You probably spend a good deal of time setting goals and planning how to achieve them, but have you considered how customer experience serves your organization’s most crucial objectives?
Have you realized how important customer experience is to every area — every different department — of your company?
The truth is that customer experience doesn’t only affect the customer. It impacts the organization as a whole, whether you intend it to or not.
Whether you have an established and strategic customer experience program or not, your customers still have some kind of experience with you. And intentional or not, that customer experience has a far-reaching ripple effect throughout your company.
Smart leaders harness the power of customer experience and make that ripple work in their favor. They leverage it; putting it into play toward achieving important goals.
So, let’s explore just how customer experience serves your organization’s most crucial goals by breaking those goals down by departments …
Sales and Marketing Goals
Sales and marketing are critical to company growth. Common sales and marketing goals include:
- getting more customers,
- keeping those customers,
- getting those customers to buy more of your products and services, and
- increasing total sales volume.
When you focus on customer experience, reaching those goals becomes easier.
It becomes easier — and less costly — to acquire new customers because with a great customer experience, your existing customers give you better reviews and more referrals. In fact, Capgemini reports that 81% of emotionally engaged, loyal customers will promote a brand to their friends and family.
When they’re having a good experience, customers are happy. When customers are happy, you experience higher customer retention along with fewer returns and refunds.
Happy customers also are more likely to buy from you again … and again … and again. Forbes reports that “loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.”
This increases the lifetime customer value of all those new and retained customers. And as a result, your total sales go up as well.
In fact, Forbes reports that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customer experience.
Operations and Product Development Goals
Your operations and product development teams want to understand how customers use your products so that they can innovate and create new products to make them more valuable.
This is where customer experience research programs that gauge customer satisfaction and collect customer feedback are invaluable. The data collected gives your teams the information they need to make strategic decisions and reach their goals.
Customer Support Goals
Focusing on customer experience directly serves your customer support goals.
For example, a better overall customer experience will reduce the number of support requests coming into your contact center. Fewer requests will, in turn, reduce wait times for support as well as increase the speed of customer issues being resolved.
Providing a better customer experience in the first place minimizes the potential for customer frustration and friction. And when support is needed, a strategic customer experience plan gives your contact center agents a better context and framework with which to support the customer.
HR and Finance Goals
With fewer support requests coming in because of superior customer experience, you are likely going to be able to reduce your service costs. This makes your finance team happy and helps them reach their budgetary goals.
But also, with happier customers, you’re going to have happier employees. You’ll have less employee turnover, which means reduced hiring costs. You’ll be able to increase employee satisfaction and production … both common HR goals.
Customer Experience Programs Start with Research
Being intentional about your customer experience starts with knowing your customers. And that requires research, including customer satisfaction surveys.
Setting up customer experience programs to get that kind of customer insight is one of our specialties.
To get in touch, use this form to book a call or you can reach us directly at 1-800-397-3515. If you prefer email, you can contact us at info@arcqs.com.
You also can learn more about customer experience programs by reading the following: