The Complete Guide to Customer Experience (CX)

Let's cut to the chase: customer experience is the differentiator for today’s businesses.

In an overflowing market, it's no longer about being one of the choices; it's about being the choice. It all boils down to how simple, satisfying, personal, and (practically) mind-reading every interaction is with your customers.

Taking notice, businesses are on a mission to amp up their customer experience (CX) to win hearts, minds, and loyalty at every touchpoint (online and offline). In fact, 64% of CX leaders expect to have larger budgets in 2024 for related initiatives.

Investing in CX is no longer optional to meet customers’ high standards – 74% of folks expect to do anything online as smoothly as they can in-person or by phone.

The best customer experience companies and leading businesses first invest in fundamentals and removing every friction. At the same time, they keep an eye on future innovation and opportunity by using data, AI, experimentation, customer feedback, and emerging technology to continuously stay ahead of their customers’ needs.

What is Customer Experience and Why is it Important?

Here is the definition of customer experience, according to McKinsey & Company: CX refers to everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers.

In a nutshell, customer experience is everything. It’s the sum of every impression you leave customers, across every touchpoint with your business, brand, product, and service.

Think about your daily life. You return to businesses that remember your favorite coffee order, help you look good in front of your boss, or make it easiest to find that last minute gift. Those personal, fast, and rewarding experiences make that business more memorable and top of mind.

Ultimately, your customers don’t differentiate between channels – whether they’re chatting with customer service, visiting your website, or browsing in- store, each of these experiences is a single deciding factor for whether you gain repeat business.

So, why is customer experience important in business?

The market is crowded – your customers have every alternative at their fingertips. Capturing their increasingly fragmented attention and earning their loyalty is crucial to driving repeat visits, loyalty, and revenue.

It’s also key to getting referrals, attracting new prospects, and gaining a leadership stake in the market.

What Makes a Great Customer Experience?

In our expert opinion, the best kind of CX is easy. So easy, in fact, it seamlessly fades into the background or sets a new bar for customers’ future expectations.

Amazon is one of the biggest examples of brands building their empires on seamless and personal customer experiences. Here are just a few examples:

Autofill shipping and payment information, so you can purchase in a click.
Displays product recommendations, based on your recent purchases or browsing activity.
Offers “buy again” and “pick up where you left off” widgets on your personalized homepage.
Offers free returns at local retail chains, like Kohls or Whole Foods.

Amazon thinks through all of the small inconveniences getting in the way of a customer finding, buying, and even returning the right product, then aggressively pursues ways to make these steps easier.

They demonstrate that a great customer experience is less about flash and more about focusing on your customers’ needs and pain points, while removing every possible friction obstructing them from completing their goals.

Whereoware's CTO Eric Mackenzie explains that technology is just one part of CX, but it really comes down to nailing down and advancing your goals.

What is the Value of Customer Experience?

CX is proven to drive revenue by increasing conversions (demo or contact requests, product purchases, and other opt-ins), offering an opportunity for substantial revenue growth.

By improving key points in the customer journey and delivering on what matters most to customers, businesses create a loop of satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business.

In fact, a 2022 BCG survey found that businesses that lead on customer experience saw 190% higher three-year revenue growth and 70% higher net promoter scores.

McKinsey data mimicked this, finding that companies that are leaders of CX achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021 – and rebounded more quickly from the pandemic.

Ultimately, the better your customer experience, the more doors you open to drive revenue. When customers willingly return to do repeat business, your marketing and sales teams aren’t continuously clawing to find new customers – a costly endeavor. Instead, your teams are free to focus on improving your business and upleveling your customer experience as a key differentiator from others in your space.

So, how do you pull this off? We break it down in five CX steps.

Top 5 Steps to Great CX

Step 1 – Get Your Data Right
You need a reliable data practice to understand your customers' needs and pain points to figure out the best ways to first meet their expectations and then continuously uplevel that experience over time.

Luckily, marketers have tons of performance, intent, activity, and other types of data at their fingertips. Customers are also willing to provide data, when it’s used to better their experience.

For example, 80% of consumers will share their data in exchange for deals and offers. Clean and standardize your data and feed it into a customer data platform (CDP), so you can easily take action on it and gain a more complete picture of CX pitfalls and opportunities.

Step 2 – Know Your Customers
To deliver a great experience, you need to understand your customers’ needs, goals, motivations, pain points, and preferences. Use your data and take the time to understand the types of customers you’re serving, what makes them unique, and what they’re trying to achieve.

Solicit feedback frequently! Data is great to infer from, but hearing directly from a customer is pure gold.

Step 3 – Get the Fundamentals Right and Remove Frictions
If your website is subpar, it’s pretty hard to give customers a great experience. At the same time, even the best websites have big and small points of friction. Getting the customer experience right requires obsessing over both.

Master the fundamentals and you’re halfway there: improve your website speed, uplevel your security, safeguard user data, and make sure all conversion points work.

Next, look at key webpages and remove all friction. Look for opportunities to make the experience a little quicker and more delightful. It’s perfectly fine to take a walk-run approach to continuous CX optimization.

Step 4 – Responsive Customer Support
Respond and resolve immediately; this sounds like a no-brainer, but it is front-and-center of customer experience complaints. We’re all about reducing friction here – getting a customer complaint or inquiry and not immediately responding and resolving that problem is friction kingdom.

Offer multiple channels for customer support, like phone, chat, in-store support, social media, and email. If a customer has a problem, make sure there are plentiful channels and ways to resolve it ASAP.

Step 5 – Get More Personal
Today’s customers expect personal and relevant customer experiences. Smart personalization shows your patrons you “get” them and are trying to make their lives easier.

In fact, 56% of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience. But it’s easier said than done.

The same study found 50% of companies feel like getting accurate data for personalization is a challenge. Break out of this disconnect by focusing your personalization efforts in meaningful ways (like, remembering customers’ preferences or personalizing content discovery). Place your customers at the heart of your personalization strategy.

These five steps are a starting point to creating a deeper connection with your customers.

But let’s go farther. What specific steps can you take to incrementally improve website CX?

Customer Experience Components to Improve Site CX

Getting the CX right on your website is nuanced and unique to every company’s pain points, customer needs, and business opportunities.

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Instead, start with these five components of customer experience. You're goals are around making it:

1. Easy to find products and information
Customers arrive on your website with a need or goal in mind. They may be browsing your products, researching services, looking for gift ideas, checking your return policy, or trying to figure out how to get in touch with your sales team.

Help your customers complete these tasks with ease by ensuring your website has:

Concise, descriptive, and intuitive website navigation, so customers find what they’re looking for without getting frustrated.
Prominent and descriptive calls-to-action to help customers explore your website.
Website breadcrumbs to help customers easily navigate back and forth between different pages.
Organized products or services (logical categories) to help customers find the items they’re seeking.
Interactive filters to help customers narrow down a large volume of SKUs and browse products how they prefer to shop (e.g., by top sellers, price range, brand, color, material, or delivery date).
Personalized recommendations to help customers discover new products or content on your site, based on their recent browsing or buying activity; products frequently purchased together; or popular content and SKUs.
Robust search, so customers can bypass site exploration altogether and find what they need fast.

2. Easy to enjoy
This is a biggie. Your website design, messaging, and media work together to give customers a positive impression of your brand and business. Definitely get the technical, security, and other mechanics right.

But don’t overlook making your website an enjoyable place to browse products or research information.

Make sure your website features:

High-quality imagery and video to engage customers and show off your unique offering. In fact, 85% of shoppers said product information and pictures are important to them when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from.
Clear copy, concise messaging, and helpful content to help customers understand your value and unique differentiators, while improving site exploration and product
Immersive media, like user-generated content, product variants, interactive zoom, augmented reality tools, or product comparisons, to help customers research products or services.
Self-serve portals, particularly in B2B, to give customers tools to reorder products, view status updates, pay invoices, connect with your customer service reps, and more.

2. Easy to get in touch
Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. If a customer has a concern or question, your website is one of the first places they’ll go to get a resolution. Quickly resolving their problem deepens customer loyalty. Help customers get the help they need:

Communicate clear contact information to directly connect with your customer service, customer success, or sales teams.
Reply to contact us webform submissions as soon as feasibly possible (no longer than one or two days, ideally same day).
Offer alternatives to customer support, like AI-driven chatbots to answer common questions, score contact submissions, and route to the most appropriate team member.
Prominently display detailed Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), shipping/returns policies, and informative content to help self-serve customers answer questions on their own, before they reach out to your customer teams.

2. Easy to trust you
Customers have a healthy fear of their personal information being compromised in a cybersecurity breach. For good reason – SonicWall reported in 2022 a 264% surge in ransomware attacks on eCommerce and online retail businesses. Your website needs to be secure, trustworthy, and rigorous in protecting customers’ data. Partner with experts to ensure your website is:

Secure and running the latest software, with continuous updates and monitoring.
Compliant with data privacy laws, like CANSPAM, GDPR, and other data protection regulations.

Additionally, build trust with customers by giving them a peek under the hood. For example:

Proudly show off employees and other cultural happenings to let customers get to know your team members.
Feature client testimonials, reviews, and awards to tout your quality and client satisfaction.
Display security seals, payment service provider logos, star ratings, and other visual indicators to demonstrate that you partner with reputable parties to keep customer data secure.

Remember, improving your customer experience is an ongoing process. Let’s look at why it’s so worth your investment.

What are the Benefits of a Good Customer Experience?

Where do we start quantifying the benefits of CX? A good customer experience helps you attract and motivate lifelong, loyal customers.

It’s far more cost effective to gain revenue from existing customers than to continuously acquire new ones. Repeat visitors help you truly home in on your audience and proactively create more valuable interactions.

Plus, you get better data to inform all aspects of your business and endless opportunities to incrementally improve customer satisfaction and business performance.

CX benefits help you see growth and improvement across:

Sales revenue
Subscriber rates
Customer loyalty and retention
Website traffic
Referrals and positive testimonials
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Data-driven decision-making
Cost savings
Long-term business sustainability
Budgeting and resource allocation

And so much more. Each of these KPIs has an enormous impact on your bottom line and profitability. Let’s see an example in action.

What Makes a Good Customer Experience?

Examples

The best digital customer experience examples start by intimately understanding your customers by using data and human-centered design to get into their head and solve their challenges.

Let’s look at award-winning CX examples from a Whereoware client. Creative Co-Op, a global leader in wholesale home accessories and lifestyle products, owned four distinct brands; Creative Co-Op, Illume, Bloomingville, and Finch + Fennel.

They knew each brand had considerable audience overlap, so Creative Co-Op set out to make it easier for their retail customers to shop these four brands and fulfill inventory for their stores.

Creative Co-Op partnered with Whereoware to build a highly sophisticated multi-site experience, nesting all four brands within a single digital customer experience. Retailers can shop on all four websites from one spot and checkout from a single one-stop shopping cart.

Data is shared across sites to enable Creative Co-Op to show AI-driven, personalized product recommendations and brand-specific incentives. Plus, feature-rich retailer portals help retailers pay invoices, reorder inventory, and take care of other business tasks.

Creative Co-Op understood what their busy retailers needed – business tools and seamless product discovery to fulfill inventory in a snap. The investment in CX paid off in droves. Their multi-site saw a 33,000% increase in referral traffic in the first month alone and received a WebAward, dotcom Award, and Marcom Award.

Next, let's look at a critical point of customer experience vs. customer service.

What is Customer Service?

At its simplest, great customer service is just one part of an overall great customer experience.

Customer service is traditionally thought of in terms of reactive customer support (e.g., responding to customer calls, answering customer questions, handling issues or returns), and yet so many of our customer experience best practices fall squarely under the same roof as proactive customer service:

Handling customer returns via personalized experience workflows.
Answering common questions via chatbots.
Offering proactive information(like FAQs) and self-serve portals, so customers can answer questions and take action without human intervention.

Consumers increasingly prefer to handle customer service inquiries via digital channels, as long as that experience is positive, immediate, clear, and secure. In fact, 72% of customers have used self-service portals, and 55% have used self-service chatbots. But, that same report noted that 68% of customers said they would not use a company’s chatbot again, if they had a bad experience.

More and more, delivering on either requires a strategic mix of technology, data, automation, and of course, a human heart and brain to get it right.

Here’s just a handful of the things that make Whereoware special:

Holistic Approach: Our digital experience strategy goes beyond technology implementation, encompassing process, people, and digital culture to drive comprehensive transformation.
Expansive Experience : Our diverse teams are experienced across different industries, technology platforms, skill sets, and solutions. Together, we’ve seen it all and can apply the best from our past performance to solve the most challenging issues.
Customized Digital Strategy: Each strategy is tailored to your business and unique needs.
Technology Agnostic: Our team members have technical certifications and experience across all kinds of platforms and tools. We have close technology partners and a broad array of technical knowledge.
Continuous Improvement: We don't just assess; we use data and human-centered design strategies to guide you through the implementation of recommendations, ensuring ongoing optimization and agility.

The Takeaway

Your customer experience distinguishes your business from others in the space. Today’s businesses are making strategic investments in improving their CX to differentiate themselves from competitors, increase customer satisfaction, drive repeat business and revenue, and ultimately, achieve customer acquisition and retention goals.

Improving CX is never a done deal. If you need help, our team at Whereoware can audit your existing customer experience, solve common issues, and deliver a roadmap of continuous optimization to incrementally achieve your goals.