Customer Experience The New Marketing

When was the last time you had a truly great customer experience? Chances are, it wouldn’t take you long to answer this question. You would probably recall a story of how an experience with a company left you happy and satisfied.

- Ong Xiang Hong

Same goes for the reverse – if you’ve had a bad customer experience, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to spit out the annoyance and frustration you felt.

Thus it goes without saying that companies need to maximise good customer experiences and eliminate bad ones. A positive customer experience not only results in making your customer happy, but it can also lead to additional revenue. The best marketing money can buy is word of mouth – a customer who will promote your business to friends and family, free of charge.

In fact, negative customer experiences can cause much more damage than you think. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 95 percent of respondents who have had a bad experience said they told someone about it, compared to 87 percent who shared a good experience. Respondents who suffered a bad interaction were 50 percent more likely to share it on social media than those who had good experiences (45 percent vs 30 percent) and 52 percent more likely to share it on an online review site such as Yelp (35 percent vs 23 percent).

Furthermore, bad experiences were more likely to be shared across each of the social circles identified. Friends or family (in person) were most commonly told, by 81 percent of those with bad experiences and 72 percent with good experiences, followed by co-workers (in person – 57 percent and 40 percent; respectively).

In short: bad news travels faster than good news.

But of course, review scores are not the end all and be all. Building a culture around customer experience results in a more profitable organisation, as well as a more resilient organisation.

BUT WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?

Put simply, customer experience, or CX is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship.