What Is Customer Experience?

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In the ecommerce world, brands often have a laser focus on finding new customers and getting them to make a purchase. But ensuring a shopper’s journey is successful takes a lot of resources, especially now as traditional acquisition methods become more costly than ever before.

The best solutions focus on bolstering and scaling customer experience itself, providing more opportunities for new sales as well as driving recurring sales from loyal shoppers that sustain a business long-term.

Understanding the full potential of a customer experience boils down to knowing what it is and isn’t, particularly so companies can invest in and build it up effectively. Let’s dive into answering the big question: “What is customer experience?” We’ll also cover some quality customer experience examples and the tools that can bolster service and loyalty to retain valuable shoppers.

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is an individual’s perception of a brand. More holistic than just the shopper’s journey, customer experience is a representation of the brand itself and how customers remember their interactions.

For ecommerce brands, this means managing as many steps along the customer’s path as possible, from marketing products to drawing potential customers to the site to ultimately completing a purchase. But the experience encompasses well beyond that, including the service and support the brand provides the individual as well as further engagement and retention tactics that turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers.

Take for example the Starbucks approach that’s inherent to the entire brand ethos. Referring to themselves as the “third place,” they strive to be such an integral part of their customers’ lives and routines that they’re only behind “home” and “work” on their list of daily must-visits. This attitude is backed by personalization efforts like real-time food and beverage suggestions or individualized loyalty offers. It even includes heartwarming stories like a barista learning ASL to talk to a frequent customer who was deaf.

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Customer Experience Resources to Build Long-Term Brand Loyalty

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What Customer Experience Is Not

Thinking about the customer experience as fragmented pieces can set brands up for failure. Customer experience is not individual steps — instead, customer experience should be thought of as a holistic concept.

Understanding customer experience in this bigger context is essential to applying the right optimization strategies. The individual pieces of the experience can’t be siloed, or brands will risk underutilizing their teams and leaning on non-comprehensive tools to solve bigger-picture tasks.

Customer experience is an interconnected set of processes, incorporating marketing and advertising, web design, systems architecture, fulfillment, and customer service. When considering any one part of the experience, brands need to ensure changes or improvements have net neutral, or ideally net positive, effects across the entirety of the journey.

Maximizing Your Chances for Customer Experience Success

Considering customer experience holistically, brands should try to use the most comprehensive platforms available. In the field of customer service, Gladly provides interconnected, well-integrated tools that deliver mutual benefits across an entire loyalty-driving ecosystem.

With Gladly, brands can enhance their customer experience with automation and personalization tools that provide support agents with customer details in real-time, making support more human and conversational while getting to a solution faster. Other upgrades include in-chat payments that help shoppers complete purchases with ease and powerful integrations that benefit the entire experience.

What is customer experience? Now you should have not only an understanding but also a few important steps to take toward amplifying your brand’s relationship with shoppers. Once you take the next step with technology and training, your customer service reps will be able to create truly exceptional experiences that are superior to competitors.

REPORT

2022 Customer Expectations Report

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