What is customer experience

The Customer Experience, also known as CX, is a series of interactions that occur between a person and a brand.

In practice, it is the sum of all the experiences, emotions, and memories of a customer, accumulated over time through interaction with the company.

Therefore, it results in how the customer perceives their relationship with the company during the customer journey, through a series of touchpoints (the so-called touch points) and throughout the entire customer life cycle.

These interactions generate an emotional, behavioral, and sensory effect and at each touch point there is an exchange of information, data, and sensations.

If the customer experience strategy is effective, there is a greater likelihood of increasing loyalty, which means customer retention.

The Benefits of Customer Experience

By working on optimizing the customer experience, a company can reduce the costs of retention (the cost to keep a customer can be lower and yield more profit in the long term, compared to acquiring a new customer) and encourages positive word-of-mouth about the brand, thereby creating ambassadors among the customers themselves (testimonials who promote the brand and induce sales).

Customer experience has a positive impact on performance indicators that measure the results of marketing managers, the so-called KPIs.

Finally, it improves customer satisfaction, which deals with the design or texts of a portal and focuses on the client and the people who have already chosen your brand.

Improving Online Customer Experience

Those working with experiential marketing, focus on five sensory elements:

• Sense: sensory perception;
• Feel: feelings and emotions;
• Think: cognitive processes;
• Act: activities of the actor;
• Relate: interactions.

These action elements are important for improving the customer experience. The customer must be treated in a way that encourages them to return to purchase your products.

Furthermore, it is possible to break down the customer experience into four fundamental elements that determine its value:

• The value expectation: the consumer's expectations, which stem from desires from previous consumption experiences, needs, word-of-mouth, etc.;
• The value proposition: represents the uniqueness of the product offering;
• The value perception: the assessment and valuation that the user makes regarding the benefits and costs of a product, in comparison to competitors;
• The value realization, quantifies the value generated by the relationship between the company and the customer.

In some respects, CX can be defined as similar to CRM, with a few small differences: while CRM collects information to implement marketing and sales activities, customer experience gathers information to improve the service offered to the client.

Over time, customer experience has become one of the most important marketing strategies, including digital marketing.

The success of every company depends on its relationships with customers; people interact, communicate, and spend money based on their experiences during the interaction with the brand.

Factors that influence the experience of a product include:

• The packaging;
• The kindness and professionalism of the staff;
• The speed of response in online chats.

A positive experience can create a strong bond and will make the difference in choosing between one brand and another.

Customer Experience Models: The 4Cs

Following the marketing mix strategy with its 4Ps, an innovative model has been developed, that of the 4Cs, which focuses exclusively on customer experiences during the purchasing period.

The 4Cs stand for:

• Consumer wants and needs: what customers desire and require;
• Cost: that the customer can bear to have a service or a product;
• Convenience: evaluating customers' buying behavior with acquisition, management, and retention costs;
• Communication: with the customer, throughout the entire lifecycle.

The 4C model defines and classifies touchpoints based on the level of ownership and control that the company has over each one.

Examples of customer experience

Various brands have practiced customer experience, including: 

• Vodafone UK: has developed a graphical representation of its network performance with the goal of reducing network-related queries at call centers, by providing a self-service tool with a system capable of automatically communicating planned outages to customers.

The tool is easy to use and updates in real-time 24 hours a day, implementing a specific program to send personalized messages and increase user engagement.

• The Pig: is a chain of British hotels and restaurants with traditional Italian dishes: it's kind of an agriturismo where the dishes served are prepared with what grows in the garden attached to the restaurant. To improve the  customer experience, il the Pig, wanted to understand customer needs better and build an online strategy that places the customer at the heart of every stay offer.

The project was based on the need to improve the customer experience of online booking, to create a reservation system personalized for the customer, capable of managing the localization of the 5 hotels.

In conclusion, the customer experience serves to measure the client's experience based on their purchasing lifecycle.