The Case for Customer Experience

One of the most important processes that a marketer has to understand is how to effectively use the Sales Lifecycle. It looks like this.
Sales_Lifecycle
You need to know how to target, connect, engage, convert, and retarget customers to keep your current customers and prospects engaged and converting. But, though effective for a customer’s journey to conversion, it’s a limited view of the full customer’s journey.
The customer’s journey doesn’t end at the sale. In reality, the full customer’s journey looks something like this.
Conversion Lifecycle
Tim French, the writer of last week’s client experience blog post, took us through the sales and client experience lifecycles. He explained the differences, and why it is crucial to getting it all right. He even set us up with a few building blocks for successful client experience.
Blog: The Marketer’s Guide to Troubleshooting Client Experience
The first step to building a successful customer experience is understanding how it happens. Understanding this lifecycle, and how it interacts with the sales lifecycle are important steps. Now, we’re going to look beyond that.
Today, we pose a new question. Through it we will help you understand why the experience is integral to everything you do and worth the investment.

Why should I care about customer experience?

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Drive Customer Loyalty

We all know that customers set expectations when they purchase something. They are promised things throughout the sales lifecycle, and those promises are made by both sales and marketing.

Whether their purchases are big or small, customers have expectations.

Delivering on these expectations is a big deal. Customers will spend more money with brands that deliver an experience above customer expectations. According to Forrester, brands that offer a great experience are more likely to have more loyal customers.

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Improving Customer Retention

The willingness of consumers to buy more from organizations who offer a better customer experience has a direct correlation to customer retention. Forrester research has also shown that if customers enjoy the experience, they will be less likely to switch to the competition.
CXi Score
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Facilitating Customer Acquisition

We also know that people are more willing to buy from a company with positive reviews. Even more important are recommendations from colleagues, friends, and family.
According to Forrester, a better customer experience drives customer recommendations to friends or colleagues. This means that your company can see incremental sales from customers talking about positive experiences.

It’s important for marketers to understand that not every initiative has to be about bringing in new customers. You also have to drive loyalty and retain customers. If you can turn your customers into champions for your brand, all of your marketing initiatives will benefit.
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