There’s more competition than ever.
But, why?
The cost of starting a business is lower than ever, products are commoditized, and markets are saturated, which means achieving true differentiation is tough.
So, how can you differentiate your company in this environment?
Focus on customer experience.
It’s so important today that, according to a 2023 Super Office study, customer experience is now the primary focus to beat out the competition for more than two-thirds of companies—up from only 36% in 2010!
And the same study found that CX is the top business priority for companies over the next five years!
Organizations have turned to customer experience to stand out. With a top-level CX strategy, the entire customer journey becomes distinctly you—distinctly your brand.
According to Hubspot, “Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue.”
What’s Customer Experience (CX)?
The customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer’s perception and feelings about it. Customer experience focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers. It includes every interaction, no matter how brief, even if it doesn’t result in a purchase.
Think about the entire customer journey and the touchpoints along the way. With each customer touchpoint, you’re instilling your voice and brand into a customer’s experience with your product and service.
As you think about your website, product packaging, invoice payments, interactions with sales representatives, and service offerings after contract signature, each touchpoint influences the customer’s sentiment toward your company.
According to Sabina Pons, Managing Director at Growth Molecules™ and awarding-winning Customer Success (CS) strategist, “Throughout the customer journey, you’ll find moments of truth when value is either realized, or the opportunity to provide value is missed. These moments define whether or not the measure of success is reached. These are vulnerable times in the relationship with your customer, and this is the time to really zero in on the customer experience.”
What’s the Difference Between CX and CS?
Customer Success definitely owns one part of the journey, but not until after a contract is signed. CS teams focus on how to deliver and uphold the value proposition promised by Marketing and Sales.
How can companies ensure the customer has deliverables, resources, knowledge, and personnel ready to achieve their purchase buying goal? It’s not just delivery by the CS team; it’s also enabling the customer to achieve success. And for this reason, it’s important for CS to provide enormous value at the top of the journey.
On the other hand, CX is the entire end-to-end process. A lot of the little things in CX matter, from packaging, advertising, invoicing, digital content, scheduled sessions with front-line representatives, product value, etc. All of these moments add up to a customer’s experience with your company.
Why Has Customer Experience Blossomed?
In the past 10 years, the number of touchpoints in a customer’s journey with a company has multiplied greatly, and some of this growth is directly tied to digitalization.
But all this digitization can lead to a disjointed customer experience. According to MIT Sloan, “66% of customers use at least three different communication channels.” In recent years, the sheer number of channels customers access has greatly increased as compared to the days of traditional call centers, conference booths, and in-person meetings. Before the digital world, customer experience was very limited in scope and tied directly to physical contact.
Now, noteworthy micro-moments throughout a customer’s journey require smaller resource investment and can lead to greater impact via repeatable processes. Ultimately, each touchpoint during a customer’s journey is a marketing opportunity to increase brand awareness. Optimizing these touchpoints, and blending them seamlessly into an omnichannel customer experience, must be the priority.
According to the same 2023 Super Office study, companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience. SaaS companies, in particular, can expect to increase revenue by $1 billion.
How’s Customer Education a Gamechanger in Customer Experience?
Content consumption has changed tremendously over the past decade. Instead of sending consumers a multitude of advertising messages, consumers are searching for, finding, and consuming content to directly answer urgent questions and to fulfill their immediate needs.
To meet this content consumption preference, Marketing teams are creating content that addresses high-level questions from prospects and existing customers. However, current forms of content production are still limited in a certain way—for example, “read this article” and “watch this webinar.”
For existing customers, the challenges they’re looking to address are even deeper and more complex.
The granularity of the questions they ask and the scope of knowledge they require to achieve their desired business outcomes are multifaceted and very specific.
To answer their questions completely, a fully scoped customer education program is a must-have. A successful program deeply engages your power users and provides a full set of best practices to help newcomers and established vets achieve success.
How’s Learning Impacting the Customer Experience Tech Stack?
Want to pull data across the entire customer lifecycle and then turn around and impact positive change based on customer data?
Your Customer Success Management (CSM) Platform is the answer. It’s the powerhouse holding key customer data and, when leveraged well, you can use it to improve CX across your company.
But how does learning data play a role in my CSM Platform?
A CSM-LMS integration fills additional information directly into your CSM Platform to fuel even more customer decisions. By having learning directly tied to your CSM Platform, you can automatically send learning content to customers exactly when they need it at each stage of their journey.
Customer access to learning content becomes hyper-personalized and relevant when the LMS and CSM Platform interconnect with each other, fueled and fed by customer data. It’s a powerful combination—one that should be consistently leveraged across customer-focused teams to ensure a successful end-to-end customer experience. Ultimately, adopting a structured Customer Education program will help everyone in the company serve your customers better.
According to Pulse Europe 2023 keynote panelist Adam Avramescu, VP of Customer Education & Engagement, Personio, “You already have educators on your team. Customer Education is about formalizing that.” Doing so allows your team to spend more time on higher-value activities.
Ready to Improve Your CX Strategy with Customer Education?
To make a real difference in your CX strategy, you need to educate your customers—efficiently and at scale. Make sure you have the right tools in place to help them succeed. Learn more about Gainsight Customer Education today.
