UI/UX Design 18 May , 2022 What is a customer experience (CX) ? Valdis Strautiņš What is customer experience (CX)? Customer experience is a set of all interactions with your company – online store, product or service, as well as your employees. From the first point of contact to purchase, use and not only. Customer experience is formed both before, during the purchase and after the purchase. It is related to how contact with your brand makes people feel and what emotions this interaction causes when interacting with your brand. A good customer experience ensures that after each interaction your customers are satisfied! The most important part of creating a customer experience is to understand what your customers want in the online store and give them exactly what they expect. When you understand what will make the customer happy, you can meet their needs better than anyone else – and it is at this moment that the customer’s loyalty begins! There are two main types of customer experience: the phase before the purchase and after the purchase. In order to create an effective strategy for each of these phases separately, it makes sense to think about how they merge into one large set that forms the customer travel cycle! The customer experience plays an important role in service, as it covers all aspects that ensure customer satisfaction – from advertising, product packaging and quality, to delivery speed and also elements such as the customer refuelling center, which reacts quickly if there are problems with ordering or invoicing.c. Effective customer experience The goal of an effective customer experience is not only to meet the needs of customers, but also to exceed their expectations, providing more value than they expected. In order to achieve this goal, you need to know what the wishes and needs of customers are – before they buy your product or service, after purchasing it, on a daily basis, when they use it, when questions or problems arise.c. If you do not know these wishes and needs at each stage, then it is impossible for you to create a customer experience that meets their needs and wishes at each stage. Digital klietna experience Nowadays, a digital channel, such as an online store, is a particularly important channel of customer experience. It is the online store that is where the consumer begins to obtain information about the product or service that could be purchased. Therefore, it is very important that your online store not only looks good, but also provides easy access to information about your product or service. In turn, it is provided by the online store dizians – UI/UX. The importance of design in the customer experience In order to ensure an excellent customer experience, it is also necessary to create an excellent user experience. Design is one of the best ways to achieve this! There are many ways in which a company can add value to its customers through design. For example, easily and transparently find shopping or information. How much effort does it take to achieve a particular goal – to find the necessary information with 1-2 clicks. People are increasingly using mobile devices to buy goods and services on the Internet. At least 57% of people leave the online store if they find it difficult to find what they need, such as delivery prices or time, in about 3 seconds. Therefore, it is important that user experience (UX) is also worked on when creating an online store, which is an important aspect of the customer experience. If customers don’t find what they need quickly and easily in your online store, there’s a good chance they won’t buy anything from you at all. The digital world has changed the basic principles of CX The digital world has changed some of the basic principles of the customer experience that companies have used for years. At the moment, these are new ways to reach your customers, learn from them and provide value. – Listen to your customers: Nowadays, companies can use digital technologies (online stores, social networks.c, etc.) to listen to their customers in a way that was not possible before. Using a variety of analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Hotjar, to see how customers interact with the online store. – Learn from your customers: Analytics tools aim to analyze customer behavior, for example, in which section customers spend the most time and which section is abandoned in the first seconds. Using the obtained analytics data, you can draw conclusions about what customers like or, on the contrary, what they are not interested in, so that in the future you can provide a much better customer experience! – Provide value: Analytics tools allow not only to collect information about customers’ preferences, but also to create a personalized customer experience based on their preferences, such as sending discount coupons for specific items based on purchase history.c.. Online stores can use the following strategies to improve the customer experience – Facilitates customer communication: When a customer has questions or problems with a purchase or service, he wants to solve them quickly and easily. If your company’s phone number is difficult to find or if the employee who answers the call is hasty and not interested in offering a solution, your customer will gain a negative experience. – Make sure that your product is of high quality: This is one of the most important factors for the success of the online store. Customers want to get the best for their money. It applies to quality, service, support, warranty, everything. No one wants to pay money for what does not work or breaks down after a few use. People also do not want poor-quality products that break easily and need to be changed frequently. By delivering a poor quality product to the customer, you will most likely receive a bad review about your brand, which will accordingly affect other people’s desire to purchase this product. – Make sure that the customer experience is personalized: Today’s demanding man is looking for such a shopping experience in which he can feel special. For example, sending discount coupons on your birthday with a 10% discount on your next purchase. In this way, you show that the customer is important, that you remember about him and wait for him in your online store by giving a discount on the purchase. – Offer a loyalty program: Think about introducing a loyalty program in your online store, thus creating loyal customers who will shop with you over and over again. For example, when shopping in your online store for each purchase, or a specific amount can earn points, then these points can be used to receive discounts on future purchases or free delivery. – Insert automated customer feedback tools in the online store: Place feedback tools that allow you to collect data on how convenient shopping in the online store is using the search engine, after reflecting the results, ask if the customer found what they are looking for.c. to maximize the customer experience and quickly eliminate problems before they cause losses! The best way to find out the customer experience of visiting your online store is to ask them yourself It’s no secret that customers are the most important factor in your company. The best way to find out what customers think and what their experience has been in your online store is to ask them for themselves. Surveys are one of the most popular ways to get feedback from customers, but there are other options. For example, use social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram as a customer service channel to ask questions and provide answers to real people who have purchased your product or service. Remember: A good customer experience creates loyal customers The main conclusion is that the customer experience is more than a one-time interaction. It’s a permanent relationship that includes how customers feel about your brand, product and/or service. By focusing on a positive customer experience from start to finish – from the moment they find out about your company to the moment they use your product and/or service, you can get loyal customers who will stay with you for years. These points are a combination of customer experience, and depending on how well these points work together, the company can grow or, on the contrary, collapse!