The basic functions of enterprises, such as production, marketing, financing, management and supply, are often aimed at effectively promoting your brand to customers and offering a better product or service. Although not directly related to customers, each of them indirectly supports the crowning of your business's activities, products and services with customer satisfaction. However, in modern approaches, customer experience is now seen as a much more important concept than customer satisfaction. By developing a good customer experience strategy, you can strengthen customers' brand experiences, increase sales and sales revenue, and minimize customer loss by increasing customer loyalty. So why is customer experience important and how to manage it? You can check the details for all the information you are curious about regarding the customer experience.

What is Customer Experience?

In the global literature, the concept of customer experience is used in the form of the English phrase Customer Experience. It can also appear abbreviated as CX. By definition, customer experience refers to all interactions between a brand and that brand's customers. Every transaction that comes into contact with customers in the process of purchasing goods or services that an enterprise puts on the market can be characterized at any moment as a customer experience.

Customer experience is about what potential or existing customers think about the brand, how it takes action. Therefore, before the purchase of a good or service, the first contact with the customer at any point of sale, or the after-sales processes are the subject of customer experience. In other words, the relationship between the brand and its customer is as important as the function or characteristics of a good or service that markets that good or service. And customer experience is a manageable phenomenon.

Why is customer experience important?

The manageability of customer experiences enables businesses that care about customer experience, invest in this area, take action to make a difference. Today, the fierce competitive environment in almost all industries, interconnected markets increase the chances of success for brands that can effectively manage the customer experience.

A good customer experience is when customers leave any type of interaction established with him with positive emotions. This easy-to-navigate, user-friendly website and e-commerce platform can be addressed in many different aspects, such as having accurate and clear information transmitted to the customer at the point of sale, being able to communicate with customers through every possible channel, providing quality products or services. In addition, providing customers with a personalized experience also strengthens the bond and loyalty between the brand and the customer.

How is customer experience management done?

For a good customer experience, businesses need to focus on customers and improve their strategies. The key to improving customer experience strategies is effective customer experience management. The data you get to know each of your customers does not occur by itself. The data that you can obtain from each interaction with your customers must be processed quickly, timely and accurately, provided with an analytical formulation.

All that is needed to manage the customer experience is data. You should be able to obtain data that is detailed enough to paint a picture of your customers and use them correctly to improve your customer experience strategies. You should be able to translate every moment, point, and process that customers come into contact with your brand into data in detail. Once you create real-time customer profiles by personalizing all customer interactions, you should be able to use this data accurately and at the right time. So you can get to know your customers much better and offer them effective personal offers. You can also strengthen the relationship between the customer and the brand by developing the offers you offer in a timely and consistent way, and you can easily overcome the rather challenging processes such as loyalty and customer retention.

When managing the customer experience, you can turn the data you generate from your marketing, sales, and advertising activities into much more meaningful outputs with customer experience software. Thus, you can develop customer experiment strategies and have access to the possibility of making a difference by implementing the strategies. Research suggests that by 2030, at least two-thirds of customer interactions between customers and businesses will be achieved through software and smart devices.

Every individual working in businesses, every department should take an effective role in the customer experience. The roles and responsibilities that individuals and departments will assume are effective in improving the customer experience. It is very important for every system that works in companies to share the data it generates with other systems effectively and in real time. Data generated in ERP software used in inventory management, e-commerce sites and platforms, accounting programs, human resources, logistics, finance departments form part of an effective customer experience strategy.

How Customer Experience Affects Sales

Customer experience is one of the most important factors in the sales process of goods or services. Your customers, contacts, websites, ecommerce platforms, points of sale, stores are the most critical components of your customer experience strategies. Brands that care about the elements that customers focus on, personalize the experience throughout their interaction with their customers, and develop strategies to deliver a great experience have very high return-to-sales rates. In addition to current sales, as well as the quality of the communication and process established between customers and the brand or business, ensures that the customer receives the product or service again. This process in which the customer experience is successfully managed will also ensure customer loyalty, which also directly affects the continuity of sales.

Customers tend to share positive or negative opinions about a brand or a product. In summary, every step taken to improve the customer experience leads to a good customer experience is a harbinger of your success in sales today and in the future.

The Importance of Customer Experience in the Growth of Your Business

A much more important contribution of positive customer experiences than results in sales is customer loyalty. Customer retention is a challenging process, given the high competitive conditions, market diversity and increases in the number of alternative products, as well as the ease of access of customers to these products, effective marketing and advertising strategies. More importantly, it costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than to retain existing customers. By improving the quality of customer experiences and with the right strategies, you can sustain your business without losing customers. With successful customer experiences, opportunities such as resale, cross-selling and up-selling are the biggest supporters of the business in increasing turnover and profitability.

What are Customer Experience Performance Indicators?

To be able to measure customer experience, the key indicators may vary according to your company, industry, customers, products or services, the level of competition in your industry. For example, if you are a company that mainly manages your sales through e-commerce, indicators that measure your capabilities at physical points of sale are partially dysfunctional or less important to you. Instead, metrics such as the number of visits of your customers, return to sales rates, and customer satisfaction rates on the e-commerce platform where you sell, or in stores serving in marketplaces, are more valuable indicators in terms of customer experience. However, the general elements that demonstrate the success of your customer experience strategies can be summarized as follows:

• Sales revenue, i.e. turnover
• Your new customer numbers or customer loss rates
• Your expenses for customer service
• Customer or product/service referral scores
• Cross-selling upsell amounts

You can take advantage of the data analytics solutions offered by Komtaş to create your customer experience management strategies and improve your brand's achievements in your business.