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Customer experience (CX) is a part of customer relationship management (CRM). It is defined as your customer’s experience and interactions with your brand from the very first steps until they make a purchase and (hopefully) become your repeat and loyal customer. The point is, to have loyal customers, you need to take in some strategies and invest in experts’ experiences. Here in this article, we want to discuss customer experience research and ways to conduct it.
This article will cover the following questions:
- What is consumer experience research?
- What are the main components of customer experience?
Note: WatchThemLive is a customer experience analytics platform that can assist you in gathering CX data. You can also use this platform to analyze your data, identify the drop-off points and fix them. Keep reading to learn more.
What Is Customer Experience Research?
Customer experience research (CX) describes the data collection and analysis of your customers’ experiences and interactions with your business. You are supposed to use the latest research techniques to analyze and refine the data into actionable feedback and help understand new customers’ behavior. The purpose of running such research is to increase the business’s overall customer satisfaction.
Using features such as session replay can help help you to watch the users’ interactions with your website and gather behavioral data. WatchThemLive offers session replays that allow you to see exactly what users are doing on your website. This helps you understand their likes, dislikes, and pain points. Session replays are one of the great ways to truly know and understand your customers. Interested? Sign up here and get started.
How to Succeed with Customer Experience Research?
To be successful with your customer experience research and avoid a wild goose chase, you need to lay out a plan from measuring broad customer experience metrics to specific action items. To achieve such a goal, you should break the customer experience into manageable customer journeys. You can interview your customers to find the burden within the journey, and evaluate your progress.
The Most Important Components of Customer Experience
Now that we have discussed what exactly customer experience is, let’s dive into the components that create well-balanced customer experience research strategies.
1. Business Context
Your business needs to understand the context to create the right CX at the right time. Having general knowledge of the market as a whole is vital to anticipate and understand the customers’ needs and then try to meet them.
2. Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is bringing in new customers or converting visitors into customers. It starts with leading potential customers down the marketing funnel from brand awareness to making purchases.
3. Reliability
An important component that affects the customer experience is the reliability of overall systems and networks and ensuring that suitable resolutions are offered in the shortest time. Obviously, what customers are looking for is getting support for both critical and non-critical issues.
In order to have reliable research, you need to build your business brand image and generate positive word of mouth.
4. Key Performance Indicators
KPIs are used to measure a company’s overall long-term performance. You can use metrics such as Likelihood to Recommend, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Overall Satisfaction, Response and Wait Times, and Overall Value Delivered to measure a company’s success. Additionally, you can assign numbers to represent elements of the CX and discern patterns of behavior easier.
5. Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) includes the tools and technologies for conducting customer experience research. The tools and technologies help to generate leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers. Customer relationship management can increase your customer’s lifetime value as well.
6. UI Design
The user interface design is the users’ interactions with applications, computers, and websites and facilitates human-computer interaction. We use UI to simplify the user experience and minimize the amount of effort for users to reach the desired outcome.
7. UX Design
The user experience design is all about identifying and solving users’ problems. It is a way of smoothing out the human-technology interaction and involves a direct conversation with AI personalities, voice-enabled apps, and other robotics acts.
8. Availability
Availability is another significant component of customer experience. Nowadays, customers expect contact availability whenever and wherever they want. They seek convenience, and they don’t want to wait in telephone queues. Satisfying such customers requires tools like a callback and sticky agents to make it possible to provide what they want.
9. Accountability
Your business is constantly being evaluated by your customers. Evaluation starts before the purchase and goes on to after-sales when the customers are evaluating if your promises were real or not. If your customers meet their expectations, it means you have been able to provide an excellent customer experience.
Remember, there are always times that you cannot deliver the promised resolution, if that ever happens to you, try your best to inform your customers that it was beyond your control and why the promised resolution couldn’t be delivered.
10. Adaptability
The digital world is rapidly changing, and so should your business. You should be ready to adapt to any changes to provide improved services to customers, including data security, data accuracy, and speed. In order to do that, you should be fully aware of the technological advances in your business environment.
Steps of Performing Customer Experience Research
In this guide, we will discuss the process you must go through to conduct customer experience research and translate general feedback into meaningful changes that can modify your company.
1. Plan Your Questions
The first step is always crucial. You should have a clear understanding of what you want to know and then make a list of questions that can help with your purpose.
2. Define Goals and Metrics
Start by tracing a top-level metric that can lead to revenue, reflect customer value, and measure progress. You should choose flexible metrics that can support multiple levels and formats. Using a customer satisfaction code is also wise; for example, you can try a customer service chat or run a quick survey to gather information.
3. Target the Interviewees
It is always better to know who your audience is before starting your research. You can plan who to meet in order to improve customer experience and get high-value input.
4. Identify Customers’ Journeys
Now that you have defined your metrics, it’s time to use them to identify your customers’ journeys. At this step, since customer journeys can be optimized for a single goal, you need to break the customer experience down into smaller units and improve them.
5. Create Journey Maps
Once you have identified which customer journey to work on, you can start mapping them out. A customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through while engaging with your company. Customer journey mapping enables you to read your customers’ minds and find the common customer pain points.
To create a journey map, utilizing a user behavior tracking tool such as WatchThemLive is essential. WatchThemLive includes services such as session replay and heat maps which provides valuable information that can pave the way for you. Sign up now and snag your free plan!
6. Set Up Measurement Systems
Setting up a measurement system is vital for any customer experience strategy. A measurement system provides a baseline for current customers’ satisfaction and notices how well your performance is. To effectively measure customer journeys, you need to target your customers and business goals for that specific journey and the milestones, in-journey signals, and success metrics.
7. Ideate, Create, Test
Once you are done with your measurement systems and created your journey map, you need to ideate customer experience improvements. You should involve all stakeholders and interview both happy and unhappy customers; they can provide you with valuable information.
Depending on the size of your CX improvements, you have to get customer feedback a couple of times and this process should not stop. You only need to refine and iterate it over time to figure out how to serve customers better.
8. Summarize Your Findings
Finally, go through all the information you have gathered. See what you have learned and how the information can help you with your CX improvement. By establishing high-quality customer research, you can develop better products, a better app, and eventually more happy customers.
Conclusion
Always go above and beyond what you know. Asking questions and interviewing customers can provide valuable information and give you a clue about where to make a change. Still, it’s never easy to know what you don’t know, so you can provide customers with the opportunity to bring forward their own concerns by asking open-ended questions. The better you know your customers, the more likely you are to perform better.
To perform perfect research, you should definitely use an app, we strongly recommend WatchThemLive in case you needed an app that covers all your demands. Sign up now and try their features for FREE!
