3 powerful ways to improve customer experience

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Customer experience (CX) plays a pivotal role on the growth at your organization.

The majority of consumers (85% according to Zendesk) account for companies’ expected quality of service before they decide who to buy from. And McKinsey & Company proved that happy customers are more likely to continue working with you and buy additional products/services from you.

Given the importance of customer experience (your clients’ sentiment as a result of all the interactions they have with you), how can you go about improving it at your organization?

We’ll walk you through 3 approaches that can make a meaningful impact.

1. Develop a system for tracking the customer experience

Without measuring how your customers feel, it becomes next to impossible to understand how to improve customer experience.

Begin the process of measuring customer experience by picking a metric you can calculate over time. Your options include:

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS): The leading metric for measuring customer loyalty comes from asking customers how likely they’d be to recommend your product/service to a friend or colleague (using a 10-point scale).
The customer effort score: Tells you the level of effort customers need to exert in order to resolve a specific issue with your product/service.
The customer satisfaction score: Gauges how the customer feels about a specific experience they had with your product and/or team.

Once you know which metric you want to track, plan on measuring it consistently. This not only helps you understand how your customer experience is changing, but it also allows you to address any issues early on.

A deep dive on the top 3 customer experience metrics

Learn more about how you can use each of these customer experience metrics.

Whichever metric you want to use, surveys can help you measure it. They’re easy to build, send, and analyze once your responses come in. And, assuming you’re protecting respondents’ identities, they give your customers an opportunity to provide honest, thoughtful feedback.

To help you get started on your survey, check out these popular, expert-built templates:

2. Create incentives for your employees to put clients first

Even if your team knows how to improve customer experience, they might need an extra nudge to take action.

Encourage your customer-facing team(s) to take the right steps, quickly, by tying rewards directly to their customer’s success. For instance, employees, whose customers provide feedback that either meet or exceed a satisfaction benchmark, on average, can be eligible to receive a reward. Alternatively, you can tie the employees’ performance to more business-specific metrics, like the customer churn rate (the rate at which customers leave your business over a given period of time), among others.

Here are some ideas for how you can structure your performance-based payment:

Offer a bonus. To ensure it’s consistently top of mind for employees, award it on a frequent basis—like once per quarter.
Designate a certain percent of the salary to customer performance. This option forces employees to earn their full salary by delivering customers with an exceptional experience.
Offer non-monetary awards. These can include paid vacations, gift cards, and pretty much anything else you can imagine! A non-monetary award that’s catered to the individual’s preferences can be just as meaningful as one that’s strictly financial.

3. Improve your employees’ connection to customers

When employees feel connected to customers, they’re in a better position to make decisions that are in the customer’s best interests.

Your executive team will know where to invest in your organization; your engineers and product managers will prioritize the products and/or features that customers want the most; your graphic designers will feel empowered to create visuals that are easier for customers to grasp—and so on.

Employees’ close relationship to customers can also improve their job performance and satisfaction. According to our research on the relationship between employees and customers, 72% of employees who think about customers at least once per week find their job meaningful—versus 58% of employees who think about customers less often. Also, 81% of employees who believe their work impacts customers say that they plan to stay at their organization for at least 2 years—compared to 73% of employees who don’t think their work influences customers.

Help your team get closer to customers by:

Sharing customer information in a place any employee can access
Encouraging your team to shadow customer-facing colleagues
Inviting customers to speak at your organization

Our favorite approach in building a client centric culture

Discover how to adopt customer interaction reports to help your team feel closer to customers.

Learn more

There’s a lot that goes into executing each of these ideas. To learn how you can implement them at your organization, and to see what else you can do to improve the employee-customer relationship, read our guide for building a customer centric culture.

The better your customer experience, the better off your clients, and, ultimately, your business will be. So invest in it. The potential payoffs can make them well worth your time.