Customer experience is often considered to be one of the most important metrics a company measures — it says a lot about how your products or services are faring within your target market. At our recent Spotlight for Revenue Leadership event, we were able to gather insights on the importance of customer experience from a panel of sales and revenue leaders: Naomi Rozenfeld, CRO at Wix Answers; Adam Tesan, CRO at Chargebee; and Allison Metcalfe, CRO at Demandbase.
Charging It to Customer Experience
Research by American Express revealed that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for good brand experience, with 45.9% of companies citing CX as a top priority for their business in the next 5 years. In fact, customer acquisition has become secondary to customer retention since the beginning of the pandemic — companies are now focusing more on CX efforts to keep customers guided and engaged. “We are past the point of crisis and we’re now at this new standard,” says Naomi Rozenfeld, CRO at customer support solutions provider Wix Answers. She explains that incorporating customer-led growth into business strategy has been the trend, and has so far been helpful in breaking down silos within organizations, enabling them to act as a unit by sharing the common purpose of maximizing CX.
The ROI of Empathy
Chargebee’s Adam Tesan cites a phrase that he recommends businesses to invest on — the ROI of empathy, which involves focusing on CX initiatives to drive growth and build the sales pipeline. As an example, Adam shared how teams at Chargebee came up with the ‘COVID Dashboard’ that provides their business customers with a central view of data they can use to guide their clients in real-time, free of charge. “Teams don’t have a lot of time in between ideation and execution, as customers are dealing with the crisis in real-time and want fast solutions.”
Allison Metcalfe elaborates on how empathy shapes customer experience, especially in the face of adversity. “Your experience with the brand is solidified in terms of how you feel about it, and how that brand takes care of you.” Similarly, 92% of respondents in a PwC survey said they will cut ties with a brand after having at least 2 negative experiences.
Adopting a Self-Serve Model
Aside from providing your customers with an omni-channel experience, Naomi says that self-service is key, particularly if you have a large user base. Sixty-seven percent of customers prefer to resolve an issue by themselves as opposed to speaking to someone from your company. Meanwhile, 40% of customers would contact an agent after they’ve looked for a solution on their own.
Businesses must follow self-service best practices to ensure that their tools are being used properly and efficiently, such as regularly updating your support information and having a website with accurate messaging and seamless navigation. “Meet the customer at their exact location in the journey; make it personalized and contextualized to enable them to self-serve and resolve an issue by themselves,” Naomi suggests.
At Demandbase, Allison shared how their team focused on customer empowerment and training so they can self-serve and integrate themselves with the platform. This provides a more impactful approach, when compared to making the customer wait for a CSM to provide training or support. “The real gold is for customers to self-report, and NPS is incredibly helpful.”
Net Promoter Score: A Valuable CX Metric
Adam’s customer success team came up with ‘The Happiness Framework,’ which aims to identify every part of the customer journey and measure those through NPS. “We compute for NPS on customer service, features, pricing, setup, UI/UX on the product,” Adam explains. They then look at it by customer segment as each score largely varies depending on a customer’s revenue size.
Naomi says Wix Answers adopts a similar approach. “It’s really more about finding ways to engage them at different points in their journey, whether it’s a pre-sale, during the sale, or post-sale. We create more success networks to create conversations and dialogue, and go beyond just the product and the brand.”
Final Thoughts
More than just having retention rates as a KPI, businesses must invest on CX initiatives to drive brand loyalty, boost your competitive advantage above the rest, and help you build a solid customer success plan before a crisis even happens.
Allison, Naomi, and Adam discussed more about customer experience in their session for our Spotlight on Revenue Leadership event. Watch the full session recording >>
Photography by Josh Calabrese via Unsplash.