customer visit experience

How to Plan the Perfect Customer Visit [+ Agenda Template]

Published: August 02, 2021

Now that the world is opening back up, it’s time to get out there and meet your customers face-to-face. For many newer customers, this might be their first time getting to spend time with you — especially as conferences have moved online.

Creating that connection is invaluable. But before you book that plane ticket, it’s essential to create a plan. Planning the perfect customer visit will ensure that you meet your goals and that your customer meeting will be successful. Here’s a look at how you get there.

Why plan a customer visit?

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr and EchoSign, has said “ I never lost a customer I actually visited. ” That’s a bold statement — one that's worth taking note of. But why? What is it about customer visits that has such a big impact on customer loyalty?

First of all, you get to make a stronger impression with your customers. No matter what you sell, you aren’t just selling a product — you’re also selling the people behind it.

Your vision, your passion, your knowledge are all play into the perceived value of your product or service. All of these elements come across more strongly when you visit in person. A Zoom call just isn’t enough time to go deep.

Secondly, you get to see how your customers are using your product in person. Are they constantly printing out reports to pin up on a wall? Are you seeing teams walk across the sales floor to point out something on a screen? What kind of working environment and equipment do they have? What other types of software are they using?

Everything happening behind the scenes paints a much clearer picture of who your customers are. And when it comes time to renew or jump on that next customer success call, you’ll have a lot more knowledge ready to draw on.

Finally, meeting your customers in person is a huge motivational boost! When you’re behind a screen for so long, it can start to feel like what you do doesn’t matter — or that you’re not making any real connections. But a visit to a customer’s office can change all that, and really light up your idea of “why” you do this at all.

61 Templates to Help You Put the Customer First

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• 50 customer email templates

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5 Potential Goals of Your Customer Visit

Going into a customer visit with goals in mind will help you get the most out of your time there. Here are five goals to consider when planning a customer visit:

1. Understanding Their Business Goals

If you’re visiting a client, you’re likely hoping for a long term relationship. Understanding what their future goals are can help align your product with their needs. These in-depth conversations would rarely come up over a quick phone call.

2. Gathering Feedback

Customer visits provide a unique opportunity to gather honest and in-the-moment insight into what your customers need and want. When you sit next to someone who uses your product in their daily work, there’s a lot more space to have this feedback arise. And documenting it for future sales opportunities and your product team is one of the more productive actions you can take during a customer visit.

3. Referrals

In-person visits are a great time to ask for and give referrals. Ask, “Are there any other companies that you work with that you could see our product being helpful for?” Alternatively, if a pain point is mentioned by the client and you know the perfect company to help solve it, don’t be afraid to build that connection. It’s just another way you can bring value to your customers.

4. Uncovering Opportunities for Cross-Selling or Upselling

While your primary objective shouldn’t be pitching your offering at every opportunity, you might uncover a problem that your product or service can help solve. Noting these potential value-adds can make for more effective, thoughtfully targeted upsell and cross-sell conversations.

5. Testimonials and Case Studies

Customer visits can be a unique source of sales content, including pictures for case studies, video testimonials, and strong evidence-based customer stories. If you plan on making this one of your primary goals, consider asking your client to set the stage for these kinds of materials before you visit so you already know who you’ll be speaking to, before coming onsite.

How to Plan an Onsite Customer Meeting

By putting more effort in before you go, you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals and impressing your clients. Here are some key actions to consider when planning your customer meeting.

Thoroughly prepare before the visit.

Before you arrive, make sure you’re up to date on the state of the customer's account. Who are they usually talking to at your company? What customer service tickets have they raised lately? Are there outstanding issues that need to be addressed? These will come up during your visit.

Secondly, understand the current ecosystem your customer is working within. Is your customer in the news? What’s happening in their industry? What threats and opportunities are arising in their business? Being prepared and knowledgeable about their inner workings will make a better impression than coming in blind.

Decide who you’re meeting with.

Start by setting up a meeting with relevant company leadership. That could be the CEO, the founders, or the VP of the functional team you're working with — depending on the company's scale. Bear in mind, while this contact might be the "reason" for your visit, they're probably not who you'll be spending the most time with.

Once you have a meeting scheduled with the company's leadership, plan the rest of your day around meeting with the team leaders and employees using your product — as well as any teams that are open to signing up or expanding the current seat count or contract scope.

Make dinner reservations for you and your clients.

Traditionally, a customer visit includes taking your client out for a nice dinner as a token of appreciation. It also offers a chance for you to get to know each other outside of the limits of the work environment and form stronger relationships.

That being said, this is not a social visit. Keep your goals in mind — even outside of work hours. If you’re familiar with the restaurants in the area, choose a place that has options for every diet and has a good atmosphere for conversations. If you’re not familiar with the available options, ask the client where they’d recommend.

Complete the wrap-up report.

After the visit is over, you still have work to do. Create a wrap-up report for your internal teams back at the office. It should cover key elements of the visit like any confidentiality agreements put in place and who at your company you can share contact information or sales figures with.

Identify any action items that came up during the visit. Include any positive highlights during the meeting as well as any risks or opportunities that arose. Create a copy of the report for your client as well, to show that you were listening to their concerns and that you’re going to follow up with them.

Customer Visit Agenda Template

Use this sample agenda to plan your own customer visit.

10 am: Welcome/Office Tour (30 minutes, w/ Stacy, Raul)

• Get settled, set up a desk or boardroom for the day

11 am: Executive Meeting (1 hour, w/ Stacy, Thomas, Ankit, Shireen)

• Overview of status, product usage, any updates
• Add any bullet points you need to cover here
• Upcoming changes or challenges for the business
• New Opportunities
• Areas of concern

12pm: Lunch

1pm: User Meetings (4 hours, rotating through Marketing teams)

• Overview of new features
• Gather feedback from users
• Sit with teams to review workflow

5pm: Wrap Up meeting (30 minutes)

• Process or configuration change recommendations
• General questions and answers
• Items to be addressed as part of maintenance
• Enhancement opportunities

6:30pm: Dinner at Restaurant

Internal Notes

• At the bottom of your agenda, include internal notes that are meant to be shared with your team only.

Plan for success

It’s time to get back out there and meet your clients face-to-face. By planning your customer visit ahead of time, you’re sure to achieve your goals and come out with a stronger understanding of what your clients need.

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How to Conduct the Perfect Customer Visit

By Natsha Ness

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization. Whether you have the ability to meet with them face-to-face, or are required to so over Zoom due to our ever-changing reality, customer visits require intentionality. They also provide a golden opportunity to make your customers the North Star they should be – and improve literally everything about your organization as a result. Why a Customer Visit is Worth Its Weight … in Actual Gold

How do we know a customer visit is critical to success? In 2019, we conducted research into sales and marketing alignment, in partnership with DRIFT . In it, we found a significant correlation between the most aligned sales and marketing teams (which were also the most revenue-generating teams) and their focus, not only around customers-centric metrics, but also regular visits with customers.

Planning Customer Visits is Key

Sometimes customer visits are inexpensive (like when they happen on Zoom ). Still, just because you’re  remote doesn’t mean the interaction has to feel inexpensive. In fact, you can still invest in the same sorts of things you did on-site. Think about buying lunch with an UberEats code. Or sending your customers a box with a bunch of goodies for the meeting. In other words, think about how you can make the “visit” an experience.

If someone falls into your target account list, and is likely to have a strong lifetime value in your business, they’re worth visiting. But you have to first make sure there’s mutual agreement around the desired outcome of such a meeting. In other words, why are you getting together?

There could be plenty of possibilities, but three main reasons almost always necessitate a customer visit:

• You’re close to creating a proposal. If you’re about to put together a proposal, a customer visit will help you achieve the tight alignment you need to make sure what you’re offering is a good fit with what the customer needs. This will likely come after multiple discovery calls and deep dives. You’ve figured out which challenge you want to solve, and have had conversations with various people that lead you to believe it’s time to create an official proposal.
• You recently created a proposal. (My recommendation is to make the customer visit happen before the creation of the proposal, but it’s better to go after than not at all).
• Upsell. An often underutilized function of customer visits are to the folks who already invested with you, but of course, this can be leveraged to further the relationship and ensure it stays. It can also be used to uncover additional insights into other products or services that may fit additional, previously undiscovered, challenges. You can also work to prevent customer churn by conducting a customer visit.

Who should be involved in a client visit?

After the “why” comes the “who.” Who needs to attend your customer visit to achieve your desired outcome? There could be a wide variety of internal stakeholders that you want to include. You might have people from business development, marketing, analytics, general managers or directors and/or someone from the C-Suite. There should only be people there who have direct input into and/or influence over the subject matter at hand; no one extra. Once you figure out who should be there, think about each of their differing priorities. If you’re unsure of someone’s priorities, ask them in advance. This will help you show up prepared.

Then consider who should be there from your side. Again, don’t bring anyone who doesn’t have a clear role. There’s no dedicated team that should go to customer visits; it varies based on the goal and the customer. You should know what the customer cares about before you head there. This helps you decide whether you need your CEO present or whether the principal on the account is sufficient.

Before the Visit 

One of the best tips I can give you is to get all the skeletons out of the closet before you get in front of someone. For example, if your customer’s marketing leader beams about his 600 pieces of content, but the business development group complains they are out of date and impossible to find, do you want the first time the marketing leader hears that to be real-time, while you’re onsite? Trust me; you don’t. The whole meeting could go downhill fast. You can work through potential issues by asking if there will be multiple budget stakeholders in the room. If so, as it relates to this project, find out whether they will be contributing some of their budget to the meeting’s desired outcome. If so, what does that look like? These questions can help you spot any areas of potential friction before you’re ever in the room.

Preparation is Prince

The content of your meeting is king, but preparing properly to share that content is certainly a strong runner up. Make sure each attendee has a very specific role, and then prepare the right presentation. Consider the following question to guide your preparation:

• Are you sharing a slideshow? Audio? Video?
• What assets will you use before the meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting?
• How will you leverage small, breakout rooms to facilitate conversations vs. all-together, large group dynamics?
• Do you need slides, overheads, pens, markers, etc.? If so, it’s a good idea to send these ahead!
• Do you need a backup plan? For instance, what if your computers don’t work; do you have a hard copy of your presentation?

Then, it’s time to rehearse. Spend time with your team actually going through the presentation before heading to the customer. Talk about who will cover which slides, and how the flow will go. Make sure you’re bringing value to the customer and the tone of the meeting will be what they’re expecting. Finally, send over a message summarizing the purpose of getting together. I like to call this the DOGMA – Details Outlining Goals & Meeting Agenda. I tell them this is what we agreed to, and offer them a chance to come back and add to it or edit what I’ve sent.

During the Client Visit

Here are a few tips for the meeting itself:

• Watch for signs of misalignment. This often looks like one person repeatedly whispering to another, or in Zoom world, obviously Slacking. If someone is smiling during your presentation and you’re being serious, they’re probably talking about something else with someone on their computer. Even if you notice this, don’t mention it in front of the whole group. Instead, note it for later.
• What you can explore directly and immediately are the subtle expressions that indicate someone doesn’t buy into what’s being presented. If these things happen, try to draw it out so it can be addressed in the room. Don’t be afraid to just say, “Sally, it looks like you might have something to share.” If there are corporate politics involved and you can’t draw out the issue, try to have a conversation privately in person or via  a private Zoom chat. But stay in tune with all parties as much as you can by reading body language, tone of voice and so on.

Note: This insinuates that when on Zoom everyone has their camera on. Everyone should have their camera on.

• Record the meeting. Some people get weird about recordings, but having your meeting recorded can go a long way in helping you clarify issues later or capture something that even the best notetaker might miss. If you think someone might not like the idea, have a colleague dial into the meeting and record the call. You can say something like, “Peter couldn’t be here in person, but he wanted to call in.” It’s an easy, subtle way to get a recording to happen without making anyone feel uncomfortable. Enlist a dedicated note taker, but ask all attendees to take notes.
• Leverage a “Parking Lot.” If someone brings up an idea or thought that isn’t perfectly relevant to where you are in the agenda, jot it down in a “Parking Lot” that you can revisit at the end of the meeting – or afterward.
• Don’t leave the room without recapping what went on, with details and next steps. “This was our desired outcome and here are the five things we discussed. Numbers one through four have been hashed out, but we need to spend more time on number five so let’s set up a call ASAP to flesh that out more.” Make sure to spell out who owns what, and the agreed upon timeline so you set the expectation for accountability.

After the Visit

You had your meeting.  Now what? This is where you make or break the trust and credibility you worked so hard to create. I suggest sending a quick email to all involved parties, again reiterating what was discussed and the next steps. But take it a step further and get a handwritten thank-you note in the mail that same day. The content should be different – make it personal and send it out fast, and you’ll blow your customer’s socks off. Really.

After you’ve sent the customer a summary, create a customer visit report for your internal teams. A customer visit report should include:

• Action items
• Positive highlights
• Risks and opportunities
• Any other key observations and notes

Customer visit reports can also be given to clients, or sent in lieu of the email suggested above. After you’ve written up the most important information, it’s time to start taking action.

Take the lead by holding up your end of the bargain. Take care of any items for which you’re responsible, and set up any follow-up meetings that were discussed immediately. The power of a customer visit can quickly be deflated by distraction – and a lack of action – when it’s over.

How We Can Help Your Client Visit Planning

So, which customers or prospects deserve your time and attention onsite? Make a list, and get to scheduling. It’s the step you’ve been missing toward better alignment and better results too. Need support with any of these tactics? Shift Paradigm is a full-service partner for any organization that wants to stay agile in the current digital landscape. Our customer engagement services provide the complete package to keep your customers invested in your products and organization. Interested? Contact Shift Paradigm today!

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The Art of the Customer Visit: How to Plan One + Why You Should

When was the last time you visited a customer? Customer visits might seem extravagant and unnecessary on the surface.

Why not just get on a phone call or Zoom meeting? Or follow up with them via email? You could just send them a survey, or even dig into your product analytics to surface insights.

That said, if I’m talking to another entrepreneur and say something like, "It's super crucial you physically visit your customers", they all look at me as if I just said the most obvious thing in the universe.

And we’re not excluding ourselves here: We launched Close in January of 2013, but our first customer visit was more than a year later!

Some businesses put off visiting customers because it takes time, and it’s easy to push down on your long to-do list. Or, it may seem more urgent to focus on getting new customers to sign on, rather than visiting existing customers.

If this sounds like you, let’s discuss the benefits of visiting your customers, and how you can set up successful customer visits.

What Are the Benefits of Visiting Your Customers in Person?

It’s true: COVID has permanently altered the way B2B sales works. Studies by McKinsey show that companies have reduced their in-person efforts as a go-to-market strategy by more than 50 percent since the pandemic started.

That said, a decent number of B2B buyers still prefer in-person contact during the customer journey.

And this is exactly where the opportunity lies—fewer companies are vying for your customer’s attention in person. This opens the playing field for your company to perform more customer visits.

And trust me—it’s worth the effort. Here's a quick rundown of the value we got from our first customer visits.

Motivate Your Team to Serve Customers Better

Seeing real people use your product is incredibly inspiring. It energizes you. It recharges your batteries. It gives you a visceral sense of how your work actually impacts the life of your users, rather than just an intellectual understanding. It's like pouring gasoline on the fire that fuels your engine.

Everybody on your team—from the CEO to the intern—should visit a customer, for this reason alone.

It is different from hearing customers tell you how much they love your product or how great they think it is. You just have to experience customer satisfaction happening in real-time. You need to see real human beings depending on what you built. You need to witness how your product helps them to operate better, to be better at what they are doing.

The impact you make on other people's lives is a much stronger driver than any number on a spreadsheet can ever be. Do not underestimate how much this affects you. It's powerful.

Build Better Customer Relationships

Meeting someone in person adds another dimension to your relationship with your customer. You can do a lot of relationship-building via email, chat, phone, and Zoom, but nothing has the same effect as meeting someone in person. It creates a human bond between the two of you.

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr says he never lost a customer whom he had personally visited while he was CEO of EchoSign. Spending time with your customers transforms a transactional relationship into a partnership. It builds empathy on both sides, which ultimately leads to better business.

In-person customer visits are one of the best ways to build customer intimacy . It deepens the commitment on both sides. If one of the people we met needs help one day, we'll be more eager to support them. And I'm pretty sure they'll be more forgiving if there's ever an issue with Close and be more loyal to our product.

Get In-depth Product Feedback on the Customer Experience

Your customers are more than the sum of all their clicks on your product. Yes, you might be monitoring product usage and reading all the feedback people send you via email or even tell you on the phone, but you're missing a lot of crucial context if you can't see your customers using your product within their work environment.

• How exactly are they using your product?
• What's happening around them?
• What else is on their screen?
• What's competing for their attention?
• What's their workspace like?

When you visit your customers, you get to see the environment in which they use your software. You experience your product embedded into a user's workday and get a sense of the entire puzzle, rather than just a single piece of it.

And it's little things, like...

• What kind of headsets /chairs/desks are they using?
• What other software/apps are they using during their day?
• Which little hacks did they come up with to make them more productive and efficient?
• What makes them smile, and what makes them frown when interacting with your web or mobile app ?

It just gives you a better picture of what's working and what's not.

Here’s a real example: during one customer visit, we saw that the customer was using a TV to display our reporting in Close . But at the time, our reporting page wasn’t optimized for full-screen display—it looked crappy.

I remembered that one of our engineers had worked on a quick fix that would make this look better, but we had never released it. I sent a message to the team, and within an hour, this feature was released by our VP of Engineering, Phil Freo . It looked fantastic, and our customers loved it.

While visiting customers, you can gather more in-depth feedback about how they’re using your product and where they would like to see improvements in the customer experience. Product managers can then use this information to build out improvements.

Find Opportunities to Upsell

Years ago, during one customer visit, we found the customer was on a basic plan that didn’t include a specific feature. Instead, they were using a third-party provider to get this feature for their sales team.

Talking with the founder, we faced some resistance to upgrading their plan. But we gained an internal champion during that customer visit by chatting with the sales team manager. We gave him everything he needed to make the transition happen, and they soon upgraded their plan to start using this feature again.

This is the power of in-person visits—not only did the extra revenue help us, but by upgrading their plan, the customer’s success with our product was significantly increased.

Create New Case Studies and Customer Stories

Using case studies and real-life examples of how your customers use your product is an excellent digital marketing strategy and one that will help build trust in your brand.

When planning customer visits, think about the customers you may want to interview for video testimonials or case studies on your website. Having these real customer stories also helps build better marketing alignment with your ideal customers and their needs.

All of these are examples of the kinds of benefits you can get from visiting your customers. You can't predict which benefits precisely you'll get—but you will always get value from a customer visit!

Get Your Copy of Talk to Your Customers →

How to Plan a Client Visit That Boosts Customer Loyalty in 7 Steps

By now, you should be sufficiently motivated to actually visit your customers. But what do you say and do? How do you get the most value out of these visits? How do you prepare for them? How do you wrap them up? How do you get started when you visit their office?

1. Identify Which Customers to Visit

Whether you have 10 customers or 10,000, it’s probably not feasible to visit everyone. So, which customers should you visit?

To start, make a list of the customers who already have a good rapport with you—your partners, advocates, and overall best customers.

Next, include customers who are using your product or purchasing from you on a regular basis. Learning about how they use your products and services, or why they keep coming back to you, will be great for your team.

Finally, make sure to include the customers who consistently give you critical feedback. These customers are already pushing your team to do better, and they will likely have super valuable insights to share with you when you visit in person.

2. Decide Who You’re Meeting With

Once you know which companies you’ll visit, decide which individuals inside the company you’ll need to meet with.

First of all, you set up a meeting with the founders or CEO. That's the person you'll be officially meeting. But it's not necessarily the person you'll spend most of the time with.

For SaaS companies, focus on the person managing the team that's using your product, as well as the end-users. If you’re a service-based business, talk to the people who are mainly affected by using your services.

3. Spend Time Getting to Know the Business Beforehand

Just like when prospecting, spend time doing research before the meeting—whether that’s on social media sites like LinkedIn, on the company’s website, or in B2B databases like Crunchbase.

When you walk into that client visit, you should know exactly who you’re talking to, what kind of business they are, which customers they serve, and how your product or service fits into that workflow.

4. Prepare and Share an Agenda

Having a clear agenda for your customer visit is essential to get the most out of the time you spend with your customers.

Start by setting out the agenda for your main meetings with the C-suite and with the managers of the teams that use your product. Set up talking points: such as updates to your product pricing, or upcoming feature launches in your product. Also, leave room in the agenda for their team to add any questions or comments. Leave a clear space for them to give you feedback.

Once your customer visit agenda is prepared, share it with their team. Let them have editing access so they can include their ideas. Make sure that expectations between you and your customer are aligned before you start asking them a lot of questions. Create a setting that encourages them to discuss and share their concerns openly.

Also, make sure to discuss confidentiality. If you plan to report back to your team after your customer visit, explicitly ask them if they're fine with you sharing their business processes, revenue numbers, etc, with your team. (If not, that's fine too—you can still share the learnings, without actual specifics, with your team.)

That way, both teams will be ready to get started when the day comes.

5. Learn About the Customer Experience in Real Time

So, the day of your customer visit has finally arrived! Start by talking in general, broad terms about their business and your business. Then, progress to more specific topics and product use cases.

Be both a student and a mentor. Learn as much as you can about your customers, and look for opportunities to help them. Learn about their workflows, and your product fits into those workflows.

Here are some questions you might ask during a client visit:

• How often do you use our product?
• Which team members use our product the most? How often do they use it?
• Are there secondary users that only use our product occasionally? If so, for what? How often?
• What are your business goals?
• How do you implement our product in your daily workflow?
• What bugs have you encountered?
• What features are you missing within our product?
• What do you like most about our product?
• What do you hate about our product? Which limitations do you find particularly frustrating?
• Which metrics does your team track within our product? (Or which KPIs does our product impact for your team?)
• If our product ceased to exist tomorrow, what alternatives would you consider to replace us?
• Are there any trends or changes in the industry that could affect the way you use our product in the future?

These questions and others like them will give you a clearer picture of how your customers use your product, and how it impacts their business.

6. Ask for and Give Referrals

Visiting customers is a great opportunity to get referrals . And to refer them to others as well. Don't just limit referrals to potential customers—any reason to put them in touch with other people is fair game, as long as you can see potential value for both parties.

Sometimes we see companies serving the same audience with complementary services—that's potential for a co-marketing initiative. If you introduce two happy customers to each other, and they collaborate together, and both get a ton of value out of it, you generate a lot of goodwill, and oftentimes very vocal brand advocates.

If you have a partner program set up, try to see if the customer you’re visiting would be a good candidate for that program, and help them understand how it works and the benefits they could get.

7. Create a Customer Visit Report for Your Team

If you do conduct a customer visit, make sure to document your learnings and take note of memorable moments. Then, you can share these insights with your team.

It's important that all the insights you gain during a customer visit actually become organizational knowledge—otherwise, your customer visits are basically useless.

So, set up a structured customer visit report that your team can peruse and learn from, both now and in the future. Inside this document, note specific items that will be of interest to the different teams in your company—for example, product feedback that your product managers may want to look at, customer journey insights that the marketing team should keep in mind, or product knowledge gaps that the customer success team may need to address.

To make sure everyone in the company benefits from customer visits, we try to share some pictures or highlights from our customer visits in Slack, and then during our weekly team meeting, a team member might give a quick 2-minute summary of their customer visit.

How Often Should You Plan Customer Visits?

There's no one-size-fits-all formula. It depends on your startup, but in general: you should meet them more often than you're meeting them now.

Jason Lemkin recommends every co-founder, CEO, and Customer Success Manager should meet on-site with five customers a month.

Being able to see the environment in which your customers use your product, the atmosphere at their workplace, and talking with the people who use your product daily is always an insightful experience.

Customer visits have been a crucial market research method for traditional businesses for many decades—but they're even more crucial for startups and SMBs . Your most powerful asset when you're in a market with established, large companies is your ability to understand your customers better and focus on their needs better than a large corporation can.

Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, said : "If you look around the startup ecosystem, you can find too many founders who believe that famous investors + lots of employees = winning. I bet most of our VC-backed competitors feel this way, and you can use this to defeat them (they aren't talking to customers nearly enough).”

Want more insights on talking to your customers? Get my book and learn more about building customer intimacy.

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The CEO guide to customer experience

What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.

This CEO guide taps the expertise of McKinsey and other experts to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes. For a quick look at how to improve the customer experience, see the summary infographic.

Armed with advanced analytics, customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years. But it takes patience and guts to train an organization to see the world through the customer’s eyes and to redesign functions to create value in a customer-centric way. The management task begins with considering the customer—not the organization—at the center of the exercise.

Customer experience

More insight into creating competitive advantage by putting customers first and managing their journeys.

Observe: Understand the interaction through the customer’s eyes

Technology has handed customers unprecedented power to dictate the rules in purchasing goods and services. Three-quarters of them, research finds, expect “now” service within five minutes of making contact online. A similar share want a simple experience, use comparison apps when they shop, and put as much trust in online reviews as in personal recommendations. Increasingly, customers expect from all players the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.

Central to connecting better with customers is putting in place several building blocks of a comprehensive improvement in customer experience.

Identify and understand the customer’s journey.

It means paying attention to the complete, end-to-end experience customers have with a company from their perspective. Too many companies focus on individual interaction touchpoints devoted to billing, onboarding, service calls, and the like. In contrast, a customer journey spans a progression of touchpoints and has a clearly defined beginning and end.

The advantage of focusing on journeys is twofold.

First, even if employees execute well on individual touchpoint interactions, the overall experience can still disappoint (Exhibit 1). More important, McKinsey research finds that customer journeys are significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes than are touchpoints. A recent McKinsey survey, 1 1. McKinsey US cross-industry customer-experience survey, June–October 2015 data. for example, indicates customer satisfaction with health insurance is 73 percent more likely when journeys work well than when only touchpoints do. Similarly, customers of hotels that get the journey right may be 61 percent more willing to recommend than customers of hotels that merely focus on touchpoints.

Quantify what matters to your customers.

Customers hold companies to high standards for product quality, service performance, and price. How can companies determine which of these factors are the most critical to the customer segments they serve? Which generate the highest economic value? In most companies, there are a handful of critical customer journeys. Understanding them, customer segment by customer segment, helps a business to maintain focus, have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and begin the process of redesigning functions around customer needs. Analytical tools and big data sources from operations and finance can help organizations parse the factors driving what customers say satisfies them and also the actual customer behavior that creates economic value. Sometimes initial assumptions are overturned. In one airport case study, customer satisfaction had more to do with the behavior of security personnel than with time spent in line (Exhibit 2). For a full view of the airport’s insightful customer-satisfaction exercise, see “ Developing a customer-experience vision .”

Define a clear customer-experience aspiration and common purpose.

In large, distributed organizations, a distinctive customer experience depends on a collective sense of conviction and purpose to serve the customer’s true needs. This purpose must be made clear to every employee through a simple, crisp statement of intent: a shared vision and aspiration that’s authentic and consistent with a company’s brand-value proposition. The most recognizable example of such a shared vision might be the Common Purpose 2 2. The Common Purpose is the intellectual property of The Walt Disney Company. See Talking Points , “Be our guest. . .again,” blog post by Jeff James, December 22, 2011, on disneyinstitute.com/blog. of the Walt Disney Company: “We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.” The statement of purpose should then be translated into a set of simple principles or standards to guide behavior all the way down to the front line.

Customer journeys are the framework that allows a company to organize itself and mobilize employees to deliver value to customers consistently, in line with its purpose. The journey construct can help align employees around customer needs, despite functional boundaries. As McKinsey’s Ron Ritter elaborated in a recent video, rallying around customers can bring the organization together.

Shape: Redesign the business from the customer back

Customer-experience leaders start with a differentiating purpose and focus on improving the most important customer journey first—whether it be opening a bank account, returning a pair of shoes, installing cable television, or even updating address and account information. Then they improve the steps that make up that journey. To manage expectations, they design supporting processes with customer psychology in mind. They transform their digital profile to remove pain points in interactions, and to set in motion the culture of continuous innovation needed to make more fundamental organizational transformations.

Apply behavioral psychology to interactions.

Deftly shaping customer perceptions can generate significant additional value. One tool leading customer-experience players deploy is behavioral psychology, used as a layer of the design process. Leading researchers have identified the major factors in customer-journey experiences that drive customer perceptions and satisfaction levels. 3 3. Richard Chase and Sriram Dasu, The Customer Service Solution: Managing Emotions, Trust, and Control to Win Your Customer’s Business , Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Education, 2013. For example, savvy companies can design the sequence of interactions with customers to end on a positive note. They can merge different stages of interactions to diminish their perceived duration and engender a feeling of progress. And they can provide simple options that give customers a feeling of control and choice. One pilot study at a consumer-services firm found that improvements in customer-satisfaction scores accrued from “soft” behavioral-psychology initiatives as well as from “hard” improvements in operations (Exhibit 3).

Reinvent customer journeys using digital technologies.

Customers accustomed to the personalization and ease of dealing with digital natives such as Google and Amazon now expect the same kind of service from established players. Research shows that 25 percent of customers will defect after just one bad experience.

Customer-experience leaders can become even better by digitizing the processes behind the most important customer journeys. In these quick efforts, multidisciplinary teams jointly design, test, and iterate high-impact processes and journeys in the field, continually refining and rereleasing them after input from customers. Such methods help high-performing incumbents to release and scale major, customer-vetted process improvements in less than 20 weeks. Agile digital companies significantly outperform their competitors, according to some studies. 4 4. See The 2015 Customer Experience ROI Study , Watermark Consulting, watermarkconsult.net. To achieve those results, established businesses must embrace new ways of working.

Perform: Align the organization to deliver against tangible outcomes

As the customer experience becomes a bigger focus of corporate strategy, more and more executives will face the decision to commit their organizations to a broad customer-experience transformation. The immediate challenge will be how to structure the organization and rollout, as well as figuring out where and how to get started. Applying sophisticated measurement to what your customers are saying, empowering frontline employees to deliver against your customer vision, and a customer-centric governance structure form the foundation. Securing early economic wins will deliver value and momentum for continuous innovation.

Use customer journeys to empower the front line.

Every leading customer-experience company has motivated employees who embody the customer and brand promise in their interactions with consumers, and are empowered to do the right thing. Executives at customer-centered companies engage these employees at every level of the organization, working directly with them in retail settings, taking calls, and getting out into the field. In the early years, for example, Amazon famously staged “all hands on deck” sessions during the year-end holidays, a tradition that lives on in the employee-onboarding experience. 5 5. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon , New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2013. Some organizations create boards or panels of customers to provide a formal feedback mechanism .

Establish metrics that capture customer feedback.

The key to satisfying customers is not just to measure what happens but also to use the data to drive action throughout the organization. The type of metric used is less important than the way it is applied . The ideal customer-experience measurement system puts journeys at the center and connects them to other critical elements such as business outcomes and operational improvements. Leading practitioners start at the top, with a metric to measure the customer experience, and then cascade downward into key customer journeys and performance indicators, taking advantage of employee feedback to identify improvement opportunities (Exhibit 4).

Put cross-functional governance in place.

Even for companies that collaborate smoothly, shifting to a customer-centric model that cuts across functions is not an easy task. To move from knowledge to action, companies need proper governance and leadership . Best-in-class organizations have governance structures that include a sponsor—a chief customer officer—and an executive champion for each of their primary cross-functional customer journeys. They also have full-time teams carrying out their day-to-day work in the existing organization. To succeed, the transformation must take place within normal operations. To foster understanding and conviction, leaders at all levels must role-model the behavior they expect from these teams, constantly communicating the changes needed. Formal reinforcement mechanisms and skill-building activities at multiple levels of the organization support the transformation, as well. In a recent video, McKinsey’s Ewan Duncan describes how rewiring a company in this way is typically a two- to four-year journey.

Log early wins to demonstrate value creation.

Too many customer-experience transformations stall because leaders can’t show how these efforts create value. Executives, citing the benefits of improved customer relations, launch bold initiatives to delight customers that end up having clear costs and unclear near-term results. The better way is to build an explicit link to value creation by defining the outcomes that really matter, analyzing historical performance of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, and focusing on customer satisfaction issues with the highest payouts. This requires discipline and patience, but the result will be early wins that will build confidence within the organization and momentum to innovate further.

Delighting customers by mastering the concept and execution of an exceptionally good customer experience is a challenge. But it is an essential requirement for leading in an environment where customers wield growing power.

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What is customer experience and why you should improve it

What customer experience (CX) is, why it's important for your business, and how you can improve it for your customers.

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Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset...and a lot of careful work. This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to improve it through customer feedback and surveys , plus tips from 100+ CX experts and a report with plenty of CX trends and stats —so you have everything you need to start delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX, is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.  

CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you. Everything you do, whether it’s providing responsive real-time support or maintaining seamless omnichannel messaging, impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so a great customer experience is your key to success.

Why is CX important for your business?

Delivering a great customer experience is important for any business. The better experience customers have, the more loyal customers and positive reviews you'll receive, while simultaneously reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns. Moreover, providing a great customer experience gives you a competitive advantage over businesses that maybe aren’t doing so hot with their own CX.

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

Increased customer loyalty

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Improved customer engagement

Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

All business models can benefit from improving customer experience: subscription businesses can increase customer retention and reduce customer churn rates ; ecommerce marketplaces can facilitate purchase decisions, increase repeat customers, and reduce returns; and service industries can elevate customer interactions, gain recommendations, and reduce complaints.

In fact, we challenge you to think up a type of business that doesn't benefit from providing a positive customer experience. 

We believe that putting customers first is always good for business (and we also have the data to prove it in the ' CX stats and trends ' chapter). 

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As we mentioned, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help—for example, calling an operator to request a refund, getting support from a chatbot, or interacting via email with a service provider.

In other words: CX is broader than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with your company, from the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your support team to ask for help with inside your product (and hopefully get a prompt response).

What is a good customer experience?

There’s no universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience: your business is unique and so are your customers. However, we've found a number of common principles by polling 2,000 CX professionals across many industries. You can read the full results of our survey here , but we've included some of the key takeaways below.

In short, good customer experience can be achieved when you:

Make listening to customers a top priority across the business

Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers

Implement a system to help you regularly collect, analyze, and act on feedback

Reduce friction and solve your customers' specific problems and unique challenges

It's not rocket science: a good customer experience comes from asking your customers questions , listening to their responses, and acting on their feedback.

6 things that cause bad customer experiences

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes, but we noticed a number of commonly-reported issues in our customer experience stats .

Bad customer experience is primarily caused by:

Long wait times

Employees who don’t understand customer needs

Unresolved issues/questions

Too much automation/not enough of a human touch

Service that doesn’t provide a personalized experience

Rude/angry employees

If you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer—it's quite likely that one (or more) of the above was the cause. 

Ultimately, though, what counts as a poor customer experience in your business will be unique—and you'll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback, then working to minimize the impact of factors that cause a bad experience. Collecting customer feedback is an essential jumping-off point in developing your overall customer experience strategy. 

→ Check out the chapter with all the CX stats and trends or learn more about improving your CX strategy

Why you should use customer feedback as part of your CX strategy

You may know some theory behind what makes good and bad CX, but for it to make an impact on your business, you need to have a reliable method of collecting insight from your customers so you can take action and make impactful changes.

Customer feedback is information you collect from your customers about their experience with your product, service, website, or business as a whole. You can use this feedback to improve customer experience by removing or reducing areas of friction, cultivating positive touchpoints, and creating pleasant in-store or digital experiences.

You're probably already collecting customer feedback without realizing it: when a customer sends an email, calls your customer support team, or leaves a review on social media, that's feedback. The problem is, if that feedback and other valuable customer data is not measured and analyzed, you're missing out on the opportunity to use it to improve customer experience and leverage its growth potential.

→ Read more about the CX surveys you can run to collect feedback from your customers

Grab a FREE Hotjar trial and start collecting feedback from your customers, so you can fix and improve their experience of your website.

How to measure and analyze customer experience

From what we've described so far, customer experience might sound like a subjective concept that's difficult to measure. That's why you need to rely on a number of different customer experience metrics that can be used individually or together to get an indication of CX in your business (you can also get more detailed feedback on customers’ expectations by engaging them in interviews—and Hotjar can help you connect with customers without lifting a finger).

By having a measurable indicator of CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use customer analytics to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might be affecting your customers. Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals and customer relationship management (CRM) teams to track customer experience over time, at different points in the customer journey :

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Net promoter score® (nps), customer satisfaction score (csat), time to resolution (ttr).

Customer Effort Score measures the experience with a product or service in terms of how ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ it is for your customers to complete an action.

CES surveys are usually sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as "How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?" and a rating scale going from "1: very difficult" to "7: very easy". They also work well after customers reach important milestones in their journey, particularly the customer activation moments when a customer actively engages with your product or service (for example, after they sign up for a free product trial or successfully conclude a transaction).

💡Pro tip: use our CES survey template to discover how hard or easy to use your site or product is.

Net Promoter Score ® is a customer loyalty score derived from asking customers a simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” 

You can choose to adapt the question slightly to better suit your business and use a follow-up NPS question to get more insight, but the point of NPS is to get a simple numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience or brand loyalty .

We use NPS as a primary CX metric at Hotjar—you can give our built-in NPS software a test drive yourself.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

💡Pro tip: use our NPS survey template to gauge your customers’ loyalty.

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They can be expressed with a 5- or 7-point scale (with1: very unsatisfied and 7: very satisfied), or through binary yes/no questions.

Unlike the Net Promoter Score®, which asks customers to consider their overall feeling towards the brand (and thus, their likelihood of recommending it or not), CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on specific touchpoints they were satisfied or dissatisfied with. Taken in context with CES and NPS, customer satisfaction is a meaningful indicator of whether your customers are cultivating a pleasant emotional connection with your business, or what product teams like to call customer delight .

💡Pro tip: use our CSAT survey template to measure how satisfied your users are with your site, product, or service.

TTR is the average length of time it takes customer service teams to resolve an issue or ticket after it’s been opened by a customer. It can be measured in days or business hours, and is calculated by adding up all times to resolution and dividing the result by the number of cases solved.

In our CX stats and trends , we found that the leading cause of customer frustration is a long wait/response time. For that, TTR is a crucial metric to track and improve: the shorter your TTR, the higher the chances your customers won’t experience frustration when they reach out for help.

💡Pro tip: use our TTR survey template to evaluate the effectiveness and perception of your support.

And keep in mind that for a better customer experience, you can display Hotjar surveys as a popup, a full screen takeover, after a button click, or send them by email.

A great customer experience example using NPS

Here’s a practical example of what tracking a CX metric and acting on the insight can do for customer experience.

One of our customers, jewelry ecommerce Taylor & Hart, specializes in bespoke engagement rings—not the kind of product people usually think about buying online, and also not the kind of product customers typically buy more than one of.

The company’s goal was to turn reluctant visitors into one-time buyers, and one-time buyers into lifelong promoters who would recommend the same service to their family and friends. After choosing Net Promoter Score® as their primary CX metric, Taylor & Hart identified two essential customer touchpoints  and set up NPS surveys at each milestone:

The moment a customer places an order

The moment the customer receives their order

The resulting NPS numbers were kept visible on metrics dashboards in the office, and everyone's focus was on improving the scores. It wasn't an easy feat, but the team used each piece of negative feedback to fix parts of their business, from manufacturing to shipping methods, to give customers the best experience they could (if you're curious about the logistics, you can read a full write-up of this NPS case study ).

With a focus on providing a better customer experience, Taylor & Hart grew their NPS score to over 80 (the highest in their industry); annual revenue followed suit and doubled to €4.5M. 

→ Find more inspiration in these tips from 100+ CX experts on what else you need to deliver a great customer experience

7 more ways to understand and improve customer experience with Hotjar

1. identify high-drop off pages.

Use Funnels to identify unusually high churn rates in your most important flows, and watch recordings of users who didn’t make it to the next step. Uncover the pain points in their user journey and improve their customer experience.

2. Discover how users engage with your page

Heatmaps help you understand how users click, scroll, and move on a page. With Engagement zones , see which areas of your page users most interact with. If you notice some rage clicks on a non-clickable element, improve user experience by making it clickable, or revisit your page’s design.

3. Watch session replays of frustrated users

Filter session recordings by Frustration score to dive into sessions where users rage clicked, u-turned, or generally had a bad time on your site. Or use the ‘error’ filter to review sessions in which users encountered a JavaScript error.

4. Gather in-the-moment feedback

Floating or embedded widgets let you collect feedback from users as they experience your site. Discover how they feel when running into blockers or interacting with something they love on your site, then review their feedback to spot pain points and ‘aha moments’.

5. Interview users for nuanced feedback

When written feedback from users leaves you wanting more, give Engage a spin to get to the bottom of why users love their experience with your business, or are instead struggling to interact with it. Gather insights on how they would improve their experience so you can better meet their needs by implementing user-led changes.

6. Test changes made to improve CX

Speaking of changes, of course you’ll want to know what CX updates to make, and how each one performs, based on all the user feedback you collect. Hotjar integrations make it easy to act on that feedback: conduct effortless A/B testing with Optimizely or Omniconvert , then filter your session recordings and user feedback by experiment to understand how users interact with different versions of your site.

7. Share findings with your team

Last but not least, spread the word: you’ll be sitting alone on a mountain of information unless you clue in your team. Share live CX insights and use them to collaborate on initiatives by integrating Hotjar directly with Slack or Microsoft Teams .

Customer experience

Understand what customer experience is and how it’s changing.

• What Is Customer Experience?
• Why Is Great Customer Experience Important?
• How Is Customer Experience Changing?
• Who is Responsible for Customer Experience?
• How Can Companies Improve Customer Experience?

Introduction to customer experience

Customer experience is the heart of the relationship between a business and its customers. Typically, when people talk about customer experience (CX) they mean traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey—for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores, or simple and beautiful apps and websites. In the past, when executed well, CX investments have yielded good results: better customer retention and acquisition, increased sales and stronger loyalty.

But the world has changed. It’s more than just the COVID-19 pandemic: A non-stop barrage of external life forces—economic, social, political and beyond—is affecting people’s everyday decisions in unavoidable ways. In fact, according to Accenture research , 72% of consumers say that external factors, such as inflation, social movements and climate change, are impacting their lives more than in the past. Amid so much upheaval, people are revaluating what’s important to them: 61% of consumers say their priorities keep changing as a result of everything going on in the world. As a result, the way they interact with brands is evolving, and so too is the idea of customer experience.

Here, we will explain what customer experience is, how it’s changing and how a new customer experience strategy can benefit your business.

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What is customer experience?

Customer experience is many things, but it can broadly be described as the perception a customer or a company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction, and each interaction is an opportunity to build a stronger bond between the company and the customer—or has the potential to weaken that bond.

Good customer experience involves building a relationship by understanding what people want, need and value. It goes beyond the act of using the product or service itself: The full experience includes pre-purchase connections with the brand (via marketing or awareness), the process of researching and making the purchase (either in-store or online) and post-purchase interactions (regarding service, repairs, additions and more). The goal is to create smooth and efficient connections between the brand and the customer.

It’s vital that brands remember that every interaction people and other businesses have with them elicits some sort of emotion. Whether good, bad, happy or sad, the feelings brought on by those interactions are then associated with the brand. This can result in your customer asking some all-important questions: To buy or not to buy? To love or not to love? To return or not return?

It’s also critical to acknowledge that people’s needs, desires and emotions change moment to moment based on external forces. An oversimplified understanding of people’s emotional responses is not enough—brands need to see their customers beyond walking wallets and respond to the complexities in their lives.

Why is great customer experience important?

Positive customer experience is a way of standing out from competitors. As more brands compete for public attention and more options are readily available, CX provides a way to put your product and brand at the forefront.

Imagine you’re a business looking to place beverage vending machines in your offices. Your overall customer experience isn’t just how much you like using the machine, it’s the full start-to-never-fully-finished process of engaging with the brand, making the purchase and continuing interactions for service and support or future upgrades. When making the purchase, the beverage retailer can offer you a one-size-fits-all experience, such as showing you pictures of various products. But a better approach would be to use augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) to create a bespoke, personalized and customized experience so that you can see exactly how each type of machine would look in your office space. Because of this great customer experience, you and your business colleagues are happy, and your business will use the same retailer next time you want a vending machine.

Brands that want to increase customer acquisition, customer loyalty, customer engagement and drive growth need to think about delivering more exceptional experiences and connecting with customers in more dynamic ways.

With so much at stake, brands need to ask: is great CX enough to elicit positive emotions and meet customers’ changing needs?

How is customer experience changing?

Twenty years ago, the answer to “what is great customer experience?” would have been a straightforward explanation about optimizing touch points, mapping out customer journeys and designing and producing covetable products that customers want.

But today, how we interact with brands and what we need from them has transformed exponentially. At a time when people are navigating constant change amid external economic, social, environmental and political forces, their behavior is increasingly inconsistent. Consumers are more comfortable with paradoxical choices as their decisions become trade-offs between what they want, what they need and what options are available.

Adapting customer experience to these changes isn’t easy. Oversimplifying segmentation and underestimating the impact of external life forces has created a disconnect :

A life-centric approach to customer experience creates connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs, while

of executives think their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up.

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach .

Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

Who is responsible for customer experience strategies?

Historically, CX was limited to the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) or the Chief Operating Officer’s (COO) purview with different functions in the business operating in siloes focusing on their own priorities.

Let’s take a quick look at how traditional CX thinking has informed how leaders and functions within an organization think about their customer experience strategies:

• CEO: prioritize maximizing profitability
• Marketing and brand: focus on making people want things
• Sales: focus on the product the company wants to sell
• Product development: create products based on market research that are easy to use
• Talent: use traditional metrics based on employee performance within a function (onboarding, annual reviews, etc.)
• Tech and IT: focus on enabling business processes at greater scale
• Operations: focused on providing efficiency for the company that often limits growth
• Supply chain: focus on moving products and goods to consumers

As you can see above, each department and function has its own priorities, targets and metrics. With blinders to the rest of the company, each department is executing a specific customer experience strategy template without seeing the bigger picture. Instead of operating in isolation, companies need to organize all of their internal operations in new ways to evaluate and serve changing consumer needs.

To remain relevant and compete in today’s ever-changing world, customer experience strategies need to be top of mind for every stakeholder in your business. From management to marketing to sales to service, everyone across front- and back-office functions needs to be invested in delivering a life-centric customer experience.

By taking the company’s existing assets (such as talent, data and technology) and rewiring them for more coordinated action, internal operations become simplified in pursuit of a common goal. Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

This is a pivotal moment for the C-suite. Leaders who push beyond traditional CX strategies and redefine their organizations, not just by which products or services they sell and offer, but with a life-centric approach to understanding and meeting customer needs, will emerge stronger and ignite growth in their organizations.

Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

How can companies improve customer experience?

From banking onboarding journeys for new customers to how clothing should be presented online, many of the fundamentals of customer experience have become commonplace. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves via CX alone.

Businesses have traditionally focused on optimizing customer touch points around product and service. In the past this has been a successful approach to increase sales and loyalty. Now, it’s no longer enough. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers.

Today, brands must enhance customers’ lives through new technology-led experiences that go beyond short-lived transactions. Consider the impact of omni-channel services that connect brick-and-mortar shopping with customers’ digital data for greater personalization. Companies also need to have the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy for the customer that will drive them to find creative ways to engage and serve people who crave simplification and agency.

By evaluating what brings value to customers and reconsidering how a brand promise fits with customer needs, companies can refocus their efforts to drive growth and relevance.

To grow a life-centric CX strategy, brands need to think of customers as more than just buyers.

The future of customer experience is life-centric

Brands are looking for ways to harness the changes the world is experiencing to emerge stronger and more prepared for the road ahead. To do so, they need to hone in on the complex life forces and paradoxical behaviors driving consumers today. Through data, technology and a holistic, human-centered approach, they can respond to people’s diverse, often paradoxical and ever-changing needs.

To achieve this, an evolution is needed: It’s time for companies to become life-centric .

Explore more about what it means to be life-centric and find out how to create a life-centric strategy that works for your business.

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Frequently asked questions

Customer experience (CX) is broadly described as the perception a customer or a B2B company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction a customer has with a brand. While some focus only on CX as traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey (for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores and simple and beautiful apps and websites), it’s actually much more complex.

What makes a great customer experience?

As customers face growing pressure from external social and economic forces, CX has moved from fulfilling wants and needs in the moment to seeing creating experiences that adapt to their changing circumstances and paradoxical behaviors. For brands, this means taking a life-centric approach that sees customers in their full lives and interacts with them as complex, inconsistent and evolving individuals.

As customer experience basics become commonplace, brands need to do more to differentiate themselves. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers. Companies need to enhance customers’ lives through technology-led experiences that forge long-term connections, and foster the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy that will help them pivot to meet changing needs.​

What is the future of customer experience?

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach. Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex, and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

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The importance of customer visits: Tools & tips

Table of contents, what are the benefits, who does it concern and why, what is a customer visit program, before the visit, during the visit, after the visit, final tips: how to simplify the customer visit.

Nowadays, with people being so connected, companies often or completely forget the importance of customer visits. A Digital tool can show you statistics, but can it actually read the true interests or intentions of a client?

The answer to that is most likely not. Usually, the more customers you gain or have to deal with, the more it is essential to keep a close relationship with them.

Wouldn’t you like to be considered more than a data or a click on an ad? I’m pretty sure you would.

Why are customer visits important?

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team or your competitor's. In fact, they will likely appreciate talking with a salesman who is not trying to sell goods, but instead someone who is invested in hearing about their problems and preferences. So, by meeting with them:

• It helps customers feel appreciated
• It creates a certain bond: Meeting clients in their environment shows you how they integrate your software in their workday. You’d be able to study their behavior and show them your support
• It detects needs or problems that would not have been obvious on the telephone or by e-mail
• Finally, company workers will feel more motivated as they will get honest and personal feedback of their product or service

You must keep in mind that you are not the only one soliciting that customer, it is a competitive market, so getting as much personal information as possible will keep you ahead of the game. And finally, seeing their smile and satisfaction in person can be the best reward ever.

You might want to bring your whole team such as the marketing and analytics members to the meeting but remember the goal here is not to sell but to listen and be understanding. Therefore, it should only concern the most profitable customers. And here is how to do it:

• Refer to your CRM tool and highlight, via the sales dashboard or cross tables, those who have ordered the most often or with the best average basket;
• Profile your customers. For instance, by using a progression metric, which assumes that the most interesting customers are those who have the best potential (good contact, several exchanges to date) but who have not yet made many purchases.

In a logic of cost reduction, a strategy to take into account is also the optimization of b2b sales funnel : you organize your customer visits by geographical area , and link them in order to lose as little time as possible between each appointment. 

This method can only boost your notoriety amongst customers and build customer loyalty. Because once it is done properly, it increases your efficiency to read and better understand the customer. And as it is generally said, time is money as well as of the essence.

Tips: Check out our lead generation in digital marketing and lead conversion to know how to best generate and convert lead into customer!

• The Best B2B Sales Lead Generation Strategies
• The 7 Fundamental Steps of a B2B Sales Cycle

A customer visit provides an opportunity for interaction between the parties involved to reach a settlement. Discussions may include pricing and terms, advertising, and 'team' approaches to visits. Strategizing is very essential and should not be omitted. It really gives you a true insight into a customer’s perspective.

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

• It can be a Customer visit with the senior management team. Owners, presidents, general managers, and so on.
• A customer visit with the sales managers
• A customer visit with a team of two or more people.
• And finally, a customer visit with an individual. This could be a member of the sales management team or a sales person.

How to prepare for it?

Preparation is key as it helps with your confidence and organization.

• First step is to make an appointment with the person or people in charge.

Ask them when they will be available and set a time and date.

Make sure that each party is aware of what the meeting will be about beforehand.

Speak to them about confidentiality, that everything you report back to your team will be done with their consent.

• On your end, if you haven’t already, keep studying your customer.

See what has changed in the use of the product from now up until the day of the meeting. Study their company, visit their website to know more about their products, services, and their world. Build a client portfolio or a persona. 

It will help you personalize the interview with a guaranteed effect!

Make sure each attendee on your team knows their role.

Review and reread your files as well as the history of exchanges and purchases, if applicable, to have all the keys in hand.

Do not forget to have a backup plan. It shows your professionalism in case something goes wrong.

Pay attention to CAC customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value calculation to balance your fee.  

Once every concerned individual is informed about the meeting, this is where you get into the gist of things.

Start off with light conversations, then get to the purpose of the meeting.

Make them feel comfortable. You do not want to seem too keen to get down to business.

Keep in mind that this is a mutual agreement, so the customer or client won’t run away. Nevertheless, here are a few topics you can do and speak about:

• Be at the same time the student and the mentor. Pay attention to them as well as try to find the best solution to their problem.
• Get to know what their daily work life looks like. Ask open-ended questions. Allow the customer to take the lead and talk.
• If possible, focus on who uses your products or services more. And if so, how often and what are the main reasons?
• Once you have determined the necessity they have for said products and services, ask them what they would like to be changed. Are there any bugs?
• Above all, take notes, whether the information seems useful to you in the short, medium or long term, or not, perhaps this data will be useful later or will speak to one of your colleagues.
• Finally, don’t leave the room without summarizing what was said, as well as speaking of the next step you will take to ensure their needs are met.

Many benefits can come out of this.

Have a debrief . Review what happened. What did you learn? Were some of your questions answered? Did you reach your goals? What was the most helpful?

Then, follow up with the customer and your team . Send the customer a thank-you note, so they can know you appreciate the time spent together and the feedback they have given you.

It doesn’t need to stop there, as keeping a close relationship and giving your customer or client the best experience is not a day process but a constant and ongoing contact with them. Which is why your next steps should involve:

• making a new appointment,
• drawing up a diagnosis or a commercial proposal ,
• preparing for the negotiation based on the customer's specific requests,
• identifying trends in the marketplace . If a number of your customer visits reveal the same concern, this may be an area that you need to focus on.
• communicating important elements to the relevant teams (e.g. the after-sales team).

Customer relations, like all professions, are going digital.

This is all the more appropriate as salespeople are professionals who often work on the move.

It is therefore essential to equip them with a mobile sales management application.

There are interesting tools for note-taking and customer visit reports, as it allows you to create any business document, tailored to your image.

Your documents are unified and 100% dematerialized, for consistency and centralization that benefits the whole company, especially the sales representatives in the field, who no longer lose any of their work.

Depending on the different email scenarios configured, the managers receive a summary and the customer a recap by email. And if the visit is successful, you can even have the customer sign an order in the same breath!

The tool can also communicate with your CRM, a second essential tool which thanks to technology can directly be mobile, that is to say on your phones and tablets.

Using a flexible and customizable software, your sales representatives have all the necessary tools at their disposal on their smartphone or tablet: customer files updated in real time, connection to your ERP, generation of sales documents (quotations, order forms, invoices), and access to order history, stocks and your catalogue.

And you, have you tested any digital tools for your customer relations?

What did you think of them?

If you are still here, here is one last piece of advice: Always look to the future but do not forget that customer satisfaction is crucial to a company’s success.

Nothing beats a face to face meeting as hidden gems can be said. Take the time to know who you are catering to. Customers buy when they feel loyalty and consideration. Do not overlook great relationships that can lead to great opportunities.

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15 proven ways to ensure a positive customer experience

Successful businesses recognise the power of positive customer experiences. Satisfied customers become loyal and are more likely to recommend you and purchase from you again. A better customer experience can result in lower operational costs and significant growth for your business. But what’s the key to a successful customer experience strategy? We’ll explore that, and more, in this article.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (also known as CX) goes beyond customer support calls and feedback. It relates to every interaction a person has at various touchpoints along their entire customer journey - and each of those touchpoints can provide a good or bad experience. It’s about ensuring you have a happy customer from their initial contact with your brand to their retention as a loyal, engaged and satisfied customer.

Customer experience Vs customer service

Customer service is only the tip of the iceberg of the entire customer experience . A customer’s first interaction with your brand could be a visit to your store, a call with you customer support team or a visit to your website or social channels for example.

Good customer service might include a friendly and helpful conversation in store, on the phone or over live chat. But good customer experience extends beyond that to the next touchpoints. That could be a follow up email with a special offer, an upgrade or added bonus with your purchase to encourage repeat custom. Customer experience is an ongoing sentiment, rather than a one-off transactional event.

Why is improving customer experience important?

Put simply, a good customer experience will boost your bottom line and contribute to business success. Happy and loyal customers will increase sales, reduce customer churn and generate new customer referrals. It’s far more cost effective to retain existing customers than acquire new customers. And a positive customer experience is the way to do that.

Your customers are everything, so it makes great business sense to meet, or exceed, their customer needs and strive for customer success.

How to improve customer experience

We’ve explained the theory, the ‘why’ improve customer experience. Now we’ll reveal the ‘how’. Here are 15 proven techniques to create better customer experiences.

1. Create superior omnichannel customer experiences

Wherever a customer connects with your business - in person, online, on the phone - they should receive a consistent, frictionless customer experience. Today’s customers use multiple channels and platforms for shopping and the touchpoint shouldn’t affect their experience. It’s important for your business to adopt the necessary technology and implement the required resources to ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience .

2. Deliver standout customer service

Great customer service is at the core of positive customer experiences. People are more likely to buy from people, namely those that instil confidence and make a customer feel supported. This feelgood factor can be the differentiator between your business and the competition.

3. Train customer-facing teams effectively

The way your team members treat your people will make or break the customer relationship. It’s important to invest in hiring, training and supporting your customer success teams to equip them with the key skills and knowledge to deliver positive customer experiences whatever the customer feedback they’re dealing with. Optimize response times to reduce customer frustration and keep customers in the loop with how the support team will manage their issue.

4. Harness AI for enhanced interactions

Technology makes it easier to develop great customer experiences 24/7 and on multiple platforms. Chatbots enable always-on customer support and customer engagement online. Customer data can be used to deliver personalized user experiences (such as Amazon’s product recommendations for example). Natural language processing (NLP) helps to interpret customer comments in surveys and free-form text messages. AI and machine learning are created specifically for customer experience management and they enable businesses to deliver these at scale.

5. Develop self-service options for better experiences

Make it easy for people to provide customer feedback or find relevant information. You could implement NPS, CES and CSat surveys for quick and simple ratings of your product and/or service. Provide online guides and help (such as FAQs) so that users can answer a question or find a solution for themselves. Implement a chatbot to provide immediate, real time responses to customer enquiries. Automation makes it easier to serve relevant email or social media messages at specific points along the customer journey.

6. Use feedback to enhance customer satisfaction

Listen to feedback about customers’ experiences with you. Learn about customer expectations of your products or services. A Voice of the Customer program is an effective and efficient way of doing this. It will gather customer data, metrics and feedback and help you to analyse the information. These actionable insights enable you to identify and fix pain points, create the products that meet customer needs, attract new customers and increase customer retention. A simple example is Netflix and YouTube’s simple thumbs up/ down feedback mechanism which informs the company’s content strategy, so they provide more videos that customers like.

7. Take social proof seriously for improved experiences

Social media platforms are valuable customer feedback channels. You can gather insightful feedback back from your own and third party social media channels. Social listening tools make this easier by finding and delivering the social comments to your relevant team members so that you can take appropriate action. Plus, social media proof sells. People are more likely to act upon a word-of-mouth recommendation than a branded ad, and it’s your happy customers that are going to promote your business and its products.

8. Keep brand messaging crystal clear

Consistency is key and customers should receive cohesive brand messages at every touchpoint on their customer journey. A great customer experience is seamless and frictionless. Customers should recognise your brand by its messaging whether they’re online, in store, reading an email, engaging with a social post or chatbot, or having a conversation with one of your team members.

9. Engage customers throughout their life cycle

Customer retention and loyalty is powerful for your business. It’s important to invest in customer relationships ongoing, rather than focussing all your attention on new customer acquisition (a more expensive undertaking than customer retention). Lifelong customers spend more money with you - it’s as simple as that. Calculating the customer lifetime value (CLV) helps you to determine the appropriate budget for it. The formula to calculate the customer lifetime value is CLV = (annual revenue per customer x customer relationship in years) – customer acquisition cost (CAC).

10. Make customers integral to your company’s success

Put customers at the heart of everything you do. Listen to customer feedback so that you can deliver the products, services and overall customer experience that they demand. Create buyer personas to help team members understand your customers better. When you picture a person, it’s easier to tailor the brand messaging, user experience and customer touchpoint to suit them.

11. Optimize the customer journey for maximum impact

Use your personas to create a customer journey map. Picture the customer journey that your persona will take and optimize it to make it the best it can be. Can you streamline a process to make it quicker and easier for a customer to achieve a task? Identify pain points, such as returning goods or finding stuff online, and make the necessary changes. Use customer data to make it a personalized experience. Recommend products that relate to their recent purchases or searches, for example.

12. Implement customer loyalty programs for stronger relationships

Valuing loyal customers makes business sense as they’ll continue to spend money with you. Reward customer loyalty by serving relevant, personalized content to them. That might be special offers and promotions, product recommendations that relate to their previous interactions or dynamic online content. Respond to their feedback and create a dialogue rather than a one-way customer relationship. Make them feel valued and appreciated.

13. Utilize customer analytics for valuable insights

There are so many ways to gather customer data [Link to CX metrics] . Website metrics can indicate pain points in functionality (such as abandoned carts or bounce rates on pages). A Net Promoter Score (NPS) highlights the likelihood of a customer recommending your brand. Tracking customer interactions with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool; gathering digital metrics about online behavior; collecting survey responses - all of these provide customer data but are only useful if they’re analyzed and used.

14. Empower your team to go the extra mile

If you want to make sure your customers are happy, you need engaged team members to deliver the positive customer experience. Training and coaching to deliver exemplary customer support is one step, but trusting them to own the customer conversation is another. With adequate training and information, a customer support agent should be able to make the right decisions to deal with a customer call from start to finish rather than referring to someone else. That will result in a better response time and resolution to satisfy the customer, and a feeling of empowerment to motivate the team member.

15. Build a customer-centric culture

Many of the most successful global businesses have adopted customer-centric cultures for good reason. They know that positive customer experiences result in customer loyalty and retention. Listening to customers inform decision-making for better products/ services and strategies for future growth.

In a customer-centric culture , team members will refer constantly to customer data and feedback in their work. It enables them to prioritise tasks, innovate and optimize. It ensures that everybody is working together with the same aim of customer engagement and satisfaction.

A few key benefits of this approach:

• Your team members understand the customer, their needs and preferences
• Your team members use personas and customer data to inform decisions
• Your team members have a desire to continuously optimize the customer experience and journey.

Key takeaways to improve customer experiences

Every touchpoint along the customer journey can provide a good or bad experience. It’s important to monitor and analyze customer feedback on these experiences so that you can optimize them ongoing.

Positive customer experiences result in happy customers, loyal customers and returning customers. These customers not only provide value through spending with you, but they become advocates for your brand and word of mouth referrals. All of this is powerful and, ultimately, increases revenue and engenders growth for your business.

Key factors to remember are that customer experience goes beyond customer support and extends to omnichannel touchpoints with your brand. It’s about your internal company culture as well as your external messaging. It needs to inform business strategy, not just feedback channels. It’s a holistic approach for your business, putting the customer first.

Our customer experience experts at Chattermill can support you to automate this process. Book a personalized demo today to see how our unified customer experience program would benefit your business.

Get started with our customer experience project checklist

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10 Inspirational Customer Experience Examples

We've all read those great customer experience stories that make us feel awed and admiring, but some of those stand-out examples can be misleading.

While they certainly jerk at the emotions and evoke a sense of wonder for the brand, they usually end up drawing attention because they are so far outside of the norm. They aren't the typical conditions under which the company does business.

To wow your customers and drive loyalty, you need to represent both stability and those moments of amazement. A scalable customer experience is one that you can promise to your customers every day — not the occasional wow moments that your employees pull out on a whim.

Because of that, we've created a list of customer experience examples that represent both the one-off wow moments where a business provided a surprising and delightful experience and the brand strategies behind a great (and scalable) customer experience.

While those individual stories might not be scalable or reproducible every day, creating a system that makes an environment for them to happen is one of the best ways to try to bake them in.

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10 inspirational customer experience examples

Excellent customer experience examples aren't all just flashy one-off stories. While there may not seem to be anything exciting about a regular, steady customer strategy, it goes a long way when creating a memorable experience.

The following ten examples run the gamut from highly individual to overall philosophies that inform notable companies’ strategies. Not all of them will fit with how your company does business, but you can still learn from these individual customer experience examples and align them with your customer practices.

1. Ritz-Carlton

The Ritz is the crème de la crème when it comes to customer experience. The hospitality brand is renowned worldwide because it empowers its employees to provide an excellent experience for each and every customer. One of the most notable policies the brand has put in place is its customer experience stipend.

The Ritz grants its employees the ability to spend up to $2,000 per incident to resolve customer problems. Employees don't need to ask for manager approval in order to make the customer's experience better.

While it might not be in your budget to offer $2,000 per issue, you can still empower your employees to do what is needed at the moment. Give them the power to provide refunds, discounts, or bend the rules if they deem that it will be best for the customer.

Recommended Reading

How Ritz-Carlton’s Support Lexicon Created Unity through Clarity

2. starbucks.

Starbucks has long strived to be the " third place ," or the place after home and work where people feel most comfortable gathering. This individual story from a Starbucks location in Leesburg, Virginia is an excellent example of why they are a third place for so many people.

A barista noticed that one of their regulars, who is deaf, was having trouble ordering and navigating the customer journey at Starbucks. In her spare time, the team member learned American Sign Language to make the customer's experience a little bit easier.

She notified the man by writing him a note when he came in to pick up his regular order, and it moved him so much he had it framed.

While your team certainly can't go above and beyond like this for every customer, knowing that they have it in them to do is valuable. Customer experience examples like this encourage us to remember that humans are on the other side of our strategies and to do what is in our power to help them get the most from our product or service.

17 Great Customer Service Examples to Inspire You

When it comes to airline customer experiences, customers are more likely blasting brands for misbehaving than praising them for excellence. JetBlue is one of the few brands that consistently gets rave reviews from their customers — and it's likely because their team often goes above and beyond to put customers first.

This is evidenced by their Chief People Officer going out and doing random acts of kindness for customers and employees alike. He hands out water and donuts to folks waiting in line, gives away free tickets, and even supports crew members working behind the desks at busy hubs.

When everyone, even the person at the top, has the customers’ needs and delights in mind, it makes for a great customer experience.

Netflix understands their customers' desires and needs to a T. They've done a ton of analysis on viewer behavior and customer satisfaction to understand what drives their customers' behaviors and happiness.

Because of that, it should come as no surprise that they have some pretty delightful customer experience strategies. One of the tremendous one-off experiences that they've provided involves a very boisterous customer service rep and a willing customer keen to play along:

You can read the whole conversation here . You'll note that it ends with the customer saying that he wished he had more issues so that he could keep the conversation going.

Netflix teaches us that allowing our customer experience team members to bring themselves and their personalities to their work can be a great way to create excellent customer experience examples.

5. Morton's Steakhouse

While this example isn’t a scalable or even typically attainable level of customer service, this story from Morton's Steakhouse has become so well known that it feels like a travesty not to include it.

Peter Shankman tweeted to his favorite steakhouse that he would be arriving in town and asked them to meet him at the airport with a steak.

Tons of people have tweeted things like this in jest, never expecting a response. Imagine Peter's surprise when he landed at the airport and found a server holding a bag containing a full meal, free of charge.

The nearest Morton's was 23.5 miles away, which is quite a feat in itself, but beyond that, someone had to find his flight information and track it to ensure the food arrived at precisely the right time and place.

While you probably won't be delivering steaks to all of your customers, this customer experience example shows that sometimes going above and beyond to find ways to delight them can have a considerable payout when it comes to loyalty.

Disney is world-renowned for providing excellent and delightful customer experiences. One way they do this is through their Compass Model, which considers four different aspects of the customer experience. It urges companies to assess the following for their customers:

N eeds: the basics of what a customer is trying to accomplish.

W ants: features that would make a significant difference and go above and beyond needs.

S tereotypes: understanding customer assumptions so that you can work against them.

E motions: how to help your customers feel good about buying from you.

The Compass Model isn't just for Disney, either. Companies like airlines and other hospitality brands have implemented it to rave success . When you build your product and customer experience strategy around these four compass points, you create a more delightful experience for your customers.

How Disney Creates Magical Experiences (and a 70% Return Rate)

7. the opryland hotel.

While the Opryland Hotel is by no means a household name, their customer experience example is one of the best in the business.

When a writer was in Nashville for a conference, she decided that the clock radio in the Opryland hotel bedroom was one of the best, most relaxing devices that she'd ever experienced.

The writer liked it so much that she reached out to get more information about the make and model of the radio at the end of her stay so that she could get one at home.

Unfortunately, the device was custom-made for the hotel. It wasn't available for sale anywhere — and the Opryland representative who the author spoke to let her know as much. They did point her in the direction of a similar one that Sharper Image sold, though without the spa sounds.

Later, when she went to pack up, the writer found a radio waiting for her, along with a note that let her know it was hers to keep.

This customer experience example shows that while something may be small to your company (like a clock radio or a gift card), it could be hugely impactful and meaningful for your customers.

Customer Appreciation Ideas: 17 Ways to Thank Customers

8. southwest.

Southwest is another airline that almost always puts customer experience front and center. They encourage their employees to build relationships and create meaningful connections with customers, even on the shortest flights.

Because of that, customers flood Twitter with stories of great flight attendants, bag checkers, and gate managers providing excellent customer experience examples for other companies to learn from. There's even a dedicated hashtag: #175Stories .

It helps that Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest, stated that the company is in the business of customer service, and it's just incidental that they fly planes. He recognized that Southwest's unique take on customer experience is what differentiates them:

"We're focused on telling customer-centric stories. In addition to talking about our unique differentiators, we want to show customers why we do business the way we do."

Southwest is an excellent example of why it's essential to walk the walk and talk the talk. If you are going to say that something is vital to your business, your customers will know instantly if that's the truth. Lead with honesty, and you may have as many loyal, excited customers as Southwest someday.

6 Proven Strategies for Building a Customer-Centric Company

TD Bank is delightful in the way it treats its customers as humans. It was one of the first bank branches to start offering coffee and treats to customers in line and has always been notoriously customer-first with its policies around fees and overdrafts.

It outdid itself, though, when it replaced some of its Automated Teller Machines with Automated Thanking Machines. Rather than balance checks or cash, they spat out gifts.

Some of the gifts were large: a trip to Disneyland or the ability to throw the first pitch at a beloved baseball game, but the recognition doesn't need to be large to make an impact. Over 30,000 TD Bank customers received recognition on #TDThanksYou day.

Every customer in a branch at 2 p.m. received a $20 bill. The system informed customers logging in through their online banking or phone that they would receive a direct deposit of $20.

While this seems like a huge push, we should note that machines did all of the heavy lifting. While we often talk about delight in the humanness of customer experience examples, this is one story that the company couldn't have accomplished without automation.

Remember that as you start to determine shifts to make in your strategy, automation can help make some of these delightful moments a bit more scalable.

5 Ways to Automate Support Without Degrading Service

10. mcdonald's.

McDonald's isn't necessarily world-renowned for catering to its customers’ needs, but this customer experience example suggests that it's more than company policies that make these changes.

A customer at a McDonald's in Chicago watched an older man in a wheelchair attempt to ask the cashier for assistance. After several moments of struggle and a bit of frustration, the cashier realized the man needed help cutting his food.

Even though it may have been easier to turn the man away, mainly because it was rush hour and there were many other customers to help, the cashier shut down his register. He went and washed his hands, put on gloves, and walked around to the front of the restaurant to help the man cut his food and eat.

While it certainly took more time for the other customers to be helped, the value that it had for the man receiving the attention had to have been immense.

It doesn't always have to take a lot of time, money, or effort to create a customer experience that is meaningful and has lasting impact.

Hire caring people and empower them

Some of these customer experience examples require structure for implementation, like those at Ritz-Carlton, but others come from the goodness of the representative's heart.

While creating strategies that support and encourage acts like these are essential for them to be scalable, it is frequently just as important to hire people who care about creating an excellent environment for customers.

Hire employees who are kind and caring, and you'll find that your customers reap the benefits. Bolster those kind intentions with policies and strategies that make them easy to enact, and your customer-facing team will create beautiful examples of customer experiences like these in no time.

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Mercer smith.

Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter .

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Visitor Experience 101: What You Need to Know Right Now

Learn more about the importance of Visitor Experience (VX) and how optimising the visitor journey is the first step in building lifelong loyalty.

Why is Visitor Experience Important?

As marketing executives everywhere are discovering: It costs far more to advertise to and engage new clientele than it does to retain the clients one already has. It also costs more in lost sales.

That’s because satisfied return visitors also generate higher profits—30% higher sales, on average. Measuring personal experience by obtaining feedback is essential to cultivating lifelong loyalty.

Critical Reasons for Measuring Visitor Experience

Market research demonstrates that without engaging clientele throughout their journey, without requesting every visitor’s invaluable insight, cultivating their loyalty becomes near impossible. Research also shows that the opinions of satisfied, return guests are far more valuable in gaining new visitors than any other form of advertising—be it radio, television, print or social media.

• The CAM Foundation, global leaders in marketing, advertising and communications, reports that it costs businesses around 80% more to acquire new clientele than it does to retain existing customers.
• Pricewaterhouse , the second-largest professional services firm on the planet, discovered that consumers rated a positive experience as 65% more influential in swaying them to make a purchase than did great advertising.
• Nielson , in measuring the consumer habits of people in 56 countries in 2012, found that an astounding 92% said they trusted “earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.”
• Forbes reported that, on average, 84% of businesses that “work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.”

In every industry, capturing visitor experience, testimonials and other feedback is essential. Just like customer experience (CX), visitor experience (VX) must be captured and acted upon to succeed in our busy world.

Soliciting feedback on your guest’s visit is what generates positive reviews, invaluable testimonials, far more visitors and even greater profits. Unlike advertising, positive recommendations are free.

Though what few grasp is that measuring visitor experience should begin before their first visit.

When Does the Visitor Experience Start?

Effective visitor engagement starts before they even set foot in your establishment.

Documenting visitor experiences should begin at first contact, by requiring potential guests to provide their name, company name and reason for their impending visit. Confirmation emails giving them directions, or other pertinent information, provides peace of mind to those planning to visit you for the first time. It also provides a database of unique visitors.

Learning the reason for their stay helps individualize their experience. For example: someone coming into town on business will have far different needs than someone attending a funeral.

To cultivate repeat visitors, as well as future donors, the Royal Marines Museum combined “formal evaluations, past visitor surveys, market research,” and other points-of-contact data, and paired that with a VX platform that could offer them “visitor research to plug specific gaps in knowledge about particular audiences.”

Working smarter, instead of just harder, requires engaging your visitors. Right from the start.

Ingredients for a Positive Visitor Experience

Think of your guest’s journey as a set of standing dominoes, arranged in a desired pattern. From the point of first contact, each piece must fall into place to produce the desired outcome: a pleasant visitor journey. Concerns must be resolved in a timely manner. Your guest, at every step, needs to feel they are being heard.

Deloitte , a leader in global intelligence, delineated the basics steps of the “guest experience journey” within the hotel industry:

• At Booking: KNOW ME. “Insight into why guests are travelling and then adjusting the experience accordingly” is shown to significantly impact satisfaction.
• At Check-In: ENGAGE ME. Improved VX technology allows “front-desk staff to be more attentive to arriving guests,” making visitors “29% more likely to share positive reviews.”
• During their Stay: DELIGHT ME. Guests want to be “surprised and delighted.” VX research gives businesses “a 3600 view of guests through social media and historical preferences,” enabling you to exceed expectations.
• Doing More: EMPOWER ME. Recommending activities and offers to your guests based on their profiles helps customize and personalize visitor experiences. “Luxury guests value customization 33% more” than other guests.
• Timely Help: HEAR ME. Mistakes happen, things break. Service recovery at this stage is key. “Guests are 40% more likely to share positive reviews when a problem is fixed quickly,” allowing businesses to turn crises into opportunities.
• At Check-Out: KNOW ME. “Robust predictive analytics” can help your business “infer what guests want in exchange for loyalty.” When visitors feel recognized and rewarded, “they are 13% more likely to return.”

We would also add: REMEMBER ME. Maintaining online outreach to preferred clientele makes all the difference in engaging and retaining repeat visitors, cultivating even more positive reviews.

Measuring Visitor Experience

Measuring visitor experience requires capturing data on your unique visitors, collecting and analysing it, then providing actionable information to help further foster and personalise visitor experiences. To quote Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

How to measure a visitor’s individual perceptions? Simple: Ask them.

Giving guests an opportunity to share their insights helps businesses understand what went right or wrong. While rewarding them for their feedback assures your mutual success.

Available technology for collecting and measuring visitor feedback includes:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) . We’ve all seen the ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ face emojis, or ‘gold stars,’ reflecting client experiences. These are measuring CSAT using a straightforward customer survey method. A simple question is asked, a simple answer given. “How was your experience?” CSAT helps businesses know if their clientele’s needs are being met.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS®) . Taking the CSAT to the next level, the Net Promoter Score asks visitors to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 10. “How likely are you to recommend this business to a friend?” NPS helps businesses predict growth.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) . A CES evaluates the level of difficulty a customer had during their experience. “How well did we assist you today?” This helps businesses pinpoint areas that need to be improved upon.

Key takeways

Data matters when it comes to tracking visitor experiences and the guest journey.

Gain insight into your visitor’s experience, so they recommend you and return. Capture real-time data points on your visitors, directly from them. Learn about consumer habits, across platforms.

Positive visitor experiences are more memorable to your guests than any service or product purchased. Favourable testimonials, in turn, give businesses far more ROI than even advertising.

Select a experience marketing platform , like TRACX, which helps you document visits, analyse guest feedback and fine-tune performance, alerting you of negative guest experiences in real time.

Co-founder, TRACX

Tom is the co-founder of TRACX, a no-code marketing platform that allows local business owners to collect customer feedback and create engaging marketing campaigns. With over 17 years of experience in entrepreneurship, product development, and marketing for businesses large and small, Tom is currently responsible for developing product and marketing strategies for TRACX.

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The Customer Experience Center: Successful Customer Visits

How to Have Successful Customer Visits to Your Customer Experience Center

In my first blog on Customer Experience Centers (CECs), I  shared best practices and key strategic elements  in the various customer experience centers we visited last summer. My second blog focused on some of the more tactical elements that we saw involved in the  design of these centers and preparations for customer visits , e.g., layout, physical props, and the all-important effort that goes into communicating your story. Now we’ll bring it all together with an overview of the best practices for executing the actual customer visit itself, starting with the intake process and ending with critical follow-up steps.

Intake Process: Registration, Research, and Planning

One of the first themes that emerged as we learned about best practices at customer engagement centers was the need for a well-thought-out registration or intake process for  every visit  (whether a new customer or a return visit). These processes vary from center to center, but typically involved several common elements:

• Coordinate information sharing: Executing a successful customer visit requires close collaboration between sales reps and technical folks to clarify the objective of the initial meeting and any follow-up interactions (e.g., whether a second visit should involve a broader range of participants, or narrow and focus on specific technical challenges). Large firms in particular may want to consider implementing a CRM system to track who has interacted with whom and record any relevant market research or account plants that have been developed.
• Do your homework:  If a sales rep generates a first visit, they will be an essential, but not sole, source of information about the underlying customer problem or situation. Additional research is advisable to help provide context, whether it’s about competitive pressures, regulatory hurdles, or internal politics. For relatively local customers, it may be helpful to start with a shorter meeting between a limited number of participants so that the host company can “right-size” the itinerary for the formal visit. There are no rote or “one-size-fits-all” customer visits – each should be tailored to the client and situation at hand.
• Give yourself plenty of time:  The time allotted to accommodate a customer visit (from conception to execution) varied widely among the centers we visited – anywhere from an hour to 3 months – but a lead time of four to six weeks to prepare for a visit was considered optimal.

Who’s in the Room? (Or Sales vs. Tech)

The goal of a customer experience center is to generate revenue. But who “owns” the visit? The business-facing sales rep who identifies the clients’ problem and brings them to the center? Or the technical staff who will be the ones likely to solve the clients’ problem?

Letting sales staff run the show risks leaving the customer unsatisfied – as one company said,

“Sales reps want customer tech shows in which they can participate;  customers  want to hear new tech ideas from engineers.”

But leaving the entire visit to technical staff has its drawbacks as well, and at least one firm we visited has a “no drop-off” rule to prevent sales staff from doing just that. In general, CEC personnel must actively work together to strike the delicate balance between the business drivers associated with the relationship and the technical orientation that is often the foundation for the visit.

In my previous blog , I talked about the importance of thoughtfully developing the story you want to tell your customers about your company.  How  you tell the story is likewise important and worthy of thoughtful development. This requires not only planning and preparation, but also the ability to pivot in the moment and adapt as the conversation develops. Being able to pivot means being skilled at listening. While active listening is hard work, it’s essential to one of the goals of a customer visit – to elicit. Not ask, not survey, but elicit. From the Latin  ēlicitus , or “drawn out.”

CEC guides frequently mentioned that customers don’t come in with a clearly articulated problem. Part of the challenge inherent in elicitation is helping to identify and define the problem. How can the customer be helped to discover the problem that needs to be solved? When (or where) is the moment that the problem takes form? And while the problem is taking shape, how can the “wild” or “out there” ideas – that might just turn into something with a little more coaxing – be maintained for future consideration? Skilled guides excel at leading the customer through this thought process to arrive at an outcome that everyone understands and is excited about.

So – What’s A Successful Customer Visit?

One of the measures of success for a customer visit was described to us as creating a shared experience, a moment that may later be referred to as, “Do you remember when we…?” between you and your customer. That’s a great accolade, but undoubtedly the greatest measure of success is the opportunity to innovate – new ideas, new products, new processes – that results from improved communications, deeper understanding of customer problems and company capabilities, and the trust needed to execute. There’s a lot of work and individual skill that goes into achieving this outcome, but if you take the time to prepare a thoughtful, personalized experience for your customer, it just might pay off.

Find out how Newry can help your organization move smarter to move faster. Get traction in your market.

Amy Fritz has been a member of the Newry team since 2006, offering her expertise and insight on varied subjects including green building, wireless communications, architectural glass, and medical diagnostics systems. In addition to her consulting work, Amy has been deeply involved in the firm’s marketing and knowledge management functions. She enjoys continuously tackling interesting and diverse tasks, and loves her work at Newry because every day is a new challenge.

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How To Use Customer Visits To Increase Engagement And Advocacy

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by Influitive | Oct 16, 2017 | Advocate Marketing 101 | 1 comment

eBook The Advocate Marketing Playbook The Advocate Marketing Playbook provides marketers with a blueprint from which to build and manage a successful advocate marketing program. It’s a… Download eBook

There are so many ways to identify and nurture advocates that sometimes you might miss the easy wins right under your nose.

When your customers are in town for a vacation, conference, or business meeting, why not invite them to visit your office?

Customer visits are a great way to deepen relationships with your advocates, as well as promote your advocate marketing program internally.

They can range in time commitment from simply taking a customer out for lunch to developing an agenda for a full-day visit.

Crafting the perfect customer visit

One way to maximize the benefit of the visit is to ask the customer to do a 30-minute session with your employees.

Think about it: not everybody in your organization gets to meet customers and learn about what they are doing with your product. Hearing it right from the customer can be invaluable, especially for product or marketing teams who aren’t in customer-facing roles.

Customers are usually eager and happy to give something in return for you providing some training, or setting up meetings with the product team, executives, and/or their CSM. Plus, having them do a presentation is a great way to see how well a customer presents with an eye towards upcoming User Groups or conference presentations.

We keep these meeting very short and informal to keep the pressure low, with about 20 minutes of presentation followed by Q&A. Slides are not necessary and we assure them that there’s no pressure to record or use their content for marketing. At Crimson Hexagon , we have found that the larger the license, the lower the likelihood that a company will approve public acts of advocacy. However, we do find that many customers are thrilled to share their stories publicly, and there have been many presentations that have led to published case studies.

How to get customers to sign up for a visit

The opportunity for customer visits is promoted formally in our customer newsletter, and plugged informally in conversations with Customer Success Managers. The customer may just happen to mention they are coming to Boston, and our advocate marketing team takes the weight off of the CSM by managing the details. Another way to make your advocates aware of this opportunity would be to simply make it a challenge in your Hub .

Once we’ve identified an interested customer, we do the following:

• Get on a call with the customer and their CSM to develop an agenda and lock down the details
• Have our advocate marketing team book the room, invite the right people to the meeting, and order lunch
• Plan ways to make the advocate feel special the day of, like updating the Welcome Screen in our lobby to greet them

If there is also going to be a presentation, we also:

• Determine who the best person is to introduce our guest
• Make sure an Executive says hello and is in the audience
• Send an invite to all employees (including remote), along with a day-of reminder

                              A recent customer presentation at the Crimson Hexagon HQ

Why customer visits benefit your advocates and your company

We have had great success with customer visits from Fortune 100 companies, agencies, government, and non-profits. A customer visit program is a great way to raise advocacy’s profile within your organization . It also creates an opportunity to talk about other advocacy opportunities with the customer, such as having them speaking at events , creating content , being involved in a case study , etc.

The benefits from the advocate’s perspective are that it makes them feel special, provides them with an audience for their thought leadership, and strengthens their bond with your company.

Recently, Michael Cornfield , a professor of political science at George Washington University visited our office and told us about his meeting with his CSMs.

What our advocate marketing team finds rewarding is that colleagues across all departments attendm and we get lots of positive comments from employees, especially from finance, HR, and engineering. Our goal is to host two to three of these customer visits per quarter.

If I had a wish, it would be that a few times a year we were able to invite and cover the costs of having a strategic customer come to Boston for a customer visit. It’s getting close to budget time, and I will definitely add it to my 2018 plan.

Related Resources

• Customer Success and Marketing Alignment ebook
• Why Marketing And Customer Success Are Your Brand’s New Super-Duo
• Together, Customer Success Teams And Customer Marketing Can Create A Better Customer Experience

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Getting the Most Out of Customer Visits

How to observe and capture how key business personas make decisions.

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There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. Often, the result of observing customers is the creation of personas for whom offerings can be designed. But there is much more value to looking at personas in context: there is the specific context of the persona: the decisions that person has to make, the criteria upon which he makes the decisions, and the types of information that must be taken into consideration—but there is also the Common Context for that role and related roles to round out the picture. Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers and creating personas in context.

NETTING IT OUT

There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. If you study the behavior of the people in the roles for whom you are targeting solutions, and the contexts in which they do their jobs, you’ll be more successful in developing useful solutions. A seasoned observer (even one who is not a subject matter expert in the field or the industry) can gain a full understanding of what the people in that role need to accomplish, the decisions they have to make, and the information upon which they rely to make good decisions. A perceptive User Experience practitioner will also observe the interactions among different roles as people work together to achieve the best results for their customers and their company.

Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers. What’s in it for the customers being studied? You’ll provide them with valuable feedback that will help them reinforce their core competencies and improve their practices. As a result, they will value their relationship with your company even more.

A Persona in Context

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

1. This illustration highlights the dispatcher as he makes one of the many decisions that he faces every day: what vehicle and driver team to assign to a job. The cloud bubbles indicate factors that impact his decision. The Common Context is all the information that is used by the various roles represented. Those pieces of information upon which the dispatcher will base his decision are highlighted in bold.

ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERS IN THEIR CONTEXT

User experience best practices.

We have discussed the importance of including user experience (UX) methods and practices throughout product development projects 1 as well as customer co-design initiatives. And we have provided details on how to optimize telephone and in-person individual and group interviews. 2

Now let’s look at the additional insights that you can obtain by visiting B2B customers as they are doing their jobs.

Understanding the Organization and its Goals

Even if you provide offerings for a single role within an organization, you still need to understand how the entire organization runs. For example, if you are offering a reservation system targeted for a restaurant host/hostess, you need to understand whether the number of reservations impact how many servers and line cooks need to be available; if reservations are required; if parties of a specific size can only reserve at certain hours; and how, ideally, the restaurant would want to tie the reservation system into any point of sale system or back-office database.

Things that you should try to find out before approaching an organization about a customer visit include:

• The overarching goals that your proposed offering can help achieve. (E.g., improved performance, reduced paperwork, fewer human errors, increased revenue potential, etc.).
• The critical roles of the people who would be using the proposed solution, and how they fit in the organization.

Arranging the Customer Visit. Arranging a customer visit isn’t as simple as making a phone call. To gain access to the people and information that you want, you need someone reasonably high up in the organization to grant the right permissions and make sure everyone will be available. Typically, the best way to find the right person is to go through your sales organization. The account rep will know who is in charge and have the authority. It can sometimes be difficult to get the sales person on board; sales reps are very protective of their accounts and don’t want to rock the boat. You therefore need someone with clout at your end to make it clear that these customer visits are a priority, and members of the sales team are expected to provide access to the customer.

Once you are in contact with the right person at the organization, you should spell out what you hope to accomplish during the visit, what access and information you would ideally like to have, and what value you can offer the company in return.

What You Want to Accomplish. Explain the purpose of the visit: “We are working on a next-generation solution for emergency room registration personnel that will more easily allow them to capture a patient’s information and communicate that information to the ER medical staff as well as flow the information into any back-end systems. We would like to spend time with some registrars, duty nurses, and accounts payable clerks to understand exactly what they need and how we can help.” Be specific about what you are asking for. For example ...

***ENDNOTES***

1) See " How to Think About Your Customer Experience and User Experience Design Strategy ," by Ronni Marshak and Patricia Seybold, June 23, 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/psgp06-23-11cc

2) See " Tips for Interviewing Customers, Partners, and Stakeholders ," by Ronni Marshak, January 22, 2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/htt01-22-09cc

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• The 25 Most Important Customer Experience Questions Answered

This is a great customer experience summary from Christopher Koch at SAP.

Yes, we’ve done the work so you don’t have to. Our eyes still glowing red from the pain of poring over the arcane verbosity of dozens of academic research papers (though a few interesting books helped ease the inflammation; some are noted below), we’ve compiled a list of what we think are the most important questions to ask about the customer experience and, based on our research, come up with the clearest, simplest, and most complete answers to those questions. Please let us know if you agree.

Q. What is customer experience and why does it matter?

Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company. But some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions: What do your customers think about you? What do your customers do based on their perception of you?

Q. Why these two questions?

Because customer loyalty is the closest thing to a holy grail in customer experience and these two questions represent the two components of customer loyalty: “attitudinal loyalty,” which means having a favourable mental impression of a company, and “behavioural loyalty,” which means that they don’t just like you, they buy from you – and keep buying from you. Research shows that attitudinal loyalty plays the biggest role in customer loyalty. If customers have a positive emotional outlook towards the customer experience, especially when measured against a competitor, they are more likely to buy from you and become loyal (repeat purchases). Research shows that customers’ evaluations of their experiences mirror the emotions they display during the interactions they have with companies as well as the feelings they experience after the encounter. If those emotions are negative, you can kiss sales and loyalty goodbye.

Q. Isn’t customer experience just another name for customer service?

No. Customer service is just one slice of the customer experience. Customers only contact customer service when they have a problem. As authors Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine put it in their excellent book Outside In, “Equating customer service with customer experience is like saying that a safety net is a trapeze act … If the performer has to use the net then something is wrong with the show.”

Q. So what should be my goals for improving customer experience?

You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that satisfaction does not necessarily lead to loyalty. For example, a customer could be satisfied with her experience with you but if a competitor offers something comparable or better she may buy from them next time. Customer experience efforts should drive towards making you customers’ preferred choice. (This distinction between satisfaction and preference is what has helped Frederick Reichheld make millions with his Net Promoter Score methodology.)

Q. But what if my company only sells to a customer once or infrequently? Why should I care about experience and loyalty?

Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.

Q. How do I know whether my customer experience needs improvement?

You can’t necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online); they’ll simply go to a competitor, or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:

• Is our market share slipping?
• Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
• Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
• Are we getting fewer recommendations and favourable reviews online and in social media?
• How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)

Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.

Q. How much do my actual products and services factor into customer experience?

Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill: product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalisation have made it much easier for competitors to crank out “good enough” substitutes.

But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.

Q. What are the most important components of the customer experience?

It’s not so much the individual components themselves, such as a Web site or a call centre (though those are certainly important); it’s more about whether the individual touch points contribute to creating a positive impression in customers’ minds. Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:

Trust. This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers don’t feel that they can trust the interaction points (say a Web site) or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase.

Research says that trust consists of two main components:

• Confidence. Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service
• Benevolence. Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customers’ self-interest above their own
• Low effort and sacrifice. Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort

Another issue is the tradeoff between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing. In their book The Experience Economy, authors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore call this “customer sacrifice.” If the gap between what the customer wants and what the company offers is too great – for example, a cable TV customer has to subscribe to 10 extra channels she doesn’t want to get the one she does want – the experience generates negative emotions.

Positive emotion. Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.

Personalisation. Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalising the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

Q. How good does my customer experience need to be?

In any relationship with a company, customers expect – or at least hope – that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable, and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates a negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.

However, some researchers believe that customers’ perceived effort isn’t just about what they have to do, it’s also tied into how they feel. In their book The Effortless Experience, authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi found that only 35% of customers’ perceived effort had to do with exertion; 65% had to do with their emotional reactions during and after the encounter. So easy must go hand in hand with enjoyable.

Q. How do I determine how much I can or should spend to improve customer experience?

If, through competitive analysis and surveys of customers, it’s clear that your customer experience lags behind your competitors then improving customer experience should be considered part of the cost of doing business. Customers can research you and your competitors much more easily now through the web and social media. The holes in your experience will be revealed, causing negative emotion and an exodus to competitors.

Of course, a grocery chain doesn’t have the same profit margins as a luxury hotel chain. However, even companies with limited budgets can try experimenting with small pilots to see how changes in the customer experience impact sales, satisfaction, and loyalty. The percentages of extra revenue, improved loyalty, and increased profits gained from the pilots can help determine the budget for customer experience improvements.

Q. Where should I begin to improve the customer experience?

Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research by the Corporate Executive Board outlined in the book The Effortless Experience found that moving customers from rating the experience “below expectations” to “meets expectations” gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.

To do this, companies need to look outside by surveying customers about their experiences. Companies also need to look inside by surveying employees (and partners and external providers), about the frustrations they encounter in trying to accomplish their roles in the customer experience.

Q. What role should employees play?

Employee emotions are as important as customer emotions in the customer experience. Employees and managers who feel unable to do their jobs as they perceive they should be done – and feel powerless to change the situation – become unhappy and less able and willing to put out the effort it takes to keep customers happy. Rather than speak up about problems, they simply focus on doing what they are told, what research company Forrester calls a “culture of compliance.”

Yet let’s not be too hard on employees and managers here. An individual employee or manager may not be able to tell where the bumps in the road are. Employees may be happy and feeling confident about their contributions while being completely unaware that they are in fact causing problems further down the line because they are isolated from the rest of the experience process and can’t see the negative impacts.

Q. So how do I identify where the problems are in the customer experience?

Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and outsourcers. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.

To create the map, you need your most knowledgeable process participants; ideally, those who have unbroken visibility out to what customers experience, as well as to the internal processes and experiences of employees and managers. Where the line of sight is broken, bring in people who can fill in the gaps. This is best done as a group exercise using the proverbial whiteboard and sticky notes, so that everyone has the opportunity to comment and contribute to determining where the problems are and debunking myths about where people might have thought the problems were, but weren’t.

Of course, this all presumes that the different areas involved in the customer experience in your company are even speaking to one another, much less willing to collaborate on fixing problems. Old habits, old grudges – and old silos – die hard. There should be a high-level executive leading the customer experience change effort, one who is a charismatic convincer (and decider), and who has a direct mandate from the CEO to get everyone to play nice with each other.

Q. What is the role of digital in improving the customer experience?

Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time-consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centres, for example, are as old as a greying dad – even a few grandfathers.

Why we are still on hold

And this is the rub. It’s one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it’s quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually that the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration – and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it – simply did not exist.

Customisation has created a nightmare

To make matters worse, companies have layered customisation on top of customisation over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases, and the internet. They’ve made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.

New technologies will help – eventually

The good news is that technology has finally caught up with the customer experience problem. Cloud technologies make application integration easier and in-memory databases have the power to hold massive amounts of information from multiple systems together in real time; that would have seemed like science fiction to mainframe developers of the sixties and seventies.

However, we are still in the early wave of the transformation. Companies remain cautious about discarding old systems that work well in favour of new technologies that are less proven. And though companies have a lot of freedom to make changes in their website experiences, the best Web site is only as good as the data behind it. Customer experience executives would do well to make the CIO their best friend right now.

In the meantime, companies do what they have always done. They pave the potholes in the customer experience with people. People fill the experience potholes – and pay the price.

Companies use people to try to ameliorate the long hold times and the call transfers that stem from having to navigate among different archaic systems and process workarounds. It’s an extremely difficult job and it’s why call centre turnover rates are so high.

Q. What is “emotional labour?”

Most people who work directly with customers these days have been trained to suffer. Researchers have even developed a term for it: “emotional labour.” Studies have shown that employees expend a lot of mental energy in the customer experience, such as having to express happiness when they don’t feel it and having to suppress anger and other inappropriate behaviours when customers treat them abusively.

The toll of this emotional labor can become so high that employees can suffer from researchers call “emotional exhaustion,” which expresses itself in burnout, feelings of low accomplishment, and a kind of emotional numbness in which employees are no longer able to summon the positive attitude and empathy that are so necessary to a successful customer experience.

Q. So does that mean I should be looking for a certain type of person to fill roles in the customer experience?

For those who interact directly with customers, yes. Research says that extroverts do better in customer experience roles because they are more naturally inclined to want to interact with others. But these extroverts should also have the ability to do three things: Regulate inner emotions Tolerate ambiguity Enjoy helping others In combination, these factors give employees extra endurance when it comes to dealing with people and more ability to suppress inappropriate behaviour (even when customers deserve it).

Q. How should I train employees to act during the customer experience?

Even the best employees can burn out if they are forced to adopt what researchers call “surface acting,” in which employees have to put on the proverbial smile and feign emotions that they aren’t feeling during an encounter with customers. Part of the stress is that customers can sometimes detect the falseness of employees’ emotions, which research says causes customers to react negatively.

Instead, companies should focus on training employees to offer two things:

1. Treat customers with empathy. This means hearing customers out and treating them with dignity and respect at every point in the interaction and acting to defuse emotional tension – without having to put on false emotions such as a painted on smile.

2. Offer customers justice. Employees need to get on the same wavelength as the customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer’s mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.

In part, this depends on the degree to which employees are allowed to exercise their own independence and judgment. But it also depends on the preset outcomes that the company builds around the experience. For example, are customer service representatives given the freedom to send a replacement product for one that is one month – or one year – past warranty? Companies need to constantly revisit these outcomes to maintain a good balance between giving employees the power to give customers experiences that lead to positive emotions while not breaking the bank.

Q. To what extent should I try to replace the human customer experience with a digital one?

There’s clear evidence that digital contributes a lot to make the experience easy and fast, especially in transactional types of relationships such as buying a book on Amazon, which customers like. Digital is also great for information-intensive experiences, such as complex products and services that require customers to do a lot of research before buying. And of course, digital experiences are much cheaper for companies, though most surveys show that companies do a poor job of managing them — especially when it comes to coordinating across digital and human channels.  Indeed, a good customer experience can rarely be completely online or offline. Increasingly, it’s the coordination of the two that matters most.

Digital may be great for easy, but we still need humans for when things become hard – such as when that product that was so easy to order online breaks offline. Research shows that customers place a high value on the quality of the relationship they have with companies. In that regard, there is no replacement for human-to-human interaction – at least not until virtual reality hits the mainstream (which could be sooner than you think). Until then, careful placement of a pleasurable human interaction into the customer experience when competitors are trying to pave everything over with digital can have a major impact.

An example is ING, the Dutch bank that entered the U.S. market in the nineties with an online experience only – no branches. But in 2001, the company decided to create a human experience, not with a traditional bank branch but with a café in New York City. Instead of serving up deposit slips, employees serve coffee, treats (sales of which help defray the costs of running the offices), and financial planning advice. The original café was a big hit and ING (whose U.S. online business was purchased by Capital One for $9 billion in 2012) began building cafes in major metro areas around the country. Capital One has continued the expansion plan while other banks have been shutting down branches or imitating the approach.

Q. What if I don’t have the resources for a “delight-the-customer” approach to customer experience?

Companies that invest in delighting the customer without first making sure they are at least meeting the expectations of the vast majority of customers are probably wasting their money. Getting a free gift card for a restaurant is meaningless if the food and service aren’t so hot to begin with.  Plus, giving stuff away or sending your employees out on time-consuming missions to bring smiles to customers’ faces is expensive – 10-20% more, according to executives surveyed by authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi in The Effortless Experience.

The first priorities should be to drive down customer effort and sacrifice.

However, delighting the customer does not necessarily need to be focused on going above and beyond the call of duty. There are less expensive ways to do it (see the “customer experience as theatre” examples below).

Q. Okay, let’s say customers say the experience is easy and fast. Is that really enough to build loyalty over the long term?

Given the current sorry state of the customer experience in most industries, yes. But let’s assume for a moment that you are the world’s master of easy, fast, reliable, and convenient. What happens when a competitor catches up? What’s next?

Some researchers argue that there are two other ways to differentiate your customer experience that are harder for competitors to match:

Customer experience as theatre Personalisation

Q. What is customer experience as theatre?

Author B. Joseph Pine II says that Best Buy’s Geek Squad has taken the classic military motif of the uniform a step farther by adding a dose of humour and humility. The Geek Squad purposely dresses its employees in an outfit that still gets nerds hung from their underwear in gym lockers around the world: white button-down shirts, thin, clip-on black ties, black pants, and white socks.

Each employee also gets a titanium badge designed to look just like a policeman’s badge. The geek squad drives Volkswagen Beetles painted black and white to look like extremely awkward and ineffective police cars. It is the nerd as the anti-hero hero, here to save the day for you and your computer.

Theatre need not cost much.

Through this minimalist and, Pine is careful to point out, inexpensive, bit of theatre, the Geek Squad, which Best Buy bought when it was a tiny startup, has grown exponentially and become a household brand name. Is it because of the name and the uniforms, or is it simply because the Squad offers better service and is tied to Best Buy, which has long been a household brand? Impossible to tell, but once again, the clip-ons haven’t hurt.

Pine, who is the co-author, with James H. Gilmore, of The Experience Economy, believes that any company, with enough creativity and a good employee screening and training program, can create the same kind of differentiated experience. “Whenever employees are in front of your customers, those employees are acting,” says Pine. “They need to act in a way that engages the audience. And it does not require any expenditure. It requires that you direct your workers to act, that you give them roles to play and you help them characterise those goals on the business stage.”

Though he acknowledges that he has nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back up his theory, Pine argues that performance is a way to stand apart in a crowded field and create customer preference rather than mere satisfaction.

Q. What about personalisation? Can that create a differentiated customer experience?

Personalisation is controversial but holds promise because it can be another form of easy. Though we usually think of customisation as adding more, it can also mean simplifying the experience by removing everything except what the customer truly wants. This is particularly true on the web, where websites and e-commerce portals overstuffed with offers and information can trip that magic switch of frustration that kills sales and loyalty.

Sweeping away the noise and personalising a Web site to a customer’s tastes – we will look back on Amazon’s recommendation engine as the stone-age prototype for this sort of thing – can reduce customer effort and sacrifice. Research has shown that offering relevant information and simplifying the experience results in more customer trust and satisfaction and more sales.

More importantly, as databases become ever-more fast and powerful, we can add a powerful new aspect to the digital customer experience: learning. At the core of recommendation engines like Amazon’s and Netflix is machine learning – the ability to memorise your actions and preferences and use algorithms to serve up personalised offers.

However, personalisation treads on the same dangerous turf as efforts to “delight” the customer. It can be complex and expensive. And if it only leads to satisfaction rather than a positive preference for the brand, that money may be wasted. Indeed, one research study found that for customers that were already satisfied with their experience, personalisation had limited benefits. Only in instances where the customer had a high degree of trust in the company but low levels of satisfaction did personalisation make a significant difference. Therefore, it’s best to start with a pilot project to see if personalisation will make a difference before investing too much.

Q. Personalisation also raises issues of privacy, right?

In order to make recommendations and personalise web pages, companies need to gather information. And as we’ve all learned, various companies and governments have stepped all over people’s privacy in order to gather data about them.

Businesses need to build a customer experience model that helps individuals understand the data that companies want to collect about them, the methods the companies will use to make behavioural predictions, and the trustworthiness they can expect from those predictions.

Here are five ways to use Big Data to be cool, not creepy.

Articulate “What’s in it for me?” Research has found that the majority of consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom are willing to have trusted retailers use some of their personal data in order to present personalised and targeted products, services, recommendations, and offers. But the value has to be crystal clear, no matter who’s tracking the data. For example, insurance provider Progressive and Tesla Motors have convinced car owners to have devices installed in their vehicles that track where and how they drive. In exchange, customers potentially get lower car insurance rates (an average 10% to 15% reduction on premiums) or improved service, such as supercharger stations near their most frequent routes.

Be transparent about the data relationship. Slapping a dense data use policy written in legalese on the corporate Web site does little to enlighten customers. Instead, companies should think about the customer data transaction – what information the customer is giving them, how they’re using it, and what the result will be – and try to describe it as simply as possible.

Let customers learn about each other. In 2011, Procter & Gamble created a “Mean Stinks” campaign for Secret deodorant that encouraged girl-to-girl anti-bullying posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The pages let participants send apologies to those they had bullied; view videos; and share tips, tools, and challenges with their peers. Besides helping girls, it drove a 16% market share increase in the Secret deodorant line.

Experiment and build trust. Building a Big Data strategy that improves customer experience takes time and continual tweaking. Google’s Autocomplete isn’t always on point. Amazon’s suggestions sometimes go astray. But as customers build up a history of experience with a brand, they see that data is used for their benefit more often than not. They develop a trust in the exchange of data for value. They see where it came from. And they forgive the missteps.

Make the distinction between little data and Big Data. “I steer companies to really focus on leveraging the data that customers give them in the normal process of doing business first and think about the third-party stuff later,” says Elea McDonnell Feit, assistant professor of Marketing at Drexel University. “At least 80% of the value you can generate from customer data comes from using the information customers reveal about themselves directly to you.”

Q. Do some customers deserve more personalisation than others?

Given that personalisation can be complex and expensive, it could pay to segment customers into those most likely to respond to personalisation.  Some companies have created composite personas of customers to do more broad-brush personalisation that doesn’t cost as much as one-to-one efforts. For example, you could create a set of categories across the customer base based on past purchase history and other data and create separate customer experiences for each category.

Q. How do I determine the ROI of customer experience improvements?

Unfortunately for customers (and in the long run, companies, too), there’s really only one measure that matters: switching costs. If there are no viable alternatives in the market, or if switching to a competitor would cost more than the product or service itself or involve so much customer effort that it doesn’t seem worth it, customer experience becomes less important to revenues. Research shows that customers who perceive high switching costs are more likely to stick with a company that provides a less-than-stellar (but acceptable – again anger and conflict trump all other factors) experience, thereby reducing the potential returns from investing in improving that experience.

But even companies with high switching costs or lack of competition neglect customer experience at their peril. Cable companies, for example, are feeling the pain today as disruptive pay-per-view entertainment options such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime lure away cable customers who have long wished for an alternative but have had no other choices – until now.

Loyalty over time matters.

But let’s assume that you are in a competitive industry. The most important impact that a good customer experience has is in customer loyalty. Because it costs more to acquire new customers than to maintain relationships with existing customers, most experts point to loyalty as the decisive metric. More specifically, they cite lifetime customer value – usually computed as the revenue from each customer over the length of the relationship.

Author Frederick F. Reichheld puts a finer point on the metric in his book The Loyalty Effect, saying that companies should measure the lifetime profit per customer minus the cost of acquiring them in the first place. The problem here is that few companies even measure revenue per customer over time, much less take it to Reichheld’s ideal level. And not all researchers agree with Reichheld that profits matter more than revenues.

Three other metrics to consider

In their book Outside In, authors Manning and Bodine modelled three areas where companies can benefit from improved customer experience that is slightly easier to measure: 1. More incremental purchases from existing customers 2. Higher retained revenue as a result of reduced churn 3. New sales driven by word of mouth They found that in the hotel and wireless industries, small improvements in customer loyalty led to major gains – in the billions – in revenue because competition in those industries is so intense and switching costs are so low. However, even in less volatile industries where switching costs are higher, such as health insurance, Manning and Bodine saw opportunities to gain revenue in the tens of millions by improving the customer experience.

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Neil ran his first SAP transformation programme in his early twenties. He spent the next 21 years working both client side and for various consultancies running numerous SAP programmes. After successfully completing over 15 full lifecycles he took a senior leadership/board position and his work moved onto creating the same success for others.

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.css-14us1xl{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;white-space:pre-wrap;} Customer experience marketing: A detailed guide

Get to know more about customer experience marketing (CEM), its important, key elements and challenges — along with some real-life examples.

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• What is customer experience marketing?

5 reasons why customer experience marketing is important

Challenges of customer experience marketing, 6 key elements of customer experience marketing, interplay between marketing and cx, why choose sprinklr for customer experience management  , .css-1qemmfx{font-weight:700;} what is customer experience marketing.

Customer experience marketing is a strategy that focuses on delivering consistently positive customer experiences at all points of contact and not just at the time of purchase.

It seeks to understand customers’ preferences at different journey stages, manage interactions at physical and digital touchpoints and deliver personalized experiences that foster an emotional connection with the brand.

Examples of good customer experience strategy

Before we dive into real-world examples of exceptional customer experience marketing, here are some ways you can improve your CX with respect to customer service operations.

Foster a customer-centric culture across your organization and ensure customers are always at the heart of your operations, to deliver great experiences constantly.  

Ensure customers have easy and constant access to support by providing 24/7 omnichannel customer service across traditional and modern support channels.

Understand customer needs and personalize care through customer interaction analytics — and know well about user behavior and preferences.

Provide timely responses to customer queries and reviews across all communication platforms to ensure your customers feel valued.

Constantly measure and monitor critical metrics to identify any issues in performance, and refine your strategies based on insights from this data.

Make customer feedback a part of your operations — regularly collect feedback through customer surveys and know how to make your products and services better.

Businesses worldwide are taking customer experience marketing seriously, banking on its effectiveness and insights to improve their customer service quality as well, which in turn improves their overall CX. Here are some ways brands have implemented positive CX changes with their customer base.

Slack: Slack, a popular cloud-based communication platform, focuses on user-centric design and seamless onboarding to deliver simple, powerful customer experiences. Their strategy emphasizes simplicity, enabling effortless collaboration within teams. With self-service and learning resources like interactive tutorials and knowledge base , they ensure users quickly grasp the platform's capabilities — enhancing productivity and satisfaction in the workplace and converting their customers into brand loyalists.

Adobe Creative Cloud: Adobe's Creative Cloud excels in customer experience through its " Creative Residency " program. This initiative involves selecting aspiring artists to work on projects using Adobe tools while providing them mentorship and exposure. By nurturing emerging talent among their customer and showcasing the potential of their software, Adobe strengthens brand loyalty and fosters a vibrant community of creatives — while also delivering enriching experiences that their customers will never forget.

Airbnb: Airbnb strives to offer superior CX despite limited control over listed properties. Airbnb is a rental services platform and ensuring uniform CX is often difficult since the brand does not own the properties. Yet, the company seeks to offer superior CX every time by providing similar welcome experiences and being responsive to customers’ needs. Airbnb has adopted an extensive omnichannel customer service approach, delivering customer care on multiple channels including email, phone, social media, messaging channels, chatbots and SMS. The company offers 24/7, almost instantaneous support using these channels. They also meet with customers and hosts during the event “One AirBnB” to collect feedback.

Also read: Customer Experience Management: What is CXM & its Strategies

Customer experience marketing becomes the foundation for great customer relationships. It directly connects your user to your brand and its values, and makes them feel heard and seen — and it doesn’t just stop there. Below are some of the other key benefits of customer experience marketing.

1. Competitive advantage

Nothing can beat competition compared to the experience that you offer customers. Multiple positive experiences are required to make up for one negative customer experience, which will invariably affect your team’s efficiency. Beat your competition by providing experiences that customers will always cherish.

2. Builds customer loyalty

A positive CX ensures customer retention and loyalty. Consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints enables a high customer retention rate, resulting in repeat visits, a positive brand image and long-term association with the company.

3. Drives revenue  

Positive, satisfying experiences lead to customers spending more dollars per purchase. It also results in impulsive buys, resulting in higher revenue for the company. The average customer lifetime value (the total amount a customer spends with your business over a lifetime) is also higher when you offer positive experiences.

4. Reduced costs

While providing a unified customer experience can seem costly, it in fact reduces the cost of customer acquisition and retention. By building customer loyalty, attrition is reduced and your retention costs also go down. This improved CX can even serve as a competitive edge for your brand, which will help bring down acquisition costs since your audience will seek your brand by themselves.

5. Higher brand equity

Brand equity refers to the brand’s value in the eyes of the customers. Customer satisfaction and brand equity are higher when a brand delivers on its promises, provides quality products and is responsive to customers’ needs.

High brand equity also helps with damage control in times of crisis and with escalations . Customers will find it easier to trust your service again because of the numerous positive experiences they’ve had, also helping them re-establish trust in your brand very easily.

Although CEM sounds like a fairly straightforward function that can be implemented and executed easily, several factors might affect your CX and the way your business functions in general. Below are some challenges one might face while developing a solid CEM strategy that aims to provide great CX.

Data privacy issues : In an attempt to engage with the customers each time they visit your website, social media pages or store, you may end up overwhelming them and breaching their privacy.

Enabling customer self-service is a surefire way to reduce friction and customer frustration since not many users prefer a bot or sales representative following them around to help. Use data to segment customers based on their preferences and then prepare specific CEM strategies for each segment.

Cost and time : CEM requires investment in resources and time. You must invest in technology solutions to collect customer preference data and run necessary campaigns on various platforms. Moreover, consistently doing it means the CEM budget is an ongoing spend rather than a one-time budget, like for a marketing campaign.

Data constraints: Data is the key to building successful CEM strategies. You need data on customer preferences and behavior to improve customer experience . Wrong or outdated data can result in your CEM strategy backfiring. Additionally, you also need to invest in data security tools to ensure compliance with regulations wherever customer data is collected and stored.

Customer experience marketing strategy needs to be scrutinized before implementation. Disconnected experiences lead to customer dissatisfaction and higher attrition. You must prepare detailed roadmaps of your customer experience strategy before investing in them.

Here are some key elements essential to customer experience marketing:

1. Customer personas  

Understanding the demographics, interests and behavior of your customers is the key to delivering engaging digital customer experiences . Build personas for your different customer types by studying their content preferences, device usage, satisfaction drivers and decision-making processes. 

Create tailored customer experience programs for your different customer personas. For example, a company selling anti-virus software will have to deal with both individual customers and other businesses and their buying patterns and needs will be very different.

2. End-to-end customer journey mapping  

Customers take different routes to reach your brand and make a purchase. Mapping customer journeys using data-driven solutions will help you understand the touchpoints and what actions need to be taken at each touchpoint.

It’s best for you to revisit your customer journey maps periodically — maybe once in six months or once a year — since customer preferences and the market environment keeps evolving and your customer journey might have to be modified accordingly.

Read more: How to do customer journey mapping for CX improvement

3. Service availability  

The availability of services is key to ensuring a good customer experience. For example, if most of your customers cannot raise their service requests within the usual business day, ensure you have customer service professionals in the evening and night shifts as well. 

Technology solutions such as chatbots , email autoresponders and interactive voice responses (IVR) help improve your customer service availability without costing much.

4. Accessibility of programs

While designing customer experience programs, make sure your resources are accessible to all types of prospects and clients. For example, your website user experience should be suited for global audiences – people with special needs, language and time zone constraints etc. Add elements to the experience to cater to a wider audience.

5. Iterations and service design improvements

Getting the customer experience journey right on your first attempt may not always be possible. Even if you do get it right, you still need to continuously work on it to ensure it stays relevant and is in line with the latest trends and technological advancements. Good CX is an iterative, ongoing journey — make sure you monitor your key customer experience metrics to optimize your CX continuously.

6. Customer data and social listening

Accurate customer data including information on customer interests, culture, aspirations, etc. is key to building engaging CX programs. Social listening can help detect customer perception about your brand or competitors via interactions on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other networks.

Also read: 10 Customer Experience Management Quotes from Power Influencers

Often, the delivered customer experience and journey ends up different from the intended experience. It could be because of a variety of reasons — including budget constraints, inability to execute the planned experience or communication gaps between the teams involved.

That’s why the team(s) involved with working and formulating your CX should be closely associated with the marketing and sales teams. In most organizations, the CX teams sit within the marketing organization and share the same leader. This ensures the CX does not vary from the promised experience.

Here’s how you should stitch together your CX and marketing initiatives more closely:

Consistent and brand-compliant messaging : Customers today interact with your brand via multiple channels. The touchpoint timelines might also vary, especially with social media customer service . The marketing team must provide a consistent experience in terms of customer service quality, query resolution, product demos and content.    Having brand and style guidelines for customer communications and all marketing collateral can ensure uniform customer experience throughout customers’ purchase journey. This also helps induce brand recall.

Data-driven strategies : Use data to build your CX strategy. This helps avoid opinion-driven CX marketing. Marketers often tend to see themselves in the customers, forgetting that there might be traits that differ. Using data from customer interaction analytics to build CX and marketing strategies can help avoid inconsistencies and wrong approaches.

Tight collaboration : Providing great customer experiences is the responsibility of every organization member. Share guidelines on customer interactions and CX programs. The CX team should collaborate with other marketing teams, sales, and other business functions to provide uniform customer experiences.

Customers shift between channels when interacting with brands, and they expect brands to maintain continuity in conversations irrespective of the channel. This consistency and continuity is expected across all channels in the customer journey, which is difficult to achieve with point solutions and disconnected communication channels.

Unlike point solutions, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform enables brands to gauge the marketplace, build customer personas using data and provide a unified customer experience — all from a single platform. With Sprinklr Service , you can elevate your customer experience to the next level by delivering seamless, personalized conversations across your customer’s favorite channels.

Deliver exceptional customer experiences and manage them end to end with a powerful, unified platform

Provide customer service across 30+ traditional and digital channels with our omnichannel customer service solution

Enable agents to provide superior support with complete context using our Unified Agent Console

Leverage Sprinklr Service as an advanced customer service analytics and reporting solution that analyzes customer behaviors, preferences and patterns and helps provide relevant support

Ready to take Sprinklr for a spin? Sign up for a free, fully functional trial of Sprinklr Service and experience the potential of a unified customer experience management solution.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Customer relationship management (CRM) includes the practices and strategies a business uses to manage and analyze customer relationships. Customer experience management (CEM) uses insights from CRM and other sources to deliver holistic, positive experiences to customers every time they interact with the brand.

The purpose of customer experience marketing (CEM) is to design brand experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. This drives customer loyalty, retention and improves your brand’s reputation.

Hyper-personalization, omni-channel experiences, use of AR and VR technologies, chats and sustainable marketing are some of the trends in customer experience marketing in 2023. Request a demo today!

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In the dynamic world of hospitality, the ability to manage and enhance the guest experience often spells the difference between those who win and those who get left behind. With today’s travelers raising their expectations while being exposed to a seemingly unlimited number of hospitality solutions, it is critical that operators deliver experiences that reflect the lives of their customers. 

What is Guest Experience?

Guest experience refers to the overall impression and satisfaction that a guest has during their interactions with a hospitality brand or establishment, such as hotels, restaurants, resorts, and attractions. It encompasses every aspect of their stay or visit, from the booking process and arrival to the accommodation, services, and departure.

A positive guest experience involves going beyond basic customer service. (More on this later.) In hospitality, factors that contribute to the guest experience include personalized attention, efficient service, cleanliness, ambiance, health, wellness, and safety, and the overall atmosphere of the establishment, among others.

Operators today should strive to exceed guest expectations and create memorable guest experiences to encourage repeat visits and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. By understanding and anticipating the needs and preferences of your guests, you make them feel valued and ensure that every touchpoint in their journey contributes to positive and enjoyable experiences.

The Importance of Guest Experience Management

Guest experience management is vital for hospitality brands looking to build a positive reputation, foster customer loyalty, achieve competitive differentiation, and ultimately drive long-term success and profitability.

Guest experiences impact reputation. Positive experiences build a favorable reputation, while negative experiences can harm it. With the prevalence of online reviews and social media, managing and enhancing guest experiences is crucial to maintaining a positive brand image.

Positive guest experiences lead to higher customer satisfaction levels. A memorable and positive guest experience drives customer satisfaction and fosters customer loyalty . Happy customers are more likely to choose the same hospitality brand for future stays or visits, while also recommending the brand to others, contributing to repeat business and long-term profitability.

Guest experience differentiates your brand. With travel consumers exposed to seemingly limitless hospitality solutions, providing an exceptional guest experience helps differentiate your brand from competitors. 

Guest experience management drives data-driven decision-making. It often involves collecting and analyzing integrated CX data, which can be valuable for gathering actionable insights, making informed business decisions, improving service offerings, and tailoring experiences to meet customer expectations.

The Difference Between Guest Experience vs. Customer Service

You may be wondering, “What is the difference between managing the guest experience and delivering customer service?” 

Traditionally defined, customer service is the act of taking care of your guests’ needs by providing service and assistance before, during, and after their requirements are met. This is provided, for example, by the receptionist at the front desk checking in hotel guests upon arrival; the tour operator explaining the historical or cultural significance of landmarks in a local area; or the sommelier giving detailed advice about which wines pair best with which dishes. 

Many think of customer service as the act of reacting and responding to guests at certain points of contact: a hotel check-in, a tour, or a restaurant visit. It is often transactional in nature and focuses on meeting immediate needs or resolving issues.

The guest experience encompasses all these touchpoints and is part of a larger strategic effort in which customer service plays a crucial part. 

A single point of contact doesn’t determine the guest experience. It encompasses the entire customer journey — through processes, policies, and people. It can include the guest’s initial awareness or discovery of your brand and can begin long before they set foot in any of your property locations. This means that all interactions and touchpoints the guest has with your brand are considered.

Guest experience isn’t a department. It’s a core value that should involve everyone in your organization, from the C-suite to the front-facing staff. Every team or department, from marketing and sales to front office, customer support, and after-sales, has a stake in managing the guest experience. 

Guest experience management isn’t reactive. You don’t wait for a phone call, an email, or a slew of negative reviews to resolve the guest’s problem or meet their requirements. The premise behind guest experience management is that operators become truly proactive and intuitive, with the goal of seeing through guests’ eyes and better understanding their needs, wants, and expectations.

Key Trends Impacting the Guest Experience in Hospitality

Hospitality is a dynamic industry and new trends continue to emerge, raising expectations in a way that forces operators to rethink boardroom strategies, marketing and sales processes, and business models. Here are some key trends that are currently shaping the guest experience in hospitality.

A Multi-Channel Strategy is Essential

To validate their booking decisions, travel buyers are navigating multiple digital channels to conduct research and find solutions that are suited to their needs. These include online travel agencies (OTAs), social media, mobile apps, and brand websites. Deal-seeking behavior is also on the rise due to the cost of living crisis and record-shattering inflation rates.

A multichannel strategy is therefore essential for hospitality brands looking to reach a broader audience and maximize reach and visibility. Today’s consumers expect seamless and convenient interactions across multiple channels. A multichannel approach allows your organization to meet these expectations and provide guests with the flexibility to engage through their preferred channels.

Each channel should also provide an opportunity for you to collect valuable data about guest behavior, preferences, and booking patterns. By integrating data from multiple channels, you can gain insights into customer trends and make data-driven decisions to improve your marketing and service strategies.

Guests Want More Tailored Experiences

More tailored and personalized experiences, from customized room preferences to targeted offers, are a growing trend in the hospitality sector. Today’s travelers appreciate options and flexibility, choosing providers and operators that go the extra mile to make their stay unique.

Tailored experiences can also create a sense of exclusivity, with things like VIP treatments, exclusive access, and special privileges for repeat guests contributing to a feeling of being valued.

To meet these expectations, a growing number of brands are leveraging customer experience analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand guest preferences and deliver tailored services.

There’s an Increased Demand for Local / Regional Experiences

The rise of the independent traveler means that guests are seeking both extreme personalization and unique, authentic local experiences. Guest experiences that give back to local communities or support the local economy are in demand, as are niche properties, staycations, and holidays and retreats that integrate attractions and activities within the local community where the business operates. More travelers than ever are also drawn to properties that reflect the local character and charm. 

This is why hospitality brands are incorporating local elements into their services, from locally inspired decor to partnerships with local businesses for unique guest experiences. Operators are also focusing more on local and hyperlocal sourcing, establishing close partnerships with farmers, artisans, producers, and suppliers.

Guests are Focused on Health, Safety, and Wellness

While health, cleanliness, and hygiene have always ranked among the top factors for travelers when choosing a hotel property, it has risen to the top of the list in the post-pandemic landscape. When making booking decisions, guests are researching sites that specifically offer cleanliness and safety information. 

This means that operators should double down on efforts to ensure that guests feel safe, secure, and clean. Beyond simply meeting compliance requirements issued by authorities, your company should work to respond to guest expectations amidst heightened sensitivity around cleanliness and safety.

Wellness is also a significant focus, with hotels offering amenities like fitness facilities, healthy dining options, and wellness programs. Some brands are incorporating spa services, mindfulness activities, and sleep-focused amenities to deliver a better experience for guests.

How to Measure Guest Experience

You cannot manage something you aren’t measuring. Hospitality brands can measure the guest experience using these common approaches:

• Guest surveys and feedback forms: Implementing surveys allows guests to provide direct feedback on their experience. To gather both structured and unstructured feedback data, your team can use Likert scales, open-ended questions, and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey methodology. 
• Online reviews and social media listening: Tracking reviews as well as mentions and comments from social media platforms provides a valuable source of unsolicited feedback, which operators can analyze for common themes, areas for improvement, and high-impact issues impacting the guest experience.
• Employee feedback: Gathering feedback from employees who directly interact with guests can offer insights into the guest experience and areas that may need improvement.
• Operational metrics: Monitoring and managing metrics such as check-in/check-out times, room cleanliness, and service response times should help you identify areas where operational efficiency can enhance the overall guest experience.
• Customer experience metrics: Connecting feedback data and operational metrics to customer experience KPIs such as NPS, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) lets your organization achieve a more complete and accurate view of the guest experience. 
• Loyalty program engagement: The level of engagement guests have with your loyalty program will also help you look into repeat bookings, member satisfaction, and redemption patterns in order to gauge overall loyalty and guest satisfaction.

By combining insights from these various sources, hospitality brands can get a more comprehensive understanding of the guest experience and make data-driven decisions that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How to Enhance the Guest Experience: Best Practices

Learning how to enhance the guest experience is essential for attracting and retaining customers. Here are some best practices applied by today’s top hospitality brands.

Improve Guest Communication

Effective communication plays a crucial role in shaping the overall guest experience. It can enhance guest satisfaction, foster loyalty, and contribute to positive reviews; meanwhile, poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, and negative feedback. Throughout the customer journey, ensure that you’re sharing relevant information with your guests to make their visit or stay as comfortable as possible.

• Pre-arrival: Information about amenities, policies, and local attractions enables guests to plan their visit and enhances their overall experience.
• Check-in: Smooth and efficient check-in procedures contribute to a positive first impression. Welcoming and friendly communication sets the tone for the guest, making them feel valued and comfortable.
• Problem Resolution: Handling guest complaints or issues quickly can turn a negative experience into a positive one, and helps demonstrate your commitment to guest satisfaction.
• Post-stay: Seeking feedback through surveys or follow-up emails allows guests to express their opinions and provides an opportunity for your company to address any concerns. 

Map the End-to-End Guest Journey

Customer journey mapping allows hospitality brands to gain insights into guest behavior, preferences, and pain points at each stage of their interaction with the brand. Understanding how guests navigate their journey provides valuable information for improving services and anticipating needs. 

Mapping the customer journey also helps identify various touchpoints where guests interact with the brand, both online and offline. This includes pre-booking research, booking processes, on-site experiences, and post-stay interactions. Recognizing these touchpoints allows brands to optimize each stage of the journey. With a customer journey map, you can pinpoint areas that may need improvement or innovation to enhance the overall guest experience.

Embrace Digital Transformation

Hospitality consumers demand tools that simplify and streamline the entire booking or buying process — from research and planning, through engagement, to the post-sales phase. This makes it critical to invest in smart technology that will better engage consumers and make every part of the customer journey pain-free.

Undergoing a digital transformation should help streamline your operations, reducing wait times and improving the overall guest experience.

Having free Wi-Fi for guests isn’t enough. Investment areas you can focus on include digital and contactless services (like contactless payments, voice control, and biometrics); mobile check-ins; smart home devices in rooms; AI-powered chatbots on your digital properties; virtual tours that recreate a digital environment for consumers to picture themselves in; and instant messaging channels that direct guests to management for any questions and issues. For larger chains and enterprise-level organizations, deploying a local listing management solution should also help maximize your visibility and support your brand’s multichannel strategy.

Personalize the Guest Experience

Personalization plays a significant role in meeting the diverse preferences and expectations of travelers. It also fosters a sense of loyalty among guests. When a company consistently delivers personalized services and memorable experiences, guests are more likely to choose the same brand for future stays, leading to repeat business and long-term loyalty.

Examples of tactics used to personalize the guest experience include: 

• Optimizing your local business listings and refining your marketing content based on guest personas 
• Providing options to specify room preferences 
• Giving personalized welcome letters and amenities
• Creating targeted offers and promotions (for example: emailing guests with their membership details, unique vacation ideas, or personal offers that are in line with their preferences and expectations)
• Curating local experiences and recommendations
• Incorporating voice-activated assistants in rooms

Personalization is impossible if operators don’t have the ability and the means to relate to and understand the needs of their guests. To address this, you can implement technological tools like a customer relationship management (CRM) or customer experience management (CEM) solution, which analyzes big data to create highly customized one-to-one interactions between the guest and the host at scale.

Leverage Guest Experience Surveys to Capture Insights

Guest experience surveys help your team capture valuable insights essential to improving your brand, products, services, and overall customer experience. Organizations that can distribute surveys and solicit feedback efficiently also often have a more complete understanding of their guests and can more easily measure satisfaction and loyalty.

The challenge is to move beyond simply collecting data. As part of your strategy, consider investing in a Voice of the Customer program or guest experience software to ensure you are hearing your guests and extracting rich, meaningful insights from their feedback.

Invest in Online Reputation Management

One of the most important aspects of guest experience management in hospitality is your ability to build a strong brand reputation and respond to online reviews and customer feedback. People are drawn to brands that know how to respond to negative reviews, promptly answer phone calls and emails, and proactively join conversations on social media. Online reviews are especially important:

• 94% of consumers say a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business. 
• 53% of guests expect management to respond to negative reviews within 7 days, but 63% say that a business has never responded to their review. 
• 45% of consumers are more likely to choose an operator that knows how to respond to negative reviews. 

If a guest wrote a 5-star review or gave your team a nice compliment via email, take the time to say thank you. If the feedback is negative or the review came with a low rating, acknowledge the guest and work quickly on resolving any issues related to their experience.

Power Your Guest Experience Management with InMoment

The future of hospitality is bright for customer-centric operators, restaurants, and hotels that are demonstrating a commitment to managing the guest experience. With InMoment, the leading provider of Experience Improvement solutions, you can adapt to meet evolving expectations, leverage experience data from every touchpoint, and power your guest experience program. Schedule a CX demo to learn more about how InMoment can help elevate your guest experiences.

About Author

Migs Bassig CX Writer

For more than a decade, Migs has dedicated himself to crafting insightful and educational content focused on reputation management and customer experience. Leveraging a wealth of knowledge and collaborations with industry experts, Migs has empowered numerous companies to enhance their brand visibility significantly.

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Proofpoint is Recognized as a 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for Data Loss Prevention

Proofpoint is the only vendor evaluated to receive the Customers' Choice distinction, which recognizes vendors who meet or exceed market averages for Overall Experience and User Interest and Adoption

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 11, 2024 – Proofpoint, Inc. , a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, today announced its recent recognition in the 2024 Gartner ® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Data Loss Prevention. Proofpoint was one of six vendors evaluated in the report and is the only vendor placed in the upper right “Customers’ Choice” quadrant, where the distinction is represented. Vendors in this quadrant, as rated by their clients, meet or exceed both the market average for “Overall Experience” and the market average for “User Interest and Adoption.”

The Gartner ® Peer Insights™ "Voice of the Customer" is a document that synthesizes Gartner ® Peer Insights' reviews into insights for IT decision-makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to Gartner expert research and can play a key role in the buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of implementing and operating a solution.

Zero-day attacks and unpatched vulnerabilities often make headlines, but it’s people who are the root cause of most data loss incidents. In fact, Proofpoint’s inaugural  2024 Data Loss Landscape report , which examines global survey responses from ​​600 security professionals and data from the Proofpoint Information Protection platform found that over 70% of respondents identified “careless users” as a cause of their data loss, while fewer than 50% cited technical issues. This people problem is only aggravated as the macro landscape evolves, with more organizations embracing the cloud, hybrid work and workflow innovations like generative AI. It is for these reasons Proofpoint takes a human-centric approach to data loss.

The 2023 Gartner ® Market Guide For Data Loss Prevention (DLP) , which recognizes Proofpoint as a Representative Vendor, notes that when identifying a DLP solution, security and risk management leaders should “invest in a DLP solution that can understand the full lineage of the data, identify baseline activities for the user, and compare subsequent actions to the baseline activity by gathering contextual clues about the who, what, when and where of the data.” The Proofpoint Information Protection platform is the only solution that brings together the telemetry of content and user behavior across the most critical DLP channels—email, cloud applications, endpoint, and web. Our unified console supports the modern ways people work, and includes all policy management, workflows, alert management, classification sophistication, reporting, and dashboards that administrators and analysts need for accurate DLP and quick incident resolution.

“Proofpoint is a customer-first organization, so this Customers’ Choice distinction is for us an acknowledgment that they trust us as their preferred human-centric security partner to defend their data against careless, malicious and compromised users,” said Tim Choi, group vice president, product marketing, Proofpoint. “The reviews and ratings about Proofpoint Enterprise Data Loss Prevention (DLP) on Gartner ® Peer Insights™ reinforce our market leadership and provide us with valuable feedback as we continue to transform the DLP space.”

Proofpoint Information Protection is deployed to 46 million+ users worldwide, making Proofpoint the second largest DLP vendor and trusted by the world’s biggest brands. As of March 15, 2024, Proofpoint customer feedback shared on Gartner ® Peer Insights™ includes:

• "Proofpoint has provided an amazing suite of tools for us to utilize in our cybersecurity routines, including the DLP module. The DLP piece specifically helps us narrow down PII and other information that may be unencrypted or leaking from various sources in our environment. With this tool we are able to keep a close eye on anything and everything outgoing and provide the proper training if there are outliers in the company." – Cybersecurity Engineer, Transportation Industry
• “Being able to easily customize and edit rules that fit our organization is one of the main things that make Proofpoint's DLP product amazing. Also the support that Proofpoint offers when it comes to all their products is amazing, they help in every way possible.” – IT Security and Risk Management, Healthcare and Biotech Industry
• “Proofpoint is an industry leader for a reason. Their blend of products and expertise can satisfy any companies security needs. Their DLP product is very customizable yet leaves us feeling secure knowing data is not leaving through unapproved channels.” – Engineer, Finance (non-banking) Industry
• “Proofpoint provides consistent engagement and positive interactions. The technology is feature rich, and their response times are quick.” – Manger, Cybersecurity, Travel and Hospitality Industry
• "Proofpoint email DLP has worked great out of the box and includes all the templates we need to protect sensitive data." – Security Engineer, Travel and Hospitality Industry

For more on Proofpoint’s Enterprise Data Loss Prevention solution, please visit: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/products/information-protection/enterprise-dlp

For more on Proofpoint’s Information Protection platform, please visit: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/products/information-protection

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Proofpoint ranked #2 globally in the Gartner Research Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2022 Neha Gupta, Yanna Dharmasthira, et al, 14 April 2023 Total Worldwide Software Revenue for Enterprise Data Loss Prevention Products and Regions, 2021-2022 (Millions of U.S. Dollars) 

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Biden announces more than $7B in student debt relief for 277,000 borrowers

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Friday that his administration is canceling $7.4 billion in student loans for 277,000 borrowers.

The White House said the latest round of relief helps borrowers enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan as well as those in income-driven repayment or Public Service Loan Forgiveness plans. On the SAVE plan, an income-driven repayment plan that took effect last summer, the new policy will allow those who took out smaller loans to have the debt canceled more quickly, the Education Department said .

With its latest move, the administration has now canceled $153 billion for 4.3 million Americans, the White House said.

"Today’s announcement comes on top of the significant progress we’ve made for students and borrowers over the past three years," Biden said in a statement. "That includes: providing the largest increases to the maximum Pell Grant in over a decade; fixing Public Service Loan Forgiveness so teachers, nurses, police officers, and other public service workers get the relief they are entitled to under the law, and holding colleges accountable for taking advantage of students and families."

Biden said that since taking office in 2021, he has "promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity."

"I will never stop working to cancel student debt — no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us," he said.

Earlier this week, Biden announced revised plans to cancel student debt that when implemented would provide relief to more than 30 million Americans "when combined with actions the Administration has taken over the last three years," the White House said.

The Education Department said that the new plans would waive accrued and capitalized interest for millions of borrowers, automatically discharge debt for borrowers otherwise eligible for loan forgiveness under the SAVE or other plans, eliminate student debt for borrowers in repayment for 20 years or more, help those enrolled in low-financial-value programs, and assist borrowers who experience hardship in repaying their loans.

The public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed actions "in the coming weeks," the department said.

The administration introduced the current efforts to provide student debt relief after the Supreme Court  struck down Biden’s original student debt relief program , which aimed to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for about 43 million borrowers.

Rebecca Shabad is a politics reporter for NBC News based in Washington.

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• Data efficiency - Always-on, at inception, inline deduplication and compression guarantees 90% capacity savings across primary storage and backup saving costs
• Application performance - Achieve improved performance from all-flash storage, tiered caching, and always-on, inline dedupe and compression
• Operational efficiency - Operational efficiency frees up 91% of IT organizations’ time to focus on new projects

Achieve resiliency and high availability

Achieve high availability with just 2 nodes. HPE SimpliVity tolerates simultaneous drive failures without data loss, and built-in data protection and disaster recovery features help keep data safe. Key features include:

• High availability - High availability tolerates simultaneous drive failures without data loss and achieves high availability with a minimum of 2 nodes
• Backup - Full logical VM backups with policy-based automation and near zero overhead
• Restore - Guaranteed 60-second restore of 1 TB VM
• Disaster recovery - Automated, multi-site, rapid disaster recovery reduces the risk of data loss and costly business downtime

Leverage high-density resource pools

Flexible, consolidated resource pools are cost effective building blocks for a variety of workloads. The award-winning HPE SimpliVity 2600 provides space-constrained environments with high-density, enterprise grade features and functionality. Key features include:

• Collapse the stack into one solution - Flexible resource pools of compute, storage, and composable fabric networking collapsed into one solution
• Scale - Simple, parallel node deployment to scale out from small to large VM environments in small, 2U increments
• Consolidation and cost savings - Simplify and save: one solution, one refresh cycle, one generalist needed to manage the whole stack

Simplify management with a single interface

Simple and automated operations eliminate the need for specialized IT skills. VM administrators manage the entire IT stack from a single, familiar interface. Back up, clone, or restore a VM in 3 clicks, guaranteed, using policy-based, VM-centric management. Key features include:

• VM-centric management - Policy-based, global VM-centric management with automation, visibility, intelligence
• VM agility - VM creation, backup, replication, and recovery with right-click operations from familiar interface
• VM mobility - Moves VMs quickly and globally from one site to another
• Simple management from one interface - No LUNS, shares, or volumes to manage. Through a single interface, you have a global view into data centers as well as remote and branch offices

HPE a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader 14 years in a row

Gartner® again names HPE a Leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage.

Hyperconverged technology partners

Explore the hpe simplivity portfolio.

HPE SimpliVity 380 gives IT organizations the agility and economics of the cloud with the control and governance of on-premises IT and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition integration. It delivers a powerhouse hyperconverged solution optimized to support the world’s most efficient and resilient data centers. This solution dramatically simplifies IT by combining infrastructure and advanced data services for virtualized workloads on a single device.

Do you need a dense platform with built-in security and flexibility that addresses key applications which need performance, availability along with ease of management? HPE SimpliVity 325 provides HCI choice with our 3rd Generation  AMD EPYC™ single CPU processor platform including all-flash storage. Highly dense, the solution is a 1U enclosure that scales in 1U increments and is ideal for remote office or space-constrained locations.

Featured products

Hpe storeonce backup appliances.

Secure your data wherever it lives. Leverage intelligent storage to transform your hybrid cloud data protection with greater simplicity, higher performance, and built-in ransomware protection — all at a lower cost than traditional solutions.

HPE GreenLake for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Empower your remote workforce with secure, scalable virtual desktop infrastructure, delivered as a service.

HPE Alletra dHCI

Built to streamline your infrastructure via data-first modernization, HPE’s disaggregated HCI for mixed workloads at scale unlocks IT agility while ensuring apps are always-on and always-fast.

Adopting hyperconvergence and adapting to the new realities in retail

Accelerate your data-driven transformation with simplivity, hpe simplivity 380 product documentation, technical specifications, advanced data services.

• Built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery for data protection
• Always-on deduplication and compression for reduced capacity utilization by up to 10X — guaranteed %3Ca%20href%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hpe.com%2Fus%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fintegrated-systems%2Fsimplivity-guarantee.html%22%20data-analytics-region-id%3D%22footnote_tip%7Clink_click%22%3EHPE%20SimpliVity%20HyperGuarantee%3C%2Fa%3E

Flexible federation strategy

• Scale up to 16 nodes/cluster and 96 nodes/federation
• Mix clusters within the same federation — for example, HPE SimpliVity 380 at the core data center and HPE SimpliVity 325 or 380 at the edge

Simple, intelligent management

• Global, VM-centric management and mobility, plus artificial intelligence by HPE InfoSight

Simplify your environment with HPE SimpliVity 380

• Storage-intensive workloads
• Multiple all-flash configuration options (XS, S, M, L, and XL)
• Backup and archive node with hybrid flash storage
• Hardware-accelerated or software-optimized for always-on deduplication and compression

Extend your options with HPE SimpliVity 325

• Small ROBO and edge use cases
• Highly dense, 1U, single AMD processor node with high core count
• Full HPE SimpliVity functionality

Optimize your data center footprint with HPE SimpliVity 325

• General purpose virtualization, edge, and VDI workloads
• Space-constrained environments that need a high-density server form factor
• Software-optimized for always-on deduplication and compression

Osso Health 17+

Immersive procedural education, screenshots, description.

Step into the future of surgical training with Osso Health, a brand new way to experience immersive healthcare education on Apple Vision Pro. With Osso Health, you can bring the virtual operating room anywhere to learn and explore surgical training in a whole new way, whether you're a healthcare professional, patient, or just interested in the medical field. Experience two procedures that healthcare professionals perform daily in stunning detail - Carpal Tunnel Release and Total Knee Arthroplasty. With the ability to analyze key elements of the human body, you can view true-to-life steps and better understand each procedure's complexities. You're in control of each step and can explore at your own pace. Download today to: • Understand some of the key steps required to complete these procedures • View the relevant anatomy of each step in high-fidelity • Integrate clinical workflows into your real-world environment, whether in a surgical center or at home • Analyze clinically accurate anatomy that brings a new perspective to each procedure • Dive into the world of immersive medical education and understand how providers today prepare for modern techniques in a safe and risk-free environment Experience the next generation of medical training with Osso Health today. ______________ Osso VR is the leading provider of immersive medical education. Other apps in our portfolio have won the following awards: • Time Magazine Best Inventions of 2019: Virtual Surgery • Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2020: Health and Wellness • Inc. Best in Business 2021 Award • SXSW Innovation Awards 2022: VR, AR & MR • AIXR’s XR Awards 2023: VR Healthcare Solution of the Year Learn more about us at ossovr.com or @ Linkedin

App Privacy

The developer, Osso VR , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Not Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

• Developer Website
• App Support
• Privacy Policy