Customer experience testing
It is the impression you leave on your customer at every stage of his journey to purchase a product or service, which leads him to think of your brand and promote it among his acquaintances and friends.
The difference between customer experience and customer service:
Customer Service
It consists of interactions with the customer in order to obtain the offered product or service, giving the customer the information he wants to know, and receiving complaints and inquiries.
Customer Experience
It can be simply explained as accompanying the customer from the beginning to the end of the journey, i.e. the purchase of the product and the impressions it provides at each stage of his communication with the company and the impressions about the product or service after purchase.
Customer service can be considered as part of the customer experience, as they are strongly related, but there is a difference between them.
To simplify the Customer Experience term, the following example can be used:
Suppose we have a movie, to produce this movie, we need:
1. Director – Executive Director – Sound Director – Cameraman – Producer… (Management Team).
2. The actors and all the individuals who appear in front of the camera.. (Employees who are in direct contact with clients).
3. The script, the dialogue, and the area in which the movie is filmed … (the tools used to produce the product or service offered by the company).
4. Current viewers..(existing clients and potential clients).
We have a highly professional script, dialogue, venue, director, lighting and sound engineer, and cameraman, but the experience of the actors is low, or we could say that it is not good, will the viewers get the aim or the moral of the movie? (Of course not) and this is the biggest mistake that current companies and institutions make with regard to the customer experience, as they focus on the management team so that they have high expertise to produce the product or service and do not care about the employees who are in direct contact with the customer who is the face of the work, the thing that negatively affect the company’s reputation, and may lead to the loss of existing customers and failure to get new ones.
The Importance Of Customer Experience
It is very important for the continuous growth of a business, as ensuring a positive customer experience contributes to:
• Building brand loyalty among customers.
• Activating your product or service and embed it in the minds of customers.
• Creating marketing opportunities by customers themselves, by writing positive comments and impressions that are more important than paid advertisements and promotions, and more influential on other customers.
On the other hand, customers want to feel connected to their favorite brand and want to feel that it knows them, respects them and cares about them. For example, suppose there are two cafes that are close to each other, and they have the same brand of coffee and the same qualities, but one of them is more expensive than the other, and the most expensive pays attention to its customers and their details, for example: He says to his customers: (Your usual drink?) which leads customers to go to the most expensive, because it satisfies the customer’s needs of drinking coffee with a feeling of care and good treatment.
Customer Experience Methodology
1. Developing customer journey map
A customer journey map is defined as a story supported by a map that includes all the interactions and communications that the customer has with the company in order to obtain a particular product or service.
Whereas a map is drawn for all potential customer paths during his journey in order to obtain a product or service and identify all channels and interactions that the customer can make at each stage of the map.
2. Evaluating the integration of operations in companies
Evaluating each of the stages that the customer goes through in order to obtain a specific product or service in terms of customer satisfaction and whether it is integrated or not, this is done through studying the customer’s experience in each of the operations in detail.
3. CRM Evaluation
It is done through an assessment of the company’s interaction with current and future customers, where customer data with the company is analyzed in order to get the best path of customer relations, with a focus on retaining old customers.
4. Experimental implementation of customer experience
It is one of the most important stages of studying customer satisfaction or customer experience, and it is done through conducting an experimental implementation of a customer journey after developing the previous tools, and accompanying the customer from the stage of purchasing the product until reaching the post-purchase stage, to get the feedback of the customer about the product, and knowing all stages and paths he went through during his journey with the company.
5. Analyzing Customer Satisfaction
This stage begins after the customer purchases the product or service and gives feedback on his journey with the company and the product or service, whereas the customer’s opinions and feedback are analyzed to reach the problems that the customer may face, and the positive and negative things that he can see in the product, then the necessary measures are taken to address these matters.
6. Studying the customer’s perception about the company
This is done by conducting a short questionnaire for the customer, in which he is asked about all of the stages of his journey, the nature of the relationship at each stage, and his views on how to make the service or journey better, and then analyzing the data coming from the customers to obtain comprehensive and general perceptions to improve the stages of the customer’s journey.
Example of customers’ journey:
For example, what does Google say about its customer experience testing?
If users can’t spell, it’s our problem
If they don’t know how to form the query, it’s our problem
If they don’t know what words to use, it’s our problem
If they can’t speak the language, it’s our problem
If there’s not enough content on the web, it’s our problem
If the web is too slow, it’s our problem
The purpose of customer experience testing is to be concerned with customer needs rather than the amount of sales.
The focus must change from absolutely focusing on the product to focusing on the customer experience to Improve the product based on results, and from being concerned about the broad market to being concerned about the individuals who connect you to the broad market.
