Customer Experience · Customer experience
What is Customer Experience and where does it start in customer contact?
Customer Experience is the sum of every moment a customer deals with you. Customer service is a small part of that, and often the part repairing the rest.
In short
Customer Experience is the whole of the impressions a customer forms across every contact with your company, from the first advert to the return after purchase. Customer service is one link in that, usually the link that becomes visible when something in an earlier step went wrong.
Why your inbox is your best research source
Every recurring customer question points to a moment earlier in the process that wasn't clear. Delivery-time questions point to your product page, return questions to your returns page, status questions to your confirmation email.
That makes your topic list cheaper research than a survey. The questions you answer most often are the places where your site or your process doesn't tell someone something.
Why a score alone doesn't steer
CSAT, CES and NPS each measure something useful and none of them says where it went wrong. A falling score is a signal to go look, not an indication of what to change. That indication sits in the open answers and in your topic list.
Where it goes wrong
Treating experience as one department's project
Most moments a customer judges sit outside customer service: the product page, the delivery time, the confirmation email, the delivery itself. An improvement plan owned only by support can't touch the causes of most questions.
Measuring more instead of changing something
A second survey rarely yields new information when you haven't used the first. Start with the two most common topics in your inbox.
What to do this week
List last month's ten most common topics and write behind each which page or which email should have prevented that question. Two of them can be fixed this month, and that directly reduces questions.
What this looks like in a system
In Cuego you can see per topic how many questions come in and how they develop over time, per channel. So you can tell whether a change to your delivery page actually produces fewer delivery questions. The customer contact scan looks from the other side: what a visitor can and cannot find on your site about those same topics.
Customer contact softwareRelated terms
CSAT
CSAT is the percentage of customers who rate a contact moment as positive. The score is easy to collect and easy to misread.
Read onCustomer service
Customer service is answering questions your own setup caused. That sounds harsh and it's the most usable definition there is.
Read onCRM
A CRM stores who your customers are and what you agreed with them. The value isn't in the storage but in what comes out of it during a conversation.
Read on