The key components to improve customer experience

Published on January 28, 2020  - Updated on December 01, 2023

The key components to improve customer experience

What is customer experience?

The customer experience is characterized by the aggregation of feelings and emotions that your customer will experience before, during and after the purchase of your product. The customer experience offers a new way of looking at the customer and allows you to innovate and accompany the evolution of services and organizational changes related to digitalization.

In order to help you better understand the experience of your customers, it is important to be able to set up a customer experience analysis system. To achieve this you need to use all the data you can retrieve about it. Whether internally with satisfaction surveys or through the mentions that are made about your brand on social media.

The importance of the customer experience.

A satisfied customer talks to an average of more than ten people around him according to the Pine and Gilmore study. The advent of collaborative web and social networks has amplified the value placed on consumer opinions. If transparency and honesty have always been necessary to ensure the sustainability of a company, this becomes even more true with the advent of Web 2.0, where any consumer can express his opinion. The customer experience therefore relies on the human and emotional to direct and innovate the evolution of services and organizational changes to take maximum advantage of digitalization and the resulting abundance of data to analyze. Moreover, this does not apply only to corporates but also to small businesses and startups.

To sum up, we have made a small summary of the benefits of a successful customer experience:

Short term: customer satisfaction, positive word of mouth, better internal mobilization, etc.

Medium and long term: customer loyalty, lower costs linked to customer dissatisfaction but also to the conquest of new customers, increase in turnover, optimisation of the company's brand image, etc.

Analyze your customer experience

Far from being an easy task, measuring the customer experience can only be done if it is defined and identified beforehand. Several dozen factors come into play regarding the quality of your customer experience. To help you identify your customer experience, you can use the following figure, proposed by Laurence Body and Christophe Tallec's book, which presents the customer experience from its main angles:

In order to develop this reasoning around the experience and the consumer it is also important to know your customer journey from A to Z. To do this, make sure you have made the following available to you:

• Buyer/customer persona
• Phases of the purchase of the journey
• Touchpoints
• Customer thoughts and actions
• Bread points
• Customer emotional journey

All of these documents will allow you to better analyze each of the components of your customer experience, as well as your customer himself.

Improve your customer experience

In order to improve your customer experience, there are hundreds of things to consider. It's hard to know where to start, so you have to prioritize by taking into account the knowledge that you and your users have about your product!

Segment your customer experience

The easiest way to segment the customer experience is to start with the customer journey, which already summarizes your customer experience. Once this first step has been completed, you can further refine your segmentation using sub-categories.

For example, at Q°emotion, when we would analyse the customer experience of a travel agency, we would divide the customer journey into 5 steps:

• Selection
• Preparation
• Departure
• Stay
• Back

Each of these steps can then be further divided, let's take the example of the Start, this step involves :

• Controls & boarding
• Physical recording
• Airport/club transfer
• Outbound flight
• Luggage deposit

As you can see, each sector of activity has its own specificities and this division of interactions between the customer and your product/service is specific to each provider!

Implementation of quantitative indicators (KPI)

The purpose of setting up your quantitative indicators is to note/evaluate each previously determined heading. The best-known indicators concerning the evaluation of the customer experience are the customer satisfaction score, the customer effort score, NPS, or at Q°emotion to go even further and get closer to the notion of emotions, we use the emotional index. The E-index synthesizes the main emotion felt in the words and its corresponding intensity. The indicators we have just mentioned are customer-oriented, but you can also take into account business-oriented indicators.

Collect data about your customer experience

Customers' feedback can be obtained in a variety of ways. We prefer online reviews that you can easily find on the collaborative web about you. Whether it is through your internet chat, your emails, your social networks, online surveys, the sources are numerous! But this data can also be collected through regular physical questionnaires.

Q°emotion can analyze in a few minutes several thousands of data from your commentaries, whether in the form of questionnaires, social networks (Facebook, Tripadvisor, Google reviews, etc...).

An innovative customer experience based on emotion

Now marketers are looking for the brand to deliberately stimulate certain emotions in the consume's mind to offer memorable experiences, in order to feed their emotional memories.

As more and more advanced data on user experiences is acquired, marketers are questioning their previous model of judgment that found a lack of veracity. This is mainly due to the growing importance of the consumer and the changing industry. Previous models (e.g. AIDA) involving the simple act of distributing advertising and this emphasis on generating attention as well as sales, became more sophisticated as consumers became part of the conversation with brands. The emotion perceived by the consumer at a time when the aim is to deliver a unique and memorable experience, is therefore one of the means of measurement favoured by marketing and user experience areas.

Until now, the metrics available to brands to measure consumer perceived emotions have been under-developed. In the most simplistic cases, these emotions are represented by emojis (joy, neutral, sad) and at best with words that are part of the lexicon of emotions (love, joy, disappointment, etc.) as proposed by our solution.

It is impossible to sum up customer satisfaction and experience in one single metric. All the micro interactions that a user has with your company must be taken into account. And the aggregation of all customer feedback gives you axes to prioritize in order to adapt and always respond better to the demand of your customers.

Test Q°emotion free of charge or request a demo, we will help you analyze and optimize your customer experience throughout the customer journey thanks to our emotional analysis tools.