CX champions often face challenges if they start new initiatives around customer services. It often isn’t as easy to see the value of customer experience as it is to see the ROI of other investments. However, customer experience is incredibly valuable. Executives often won’t invest in customer experience without “proof,” even if the writing is on the wall. Here is actual proof you can share with your teams. Without a customer focus, companies simply won’t be able to survive. We are living in a time where we face the commodity trap. Too many of our products and services are the same. To stand out in a sea of sameness, CX is the only way to do that. These statistics prove the value of customer experience and show why all companies need to get on board.

Companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries.

Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80%.

84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.

73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.

96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

83% of companies that believe it’s important to make customers happy also experience growing revenue.

Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.

Loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.

Companies with initiatives to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average.

81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.

68% of customers say the service representative is key to a positive service experience.

The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.

64% of companies with a customer-focused CEO believe they are more profitable than their competitors.

75% of customer experience management executives gave customer experience a top score for being incredibly important to business.

Companies that use tools like customer journey maps reduce their cost of service by 15-20%.

Offering a high-quality customer experience can lower the cost of serving customers by up to 33%.

71% of the companies say the cloud has influenced the customer experience.

Customers are likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who report negative experiences.

A 2% increase in customer retention is the same to profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Data Source- Forbes

Journey mapping is a tool and a process. The process has six steps, which you can read about in 6 Steps from Journey Maps to Outcomes. The fifth step in the process is Ideate, in which you’ll ideate solutions to customer and backstage pain points and then design the future state.

Here’s a bit more detail about what this step includes.

• Set up and conduct future-state mapping workshops with customers, during which you’ll:
  • Ideate solutions for the current pain points your customers are experiencing
  • Design the ideal future-state experience
• Set up and conduct future-state service blueprint workshops with stakeholders and internal subject matter experts, during which you’ll:
  • Conduct root cause analyses
  • Ideate backstage and behind-the-scenes policies and processes to solve these (root cause) problems
  • Identify people, tools, and systems that are problematic, as well, and ideate solutions that will help you deliver the future-state experience
  • Design service delivery capabilities of the future experienceAs you probably already know, future-state maps are different from current-state maps. They:
    • Are used to design tomorrow’s differentiated experience
    • Are rooted in creativity and ideals
    • Use ideation to identify solutions for customer pain points
    • Add/incorporate listening posts into the experience, as needed
    • Are driven by the CX vision
    • Help you innovate new products and services
    • Allow you to envision and design how you’ll deliver new value for your customers at minimal risk because you’re testing them on paper first

Too many companies stop at current-state journey mapping – assuming it’s been done right – and never move on to service blueprinting or to future-state design, choosing instead to make tactical and cosmetic improvements identified in the current-state map and leave it at that. Future-state mapping is an important piece of the journey mapping process and cannot be overlooked if you want to design a better overall experience – and deliver new value –  going forward for your customers.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.

Are you familiar with all the different ways your customers interact with your business? Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or you’ve never heard of CX, chances are you at least have some basic notion of the areas, or touchpoints, where customers interact with your organization. Your website, call center or storefront are all examples of possible customer touchpoints.

When mapping out these touchpoints to better understand the customer journey, some companies will identify 5 to 10 touchpoints, while others might identify 50 or 100. Numbers aside, though, companies often tend to overlook one vital touchpoint when conducting these mapping exercises: the touchpoint of asking their customers for feedback.

We will reveal why it is essential to include customer feedback collection as a part of your overall customer touchpoint map, as well as a few quick tips for optimizing the feedback collection experience.

Touchpoints vary

Touchpoints will vary depending on the type of business you’re in. If you’re a B2B company, you may think about the first interaction prospects have with your sales team. If you’re a hotel, you may think about the first interaction guests have with the doorman, or the team at the front desk. If your business makes frequent home visits to customers, a touchpoint might be your customers’ first interaction with your field reps.

The forgotten touchpoint

The one touchpoint that most people forget about, however – and it’s a very important one – is the touchpoint when you reach out to your customers and ask them for feedback. That is a touchpoint in and of itself.

The experience that your customers have as they’re providing feedback affects their NPS score going forward in the same way that your other touchpoints, like your website or call center, affect NPS.

If a customer has a negative experience providing you feedback, it affects their likelihood to come back, their likelihood to buy more, and their likelihood to continue using your products & services.

Optimizing the feedback collection experience

Think really hard about how you’re interacting with your customer when you’re asking them for feedback. Are you doing it on their time, in a way that they would want to provide feedback? Are you asking for feedback in a way that’s as short as humanly possible so you’re not wasting their time?

Customer experience is cumulative. Every touchpoint counts towards the bigger picture. Be sure to dedicate time to optimize this vital piece of the customer journey, and your overall customer experience program will reach greater heights.

Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX). All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.

Consumers are constantly interacting with brands. But how they interact, when they reach out, and why they engage is unique to each person.

Successful marketers and customer experience professionals know that having a great product or solution alone won’t bring you new business.

To attract and retain customers, marketers must focus on the holistic customer experience — creating and enabling interactions that are engaging, differentiated, and personalized to the individual at every step.

Today, this means building an informed, contextual relationship with your audience through every stage of the customer journey.

Adopting a journey mindset means the customer’s intent and needs come first.

Content, offers, and experiences are triggered and delivered in the moment, to the right channel, on an individualized basis. It’s a customer-first world, and your brand is just living in it.

The challenge is scale in managing many users and sequencing in real-time actions across many different touchpoints. You don’t just
have one customer, you have many — thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions — and your customers are always on the move.
They may visit your site, depart, resurface, read your emails, follow you on social media, call your contact center, and, if you’re a
retailer, walk into your store to interact with staff or purchase a product. All of which means you have a large and growing
accumulation of customer data that can tell you a lot about every individual. And you have many channels of engagement, including
those you control — say, website, mobile sites, email, in-store — and other channels on which you connect with customers, like
Twitter and Facebook, voice-interaction channels like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, and more. Even if you control of your
message and your channels, you can’t control who sees your message in what context. As a marketer or customer experience
professional, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. Your customers now decide the experience they want to have with a brand —
what they want to consume, where they want to consume it and when – and they expect that each and every digital interaction be
highly relevant and personalized for them. Here’s the tough part: It’s your job to anticipate, to react fast, and be where your customers
are in each moment of the customer lifecycle. Welcome to the era of the customer journey.

Customer Journey   Customer Experience  Customer’s Intent   Customer Lifecycle  Customer Data