Why Customer Experience Is the New Black

Research shows that customer satisfaction leads to greater customer retention, higher lifetime value, and a stronger brand reputation.

Have you ever been to Fiji?

If you stayed in one of those amazing resorts, you’ll remember the staff making eye contact and saying, “Bula!” every time you crossed paths with one of them. 

Always remembering to say hello isn’t really necessary. There are plenty of hotels around the world where this doesn’t happen. However, it makes a huge difference to the overall customer experience. 

At the end of your visit to a quality resort in Fiji, you’ll come away feeling appreciated and looking forward to coming back. You might not even be able to say why… and that’s all part of the experience.

Luxury holidays aside, it’s important for any business to think about customer experience. 

As a small business owner, it is easy to be so bogged down in daily operations like administration, marketing, stock management and delivery. But the reality is that your customers are your lifeblood, and you have to keep the way they feel in mind at every step of their journey with you. 

As part of a 3 part series, here’s an overview of what customer experience is and how to ensure it reaches across all parts of your business. 

Defining customer experience

This term describes the end-to-end relationship a customer has with you.

Going back to the resort example, it’s not just the welcome you receive at the reception. Customer experience covers how easy it was to book, whether or not you had the information you needed when you arrived and all those little‘Bula!’ moments during your stay. 

Customer experience also includes ‘after-service’, such as follow-up surveys and access to VIP deals. 

According to Harvard Business Review, “Customer experience encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering—the quality of customer care, of course, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability.” As HBR also explains, what’s important is making sure that brands need to tackle it with a ‘closed loop’ process, rather than having situations where the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. 

Stay tuned as we continue the weekly series on ‘Why Customer Experience Is the New Black.’ 

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