collecting, processing and analyzing buyer data, CXM goes one step further: it uses these insights to proactively improve the quality of interactions with buyers and create positive experiences along the entire customer journey. The two approaches therefore complement each other: CRM provides the database and tools, while CXM translates this information into concrete measures to increase the satisfaction and loyalty of shoppers.
Technological foundations for outstanding customer experiences
The implementation of an excellent customer experience (CX) requires the strategic use of modern technologies. At the heart of this is a powerful CRM system, such as the one from Gedys Intraware. A CRM solution offers two decisive advantages for CX optimization:
- It enables centralized management of all buyer persona data across the entire lifecycle. For example, you can store information on contact persons and product preferences in the CRM. Together with the order history, every employee has the necessary data record to make suitable offers or respond to queries in a targeted manner.
- Functions for interacting with prospective buyers, partners and suppliers, such as communication by phone and email, chat or Teams meeting.
- It provides extensive analysis functions to gain valuable insights from the interaction data. You can use the wealth of data in your CRM to identify trends, for example positive ones, such as those relating to certain products, or negative ones, such as churn. This allows you to check where the customer experience should be optimized.
The combination of data management and analysis forms the technological foundation for the continuous improvement of the customer experience.
From theory to practice:
6 proven strategies for an excellent CX
Tip 1: Proactive support
To counteract negative reviews that could jeopardize your company's reputation, it's crucial to design your processes so that you can proactively reach out to your customers to offer support before it's actually needed. This means responding promptly through your support channels to problems you anticipate, such as a delayed delivery or technical difficulties with a product. An active employee presence and de-escalation are of great importance here. Customers will only feel well looked after if their queries are taken seriously and responded to appropriately. Mistakes happen, but if they can be rectified quickly and reliably, this is viewed positively by users.
Tip 2: Consistent service despite different channels
Your customers need to be supported across many channels, whether via social media, online chat, call center or email, the important thing is to provide the same, preferably perfect service on all channels.
In order to offer your prospective customers a consistent experience, it is important that all departments in your company have the same view of your customers. This requires a CRM system that is used company-wide. This allows current information on customers and all archived cases to be displayed. Only if you are informed about the entire history of contacts can you guarantee uniform all-round support.
Tip 3: Personalized products and services
Your service should be personalized and tailored to each individual prospective buyer. Make sure you create unique data models by merging information from your CRM with data from social platforms and other channels. This makes it possible to recognize the needs of your customers, serve them in the best possible way and create positive experiences.
Tip 4: Magical moments
Customers always crave something special - unexpected actions that show they are appreciated. Small but high-quality gestures or campaigns leave a lasting impression on shoppers. A good example of this is gift campaigns for birthdays: giving a small gift including personal congratulations strengthens customer loyalty enormously: extra work, but very worthwhile!
Tip 5: Fixed contact persons
The service and sales departments of your B2B company are points of contact for your customers. However, speaking to a different employee every time you contact them, who doesn't know enough about the history of the individual buyer, may make an incompetent impression. It is therefore important that your customers have fixed contact persons. This makes them feel that they are in good hands and always know who they can turn to.
In addition, the information gained from your conversations will help you to improve your products or services.
Tip 6: Supportive service team
Magical moments can only be generated by employees who have positive experiences themselves. You should therefore look for ways to increase the independence and flexibility of your service team. CRM appswith a functional design and great user-friendliness are helpful, for example. This allows your employees to provide information even when they are on the move and respond quickly to inquiries or problems.
CRM for Service & IT
Creating an unforgettable customer experience
How to make your customer service more successful: by providing your employees with all the information about customers and their inquiries. Even when on the move. Your team becomes more productive and solves customer orders on site more quickly. This not only saves time, but also increases customer satisfaction in the long term.
