The customer experience is the product of an interaction between an organisation and a customer over the duration of their relationship. In essence, it traditionally focusses on flexing what you do to meet customer expectations. The overall perception customers have when interacting with your company will be affected by every single interaction between you and the customer.
Achieving a great customer experience and maintaining it, needs ongoing focus and visibility on a variety of key factors. These include:
- Strong employee engagement with customer vision & strategy embedded into the DNA of the company.
- Multi-channel consistency.
- Always ‘Easy’ to do business with (for the customer and colleagues).
- Fixes customers’ mistakes easily, often proactively.
- Continuous improvement culture with closed feedback loops, always looking to improve.
- Brand promise delivered every time.
- Wow moments where relevant.
Customer engagement on the other hand, is about matching what you do best to what a customer wants most. Matching purpose with outcomes. Unlike the customer experience, it is driven by the customer. When they comment on a Facebook page, register for a webinar, read a knowledge base article or contact customer support, they are engaging with your brand. Customers must choose to engage with a company, compared to customer experience, which can happen passively.
Customer engagement helps improve customer experience over time. More engaged customers contribute with better feedback, purchase more, and use your product on a deeper level. By interacting with tutorials and best practice webinars, they can get more out of your service and have a better overall experience. Once they see more value, they are more likely to come back and engage again.
When the customer experience and customer engagement works in tandem, it can create an upward spiral from a positive feedback loop. The better the customer experience, the more engaged customers become. The more engaged your customers are, the better the experience.
Offering as many opportunities as you can for customers to interact with your brand on their own terms will lead to a favourable experience. As more and more customers become engaged, they will let you know the valuable feedback that is necessary for your business to create an even better customer experience across all touchpoints.
