Lauren Sickel
Feb 3, 2022
A superb customer experience (CX) helps you retain customers and drive growth. One study shows that 86% of customers will even pay more for a better customer experience, going so far as to prioritize it over product quality. On the other side of that equation, 72% of customers may switch to a different brand due to a poor customer experience.
CX analysis is an in-depth evaluation of how your customers interact with your company. You can gather various data points by answering critical questions:
How are customers using your product or service?
Did your product or service meet or exceed expectations?
How did your product or service fall short of expectations?
What are your customers' wants and needs?
What are the costs of retaining current customers?
What direct and indirect contact points have the most impact on your customers?
How do all of these change throughout the customer journey?
Direct and indirect customer interactions can alter your brand's reputation. Direct interactions include customers’ interactions with people at your company, while indirect interactions are discussions your customers have about your company that don’t involve employees.
As a business leader in any industry, you’ll benefit from understanding the experience your customers have in three critical ways.
A great CX analysis starts before customers have even started paying you. Understanding how customers find your business and their experience getting started with your company can help you attract customers to your business.
If you don't analyze your customers’ onboarding experience, the effort you put into brand building, advertising, and prospect outreach could fall flat. Solving holes in the customer experience improves conversion. Between attracting more prospects and improving conversion of those prospects, you can dramatically reduce your cost to acquire new customers.
CX analysis allows you to keep your customers engaged, and engaged customers stick with you. This is especially important if you sell SaaS subscriptions and depend on a large customer base.
By more deeply understanding the customer experience, you can:
Determine who will get the most out of your product or service
Know who will be the most profitable customers for your business
Improve retention rates
Increase profits by avoiding unnecessary costs and becoming more efficient
Improve customer service
After all, a thriving customer base is your company's biggest asset. The mark of a successful customer is their strong relationship with your company and satisfaction with your product, as this reduces churn rates and encourages repeat business.
Understanding your CX can help you identify the customers that are most and least likely to get value from your product or service. And the customers that are most and least likely to be valuable to the business.
Customers that have a great experience tend to stay longer, spend more, and need less help. So they not only create more revenue for the business, but they can also cost less to serve. Even better, you can align sales and marketing efforts around finding these ideal customers.
CX can make the business more profitable in a number of ways:
Solve gaps in CX that can reduce support calls and cost to serve
Focus sales and marketing effort on finding the most valuable customers
Identify customers that love your product who can drive referrals
You need to know three main things to start analyzing CX related to your company.
First, define your ideal customer:
The people who would get the most value from your products or services
Those who will keep coming back if offered a fantastic experience
Customers who purchase your products most frequently
Customers who check all these boxes and are most profitable to your business
Next, identify variations on this ideal customer - or customers you may have that don’t fit this profile at all. These are your segments. You will ultimately want to understand CX across your different segments so you can focus efforts on later improving CX in the right place and for the right customers.
By looking at critical touchpoints in your company, you’ll be able to analyze and prepare for problems or successes. Key touchpoints include:
How prospects discover your business
How prospects learn more about your business
Buying process
New customer onboarding procedures
Day-to-day product use
Key milestones in product use
Points in experience where customer gets clear value
Interactions with people at your company
Getting-help experience
Day-to-day product use
Customer renewals
Customer cancellations or product returns
Winback experience
There are various ways you can collect customer insights or feedback from your ideal customer base:
Day-to-day interactions with customers
Collect survey feedback
Conduct customer interviews
Hire mystery shoppers
Explore web analysis data
Product use
Frontline team interviews
While these are all great ways to perform CX analysis, frontline intelligence is one of the most beneficial for gaining insights. Customer-provided feedback tells part of the story, but when it’s paired with frontline intelligence, you get a clearer picture of your customers' journey.
There are multiple areas and touchpoints you should be looking into when you perform CX analysis to enhance your data research and guide your business to success.
You can review customer acquisition methods and customer retention rates. Furthermore, as you track the buyer journey, you can analyze your customer base for their needs to see if your company can fill those needs. This type of data can guide new product development.
Your brand's website or social media channels are usually the first touchpoints of interaction with your customers. In fact, 63% of all customer interactions start online. Analyze your website using heat and scroll maps to observe where your customers get stuck or where the most activity is happening on individual pages of your site.
You should also look at frontline feedback from various customer touchpoints. Specifically, you may want to look at your customers’ engagement with customer support, first-time customer interactions with your site, interactions with sales, and interactions with your professional services team. When you track this feedback regularly, you'll be able to see how topics change.
You’ll want to track frontline feedback based on your customers' interactions with your products. Quala frontline intelligence makes it easy to track, organize, and review your customers’ interactions with products and subscriptions.
Touchpoints consist of every interaction with your business no matter how small. Think of every possible interaction where your customer might think about your business. Some examples include:
Webinar attendance
Social media posts
Product ratings and testimonials
Word of mouth and forum conversations
Emails and newsletters
Point-of-sale interactions
Phone calls
Billing invoices
Tracking touchpoints is all about looking at every possible way your business may be interacting with your customers across all mediums and analyzing the interactions.
Your customers’ experience is what helps move your company forward. Quala quantifies what customers say, teams hear, and customers do with your product to create a robust understanding of customer interactions throughout the customer journey. These insights, which can be segmented by certain customers, help identify areas of strength and weakness throughout the customer experience.
Request a free demo to learn how Quala can reveal insights to improve your customer experience.
