customer satisfaction – GoForth Institute Blog | Canadian Entrepreneur Training

Tips for delivering a great customer experience

Customer experience measurement is the practice of measuring customer experience – which includes all customer actions – at all “touchpoints” throughout the customer journey.

What is a touchpoint in customer experience?

A touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your business: a phone call, a website visit, an email, a shipment – any time a customer “touches” your business. The only way we can get a better understanding of customers and their needs is by measuring the customer experience. Not only does measuring customer experience enable you to cater to customers’ expectations, it also lets you measure how effective your customer experience strategy is.

How to measure the customer experience (CX)

Designing a great customer experience is only the first part — you must actually deliver on that experience, and then measure your CX satisfaction to make sure you’re delivering a great CX for your customers.

Highlight all touchpoints

Study your customer’s journey from beginning to end, and sketch the whole customer experience according to the customer’s point of view. Select the touchpoints that are defining moments for the customer, and establish metrics for every touchpoint, or metrics that specifically evaluate each touchpoint’s performance.

Understand your customer

When you understand your customers, you can think like them, and can offer products and services to better engage them and provide excellent experiences. It’s important to know their greatest needs and expectations — what makes them happy and what you should continue doing to retain them. Draw a map by creating a timeline of the customer’s journey and defining what is essential at each touchpoint along the journey.

Solve the key problem areas

Once you’ve identified all the touchpoints, highlight the key areas of concern and start working on them systematically. Identify and highlight each problem, and come up with solutions that will specifically address these problems.

Select the right metrics

When you have all the important touchpoints and have found solutions to key problem areas, you’re ready to start measuring the results of your efforts. To do this effectively you need to choose the right business metrics to analyze. Here are a few common customer experience metrics you can use:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS is an index that ranges from -100 to 100 that indicates how willing a customer is to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It divides customers into three categories: Promoters (loyal + satisfied), Passives (satisfied + unenthusiastic), and Detractors (unsatisfied + unenthusiastic). First Contact Resolution
(FCR): FCR gives an indication of how well you resolve customers’ support requests the first time by tracking the number of interactions in a case. Tracking your FCRs helps you see what you can do to keep the average number of interactions low.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the average score awarded to your brand according to customer answers on a survey. Small businesses use CSAT scores to determine how satisfied customers were with specific products or services.

Share this post:

Using the Empathy Map in your business

Many small business owners become highly focused on solving a particular problem that’s important to them. But what about what their customers want? This is why developing an Empathy Map is so critical. An Empathy Map will help you identify insights about your potential customers that you might not have known were there. You’ll be able to produce successful products or services by taking the time to understand your customer, and developing empathy for them.

Why is empathy important in business?

Empathy is very important in building a successful business. Empathy reflects our understanding of our customers – who they are, what they like and don’t like, what motivates them to make a purchase (or not), and what needs we can solve for them.

Empathy allows us to understand our customers’ perspective. As business owners, that helps us produce better services and products for them. Having empathy lets us understand what needs (or pains) our customers have, and helps us estimate the value our products or services will create for our customers (gains).

The Empathy Map and entrepreneurship

The Empathy Map, shown above, was created by David Grey, of XPLANE and author of The Connected Company and Gamestorming. This tool has been used by millions of small business owners and their teams to develop deep, shared understanding and empathy for their customers.

1. Start with the Goal section, by defining who will be the subject of the Empathy Map and what you want them to do. This should be framed in terms of new and observable behaviour.

2. Once you have clarified the goal, work your way clockwise around the canvas, until you have covered See, Say, Do, and Hear. The reason for this is that the process of focusing on observable phenomena (things that they see, say, do and hear) is like walking a mile in your customer’s shoes. It gives us a chance to imagine what their experiences might be like, to give us a sense of what it “feels like to be them.”

3. Only after you have made the circuit of outside elements do you focus on what’s going on inside your customer’s head. The large head in the centre is one of the most important aspects of the map’s design. The whole idea is to imagine what it’s like to be inside someone else’s head.

For more about the Empathy Map and how it can help your small business, check out Class 3 of our 100 Essential Small Business Skills^TM program!

Share this post:

Using the Value Proposition Canvas to understand your customers

Why should a customer buy a product or service from you?

If you don’t know the answer to this question, you might need the Value Proposition Canvas.

What is value proposition?

Value proposition is an expectation of value – why a customer or business should buy your product or service. It’s a promise of value to be delivered. A value proposition should be a clear statement that explains how a product solves a pain point, details its benefits, and states the reason why it’s better than similar offerings available. The ideal value proposition is concise and speaks to a customer’s strongest variables in making decisions.

About the Value Proposition Canvas

Strategyzer.com and Swiss business management theorist Alexander Osterwalder developed the Value Proposition Canvas, which helps you create a match between what you’re selling and what customers want.

The Value Proposition Canvas helps us to understand customers. It collects information about their needs and requirements, so you can design your products and services in a more targeted way. This means increased sales and profitability, and less time wasted on developing ideas that customers may not be interested in.

By using the Value Proposition Canvas, you identify customer needs, and come up with products and services to meet those needs, in a visual and structured way.

Want to learn more? Check out our industry-leading online small business course!

Share this post:

Defining and measuring the customer experience (CX)

customer satisfaction measurement

Customer experience (CX) refers to all the experiences a customer has with your business. This could be during one transaction, or over several years.

A company’s ability to deliver a positive experience each and every time that someone does business with it sets that company apart in the customer’s mind. Research shows that customers do business with companies they like, so the more positive experiences a customer has with your business, the more they’ll continue to do business with you!

Defining the customer experience

To define your customer experience, it’s important that you know what your customers want and need. The best way to find this out is to ask, through primary market research. Make sure you know what customers are looking for, what their pain is, what’s missing, how you can solve their problems, and where you can fill a gap in the marketplace.

Once you know what your customers need, you can visualize the best ways to satisfy those needs through customer experience. Start by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes – revisit our earlier posts about the Empathy Map here and here to get started.

Delivering a great customer experience

Once you’ve got a good handle on what your customers really want and need from you, it’s time to deliver on that experience. Then, ask the customer if they had the experience you wanted them to have. A Harvard Business School study of large companies in the US found that over 70% of business executives believed their companies delivered a good customer experience. However, when the researchers asked the customers of those businesses, the story was quite different. Only 8% of customers felt they had the experience they were looking for. Not good!

Why the difference? To us, it seems like the big companies weren’t communicating with their customers — either they were designing the wrong customer experience, or they weren’t delivering the experience properly. In any case, the customer walked away with a less than positive impression and the business loses future sales potential.

So, how do you measure customer satisfaction?

Common metrics to measure customer satisfaction

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS is an index that ranges from -100 to 100 that indicates how willing a customer is to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It divides customers into three categories: Promoters (loyal + satisfied), Passives (satisfied + unenthusiastic), and Detractors (unsatisfied + unenthusiastic).

First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR gives an indication of how well you resolve customers’ support requests the first time by tracking the number of interactions in a case. Tracking your FCRs helps you see what you can do to keep the average number of interactions low.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the average score awarded to your brand according to customer answers on a survey. Small businesses use CSAT scores to determine how satisfied customers were with specific products or services.

Share this post: