Customer experience definition

Customer Experience is defined as the overall experience customers have with your business, based on their interactions and perceptions about it. It is a combination of a customer’s psychological, emotional, and physical encounter with your business. Delightful customer experience is the secret to long term customer loyalty. The key benefits of good customer experience are:

1. Increased customer loyalty and retention
2. Higher customer lifetime value
3. Better brand equity
4. Reduced service and marketing costs

Benefit #1: Increased customer loyalty and retention

Shoppers look for high-quality products and services at an optimal price. They are willing to pay more for the same products if they get extra value through engaging interactions. Companies that provide extra value in the form of customer experience are rewarded with long-term loyalty.

Benefit #2: Higher customer lifetime value

Good customer experience is the gateway to long-term customer relationships. And long-term relationships deliver great returns for brands in the form of recurring purchases or repeat customers. According to research, an existing customer is more likely to make a purchase than a new prospect.

Customers who had a very good experience are 3.5x more likely to repurchase and 5x more likely to recommend the company to friends and relatives than if they had a very poor experience. (Temkin, 2018)

Benefit #3: Better brand equity

Almost 92 percent of consumers rely on recommendations to arrive at a purchase decision. Positive customer experience creates a favorable impression, which makes customer acquisition easy for brands through solid word of mouth recommendations.

Benefit #4: Reduced service and marketing costs

A CX-centric approach leads to less guesswork about what customers want, which can add up to potential savings in marketing costs. By collecting and dissecting data, brands can uncover hidden insights and understand market dynamics. This helps lower costs while increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Experience-driven businesses grew revenue 1.4 times faster and increased customer lifetime value 1.6x more than other companies in the past year. (Forrester, 2018)

FAQs: What is Customer Experience?

What is customer service experience?

Customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions between a customer and a business across all touchpoints in the customer journey.

Is customer experience a new concept?

Customer experience is not a new term. It is a holistic look at the customer’s interaction with the brand at different stages in his engagement journey.

How is customer experience measured? 

Brands use the following metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their customer experiences:

• CSAT score: The most commonly used methodology to gauge overall customer satisfaction.
• Customer advocacy score: The level at which customers would be willing to endorse the product.
• Customer loyalty score: The likelihood of a customer remaining a customer.
• Employee engagement score.
• Operations score: Where and how they can improve operational efficiency.

What is CX?

Customer Experience (CX) is the aggregate or the holistic view of a customer’s interaction with a brand across all channels and touchpoints. The most effective way for brands to deliver a fulfilling customer experience is through omnichannel engagement. This means engaging with customers through a channel of their choice, on their terms, whenever and wherever they want to engage.

How to improve customer experience

Customers are happy when brands understand their exact needs and fulfill them. This goal of a happy customer is usually achieved when:

1. The products or services are good and
2. The customer service offered is excellent.

Here’s how you can provide your customers with a delightful experience:

1. Prioritize customer satisfaction

Make your customers feel important and appreciated. Use personalization to build a personal connection with customers. Follow these best practices as you set out to make customer satisfaction your top priority:

• Gather customer feedback. This will help you improve future customer interactions.
• Share information about your company and its values to gain the trust of the customers.
• Keep your website easy to navigate. Customers dislike irrelevant pages or ads.
• Focus on metrics like search performance, app downloads, and customer lifetime value.
• Optimize your website for mobile. The page loading speed should be fast.
• Don’t bombard customers with information. Provide them information only when they need it.

63% CX professionals use customer feedback to prioritize investment in better products, services and customer experiences. (Oracle, 2018)

2. Implement artificial intelligence and machine learning

Predictive personalization is on the rise. It helps brands predict the next action of the customer based on their past behavior. One of the key applications of predictive personalization is AI-enabled chatbots. Here’s how AI-enabled chatbots can transform customer experiences:

• Chatbots can handle various customers at the same time.
• Chatbots are available 24/7 and can resolve customers’ issues instantly.
• They can also help customers with product or service-related information.
• Chatbots can also help provide instant responses to queries.

3. Select the right medium for communication

Communicating through the right medium and the right language is very important for businesses. You need to streamline the communication process for a seamless customer journey. Here’s how you can communicate effectively:

• Ensure that the customers are kept informed throughout their journey.
• Use social media to build a connection with customers.
• Keep a track on the traffic sources to see which channels are most effective.
• Send your customers the right emails at the right stage in their journey.
• Avoid sending irrelevant messages to your customers.

Predictive analytics and Artificial Intelligence are in the most demand among CX professionals. (Bain, 2018)

FAQs: How to improve customer experience

How do you consistently provide a great customer experience? 

There are 5 imperatives to provide a consistently good customer experience:

1. Appreciate your customers.
2. Show empathy and build an emotional connection.
3. Provide value at every step in the customer journey.
4. Be consistent across channels.
5. Leverage technology.

What is great customer experience?

Great customer experience is one that keeps your customers coming back. One of the ways to make sure your customers are completely satisfied is to give your employees the resources and authority to deliver on the promise of excellent service. Great customer experience makes customers feel good not only about making the purchase but also about making the purchase from you.

What does customer experience mean?

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. Good customer experience means that the individual's experience during all points of contact matches the individual's expectations.

How can the customer journey be improved?

The customer journey can be improved by using customer journey analytics in these 4 steps:

1. Identify and quantify what matters most to your customers.
2. Measure the impact of customer experience obstacles.
3. Prioritize customer experience issues based on their revenue impact.
4. Use customer experience to differentiate from the competition.

How to improve customer experience in 10 steps?

Ten steps to improve customer experience:

1. Coach customer-facing employees.
2. Provide self-service options.
3. Provide social media support.
4. Personalize the experience.
5. Seek and act on customer feedback.
6. Stay proactive -- anticipate problems before they happen.
7. Get employee buy-in.
8. Operate in an open, transparent manner.
9. Deliver a consistent and personalized experience.
10. Create a strong and skilled customer experience team.

How to improve customer experience in retail?

1. Make sure your employees are happy.
2. Train your salespeople to build relationships with customers.
3. Create a more immersive, engaging customer experience.
4. Make shopping fun.
5. Make the checkout process fast and seamless.
6. Make sure the retail stores are kids-friendly.

What is a great customer experience?

A great customer experience results in delighting your customer throughout their journey across multiple touchpoints. It keeps customers coming back for more and letting people know about their experience. According to research, customers who had excellent past experiences spend 140% more as compared to those who had a poor experience. Here are 5 elements of a great customer experience:

Customers who had excellent past experiences spend 140% more as compared to those who had a poor experience.

1. Omnichannel
2. Personalization
3. Empathy
4. Quality
5. Technology

Omnichannel

Customers like to stay connected across devices and channels. If your company has a presence online (i.e. website, social media, etc.) as well as offline, make sure you integrate them and ensure a seamless transition across channels. It is also important to ensure consistency in your messaging, brand image, and tone of voice across all channels.

Personalization

Customers are delighted when they receive simple and personalized services from businesses. To deliver personalized experiences, brands must make sure they know their customers’ interests, needs, and engagement preferences. They must also know which are the best channels to reach out to customers and what is the right message for every audience group. By combining this information, brands can deliver highly personalized experiences that improve engagement and maximize conversions.

Empathy

To create memorable experiences, the first step for brands is to ensure that employees relate to customers by putting themselves in their shoes. This enables an empathetic approach towards customers and helps employees engage prospects based on their own belief in what they are selling.

Quality

Brands like Amazon and Apple have set the bar high when it comes to quality. It’s an uphill challenge for most new brands to match the quality of customer experiences provided by these brands. However, they can start by implementing some guidelines. To deliver high quality, brands must define procedures and standards and ensure compliance to them on an ongoing basis.

Technology

Technology is the adhesive that binds together all the 4 components mentioned above. The points described above are strategic in creating a successful customer experience and using the right technology, every business can meet its customer experience goals.

31% of organizations have already invested in technology like AI to outpace the competition. (Accenture, 2018)

FAQs: What is a great customer experience?

What is an exceptional customer experience?

Here are 4 characteristics of an exceptional customer experience:

1. Consistent
2. Relevant
3. Evolves and improves with customer needs
4. Addresses the pain points

What is a great customer experience?

A great customer experience is one which results in customers becoming advocates for the company, creating referral, retention and profitable growth. It can be defined as a set of interactions that consistently exceeds the needs and expectations of a customer.

What Is Customer experience strategy?

Most businesses fail when they do not create the right customer experience strategy or completely ignore customer experience. Here’s how you can create your customer experience strategy:

1. Create Personas

Businesses must understand their customers, their concerns, and their motivations to create the best customer experience for them. For that, you have to:

• Create a profile of every customer to understand their needs and requirements.
• Create buyer personas to target every customer with content which has a psychological element.

2. Avoid bad website and app design

User experience is a big part of the customer experience. It is important for businesses to give their customers a simple, clean, easy to navigate experience. Here are few design tips for creating a good customer experience:

• Ensure all channels- apps, website, email, and social media channels are consistent throughout. For example, keep the logo or color theme the same on all channels.
• Ensure that your customers have a seamless experience by removing unnecessary advertisements or links.
• Ensure they reach their goal instantly whether it is seeking information or services or making a purchase.
• Integrate emotional satisfiers. This can help you analyze the mood of the customer and customer support emails will be sobered up. This also makes the customer feel satisfied and tended to

Only 32% of CX professionals feel they have access to the information they need to understand customers’ needs and previous interactions and can apply it to improve their experience. (Oracle, 2018)

3. Feedback is important

You need to know what your customer needs. You need to assess your brand value, for that you need to ask your customers. Here’s how you can create feedback loops:

• Use a traditional feedback form for customers to connect with your brand.
• Do a real-time feedback survey, as well as post interactions. For more details, you can follow up with customers over the phone.
• Customers are more honest on social media, therefore pay attention to what is being said about your business.
• Pay attention to actionable feedback from your customers, as they tell you what they exactly want.

4. Efficient resolution systems

After taking feedbacks form customers build a resolution system which can efficiently satisfy your customer's needs. Here's how you can provide customer support without pushing yourself on the customer for help:

• Use live chat platforms to tend to the queries while browsing your website.
• Video-based assistance also makes customers feel well assisted on a personal level.
• Always have active support executive on all the social media channels. This will help you monitor good or bad reviews about your business and also respond to queries or information regarding your product or services.

5. Use the right tools and technology

According to a report, 87% of businesses are presently using cloud-based Customer Service Management Tools. Around 67% of the workload of organizations have been reduced with the help of tools.

• The latest tools and technology can engage customers across all channels by bringing them in one place.
• It can automatically send personalized messages to customers based on their profile, to increase customer engagement.
• Predictive analysis helps in enhancing customer interaction and helps customers during their customer journey.

62% of CX leaders think that their organization needs to make major changes to the customer experience to meet their customer strategy. (PwC, 2017)

6. Regularly optimize customer experience strategy

It is imperative for businesses to measure and regularly optimize efforts, and make improvements wherever needed. Customer Experiences Strategy is a continuous process, It needs to regularly be optimized.

• Focus on minute details and analyze it to make the customer experience better.
• Know and understand your target audience.
• Customer executives must be properly trained about your brand, products, and services.
• Reward employees who keep your customers happy and satisfied.

FAQs: What Is Customer Experience Strategy?

What is experience strategy?

An experience strategy is the sum total of activities that an organization undertake to deliver a series of interactions which, when taken together, constitute a (product or service) offering that is superior in a meaningful way.

What does customer experience mean?

In commerce, customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. ... A good customer experience means that the individual's experience during all points of contact matches the individual's expectations.

How do you develop a customer experience strategy?

1. Create a clear customer experience vision.
2. Understand who your customers are.
3. Create an emotional connection with your customers.
4. Capture customer feedback in real-time.
5. Use a quality framework for the development of your team.
6. Act upon regular employee feedback.
7. Measure the ROI from delivering a great customer experience.

What is customer strategy definition?

Customer strategy is a plan for creating or improving the customer experience. A good strategy takes into consideration your customers and their needs, and how you can best meet them. A customer strategy helps brands understand and respond to customer needs.

Customer experience framework

Good CX is the sum total of all customer interactions and the systems, technology, and processes that enable and power those interactions. A customer experience framework is the blueprint to deliver flawless customer experiences. It is imperative to have a framework to map the customer experience. Here are certain characteristics to create a robust framework for delivering unmatched customer experience:

1. Make customers the primary focus

Initially, businesses used to approach customer experience and digital transformation from the inside, which was basically from the productivity perspective or cost-cutting, and it turned out to be a complete failure. Now businesses need to examine how to customers integrate products or services in their lives and enhance the relevance. It is more beneficial to individually focus on customers and their requirements then provide them with the best. Create personas and deliver experiences based on their needs.

55% of CX professionals believe their companies will be too slow and face disruption from more innovative, nimble and customer-focused competitors. (Oracle, 2018)

2. Understand the customer

The customer is the pillar for every business. For good customer experience, it is imperative for businesses to look from the customer’s point of view. This can be achieved by holding surveys, interviews, focus groups, quantitative and qualitative research, observations, ethnographies, and co-creation approaches. One can also get social insights that can help provide feedback and learn from the personas and use it to develop the user story.

3. Complete approach

The most effective approach is when brands engage with their customers at all touchpoints -the entire customer journey. It is essential for businesses to optimize every touchpoint and focus on customer’s interactions online as well as offline. Businesses must take complete advantage of customer experience to enhance their brand.

Only 43% of CX executives are highly confident in their company’s CX proficiencies and preparedness for the future. (Oracle, 2018)

4. Agile

To give a great customer experience, businesses also need to focus on the speed, performance, and measurement. For an accurate understanding of the customer experience, businesses must enable a combination of methods which is useful for decision making.

FAQs: What is a Customer Experience Framework?

What is customer experience model?

A customer experience model is a depiction of the different aspects of customer experience in a holistic manner. Combining multidisciplinary contributions to represent customer experience elements enables the systematization of its complex information. A customer experience model can facilitate the work of multidisciplinary teams by providing key insights.

Is customer experience the same as customer service?

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible to draw hard lines between them. The difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the entire customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer experience examples

Here are five examples of good customer experience:

1. Zappos

Listening to your customers shows that you care about them. It also allows you to discover their needs, pain points and challenges. Zappos, a popular online shoe store created the most memorable customer experience for a customer by creating an emotional connection. The customer was late in returning a pair of shoes due to a death in the family. The customer service team displayed empathy by paying for the return shipping and arranging the courier service to pick up the shoes free of cost. They also sent a bouquet of flowers with a note offering their condolences.

2. Starbucks

Instant feedback is the latest trend and Starbucks is one brand that’s practicing it effectively. The company sends an email survey to its customers right after their visit. The survey is specific to the outlet that the customer visits. Starbucks asks customers to rank the speed of the service, quality, and amiability of the baristas. They also use text messages to gather feedback from their customers right after their visit.

3. Tommee Tippee

Monitoring social media channels has become essential as most customers give their honest feedback or requirements there. For example, a father tweeted that he needed a replacement for a limited edition of Tommee Tippee sippy cup for his autistic son, who only liked drinking from that specific cup. The tweet went viral and there were thousands of retweets, shout outs and likes. Tommee Tippee announced the creation of 500 cups, especially for him. Social media is not always about promoting, but also listening and helping customers.

81% of companies expect to compete mostly or completely on the basis of CX in 2019. (Gartner, 2017)

4. Casper

Casper, a mattress company, created a free chatbot service specially catering to insomniacs. Customers simply text ‘Insomnobot3000’ from the cell phones and talk about what's on their minds and it will have real conversations. Casper collected these mobile numbers and sent them promotional offers and discounts on their mattresses.

5. TD Bank

Lastly, it is very important to appreciate and thank customers. For instance, TD bank sent their North American customer's personalized messages thanking them and sending them touching gifts. One lady diagnosed with cancer received a special vacation getaway with her family.

FAQs: Customer Experience Examples

How do you create good customer experience?

1. Appreciate your customers.
2. Show empathy and build an emotional connection.
3. Provide value at every step in the customer journey.
4. Be consistent across channels.
5. Leverage technology.

What are examples of best practices?

Here are some examples of best practices:

1. Multiple channels
2. Journey mapping
3. Self-service
4. Peer-to-peer
5. Community

What is good customer experience?

A good customer experience is one that keeps your customers coming back. One of the ways to make sure your customers are completely satisfied is to give your employees the resources and authority to deliver on the promise of excellent service. A great customer experience makes customers feel good not only about making the purchase, but also about making the purchase from you.

What is customer experience management?

Customer Experience Management is defined as the management of interactions with customers through digital and physical touchpoints to deliver personalized experiences that increase revenue and drive brand loyalty. This strategy is used to collect and analyze feedback from customers to give them a better experience.

A good CEM software is used to take customer surveys and helps to track, understand, measure, manage, organize, personalize and enhance the customer experience. These insights are then shared across the organization on-time and relevant to the various departments. These departments ensure that they deliver the best customer experience, all based on the feedback. They regularly need to evaluate their customer experience to enhance it.

Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15% revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors. (McKinsey, 2017)

Major challenges marketers generally face is being consistent with their brand across channels, integrating brand and channel experiences and combining data into one single view for the customers. Therefore, in order to overcome that they need to create and maintain complete profiles of the customers, personalize their interactions and to always give them the right information at the right time and place.

To stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to increase their brand preference by giving various experiences, increase their revenue by driving sales from existing customers and engage prospective customers. They can also improve customer loyalty and create brand promoters through memorable interactions with customers.

FAQs: What Is Customer Experience Management?

What does a customer experience manager do?

1. A customer experience manager is responsible for the end-to-end evaluation of customer feedback, giving them unprecedented control over redesigning an existing service or product.
2. Customer experience managers are responsible for the entire product experience cycle, from pre-purchase to the checkout. He is responsible for ensuring that a quality product gets approved for mass distribution.
3. Customer experience managers keep a tab on the progress of products on the market and steer the distribution towards proper channels.
4. A customer experience manager ensures that the company can maximize profits before pulling the plug on the production and distribution.

Why is customer experience management important?

There’s tremendous business value in managing the customer experience effectively. Good customer experience management can help brands:

1. Bolster brand preference through differentiated experiences.
2. Maximize revenue with incremental sales from existing customers as well as new sales.
3. Grow customer loyalty (and create advocates) through memorable customer interactions.
4. Reduce costs by minimizing customer churn.

Which of the following is the definition of customer experience?

Customer experience is the sum total of the interactions a customer has with a company and its products. The overall customer experience reflects how the customer feels about the company and its offerings. Best practices such as surveys, feedback forms, and other data collection techniques help a company to gauge customer experience.

Customer experience platforms and tools

Optimizing customer experience is the most exciting opportunity for 19% businesses, ahead of data-driven marketing that focuses on individual (16%) and content marketing (14%). (Econsultancy, 2018)

What is a customer experience platform?

To manage customer experience, organizations use customer experience management system, a technology to help manage their interactions with their potential and current customers. The system works at various customer touchpoints and synchronizes, automates and organizes. It helps in providing good service to your existing customers, respond to their issues and queries and engage potential customers. Here are the best customer experience platforms:

Adobe Experience Cloud

The Adobe Experience Cloud platform enables to deliver a remarkable personalized experience by gathering content, data, and insights on the customers, irrespective of the various channels customers use to engage with the brand. The fundamental advantages of the Adobe Experience Cloud platform are as follows

• Open and expandable platform: Custom applications and powerful tools can be built by their own ISV’s developers and partners and delivered to businesses everywhere.
• Adobe Sensei intelligence: Adobe Sensei machine learning technologies can extract new value from data and content very easily and instantly.
• Silos are defunct: Various Adobe products and solutions used by customers should have all their data and content in one spot.
• Effective solution integration: Content and data from all apps can be highly beneficial for each other.
• Choice of IaaS: Due to business conflicts, some customers prefer Amazon over Microsoft or the other way around.

Sitecore

Sitecore is one of the leading providers of customer experience management software. It enables businesses to deliver personalized information to their customers. A great combination of tools for content management, customer insights and commerce are created in one platform. This drives revenue and enhances customer loyalty. The key advantages of the Sitecore platform are as follows:

• Unification: Software that was previously used can be easily merged into the Sitecore system. To help create a smooth and continuous transition software like Salesforce and CRM have been integrated into Sitecore.
• Restricted access: Sitecore reduces access to the platform and capabilities as it can have multiple content users. Access is restricted based on a particular role.
• Built-in applications: Marketing tools like Email Experience Manager (EXM), Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) and others are also incorporated in Sitecore. These built-in applications are designed to assist customization and enhance the Sitecore experience.
• Global: Sitecore can support multiple language content, as well as translate a page into different languages. Sitecore’s Translation Provider can automatically translate the page to the user’s language of preference while visiting the websites having a different language.
• Groundbreaking technology: Every Sitecore update is compatible with previous versions of it. Users can easily upgrade their Sitecore experience whenever required, that too with the latest technology. In this process, they will not lose any data.

Episerver

Key merits of the Episerver platform:

• Built as an add-on and scalability: Episerver CMS is essentially used by the web admins who do not need to use it from the business perspective of the domain. It can be highly profitable for businesses that require an eCommerce platform. Technicalities related to content management can be taken care off by this. This tool can also be used by people who have no or very little exposure to website management. They can integrate their preexisting Episerver CMS platform with the commerce platform. By doing this they are also able to create remarkable content according to their requirements.
• Integration with external systems: External systems like PIM, MAP, and ERP can be easily integrated with Episerver. They aid businesses by managing content management and other things related to it. The benefits of integrating Episerver commerce with the preexisting systems is that it reduces the workload of creating contents that existed earlier and it also provides a more efficient and organized process for processes related to the eCommerce site.
• Improve results and performance: Episerver commerce platform is optimized for search engine bots too. The system conducts various tests to efficiently put a benchmark on the key components of the site. It also gives suggestions on how to enhance search ranking and ensures new and improved content for target keywords.
• Better collaboration and online experience: For organizations to grow and stay organized, it is imperative to streamline the business processes. Episerver has a solution for editing and creating location-based campaigns and product marketing. Customer experience gets the key focus due to seamless integration and better collaboration.
• Intelligent content management: Episerver has an intelligent platform. It is built to modify and fit the layout compatible with the content and site. As visitors keep visiting the sites, the system learns their various behavior patterns and make it user-friendly. Based on the visitor's behavior it also ensures that the content remains on top. Organizations require less manpower to maintain and organize the website.

Acquia

Drupal is one of the leading platforms for digital experience. After the introduction of Drupal 8, businesses must enhance their digital strategies befitting the next-generation technology. Here’s why:

• Innovation: In this highly competitive world, it’s a big challenge for new businesses. Customers' expectations are on a rise. They expect faster, better, engaging and helpful service. Drupal’s latest innovations promise to deliver a great customer experience.
• Speed: Since Drupal is an open-source platform, it gives businesses quick action and results. They are up to date with the latest ideas, strategies, and technology. It also allows businesses to modify, extend and build what they want and whenever they want, that too at a high speed.
• Scalability: Drupal is highly beneficial for businesses as it enables scalability. It can help businesses grow rapidly, transform it and take it to the next level.
• Freedom: Drupal can help businesses to build digital experiences according to your preferences, needs, and requirements. There are no restrictions. Businesses have the liberty to pursue or focus on their most important needs or requirements which is beneficial or effective for them.
• Community: The Drupal community has been blossoming for 15 years. There are more than 3,000 contributors who code, test and more. The same community supports and encourages Drupal developers who not only build their projects on Drupal but also support, troubleshoot, update and help in enhancing the platform.

Top 15 customer experience books

1. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
2. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences
3. Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
4. Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine
5. The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary
6. Customer Experience 3.0: High-Profit Strategies in the Age of Techno Service
7. Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagram
8. The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company
9. Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
10. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization
11. Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
12. Customer Experience: What, How and Why Now
13. The Customer Experience Book: How to Design, Measure and Improve Customer Experience in Your Business
14. The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience
15. The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience that Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty

Executive summary: What CMOs should do next

Downplaying the importance of customer experience is no longer an option for businesses. Purchasers are empowered like never before, and great customer experience drives loyalty and revenue. Here are 5 things CMOs must remember as they go about creating their customer experience strategy:

1. Utilize big data

Companies with great customer experiences leverage that data to better understand their customers. Amazon uses big data to create personalized product recommendations for its customers.

2. Drive personalization

Modern customers expect personalized interactions with brands. Using data, companies must understand each customer to meet their individual needs. One-size-fits-all approaches are no longer effective. Spotify is a prime example of this.

3. Provide self-service options

Customers don’t want to wait to talk to a customer service agent; they want to do it on their terms. Self-service options allow customers to get answers at their convenience.

4. Master omnichannel experiences

Customers expect a consistent experience no matter how they interact with a brand. They shouldn’t get one message in a store and then hear something different from the contact center.

5. Predictive analytics

Instead of looking backward, modern data can look forward. Predictive analytics can forecast customer needs, adjust staffing levels and allow for real-time feedback.