Customer Experience Components: Assembling the Perfect CX

Customer experience (CX) is about how you make your customers feel.

Good experiences naturally make customers happy and encourage them to stay with you for a long time. Providing exceptional customer experiences contributes significantly to retention and building customer trust.

Research from Harvard Business Review suggests that companies with solid trust outperform competitors in market value by up to 400%. Customers of these brands are 88% more likely to make repeat purchases.

We’ll explore the key components of customer experience that help build trust and ensure high lifetime value. This will help you evaluate your current offerings and explore potential improvements.

5 Critical Components of the B2B Customer Experience

Below are some notable components of the B2B customer experience you’ll come across.

1) Business alignment and value propositions

B2B customers come from various backgrounds and have different needs, challenges, and goals. Your business offerings and value proposition should resonate with the industry, the company’s size, and the real pains of the key decision-makers involved.

Providing solutions that cater to customers’ unique requirements improves their business performance, demonstrating your value and offering them a good customer experience through your products and services. Analysis by BCG suggests that doing so is highly rewarding:

Try communicating your value proposition in a way that resonates with your customers’ pain points, needs, and motivations. This will give you a clear return on investment while highlighting your products’ tangible benefits.

2) Relationship building and partnerships

Revenue and profits are byproducts of good customer relationships. Leading these relationships with trust and transparency shows your new customers that you value them. Try working closely with customers to identify their challenges, letting them know they can rely on you for solutions that will lead them to success.

All this results in a positive experience that customers will cherish for a long time as you build the relationship. Your support, value, and innovation give them an exceptional user experience throughout.

The results can be seen in increased retention and lower customer churn as your customers continue to drive revenue with a high lifetime value. A Harvard Business School article says, “Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.”

3) Seamless processes and efficiency

Your onboarding process significantly affects customers’ first impressions of your brand. A smooth and efficient process allows customers to get started with the product and achieve business outcomes quickly, delighting them and bringing them closer to experiencing your product.

How you offer services after onboarding reveals a lot about your operations. Timely service and effective issue resolution establish customer trust. What’s more, providing updates and promptly addressing their concerns improves their customer experience.

Journey Orchestration: Workflow Engine – the heart of NCC

4) Customer support and service

Customer support and service delivery are pivotal in customers’ experience of a company. Modern customers need omnichannel support and service. They expect businesses to be available to them over various channels, like phone, email, social media messaging, and live chat, while also having self-service options. They need to feel that they can contact your business for support whenever they need it in the way that suits them best.

Here’s how customers prefer to communicate with brands:

When you meet customer expectations while equipping your team with the necessary expertise and knowledge, their issues get resolved. The more proactive the team is in resolving these inquiries, the better it demonstrates your ability to satisfy customers’ needs. This customer satisfaction will become a memorable experience your buyers won’t be able to get enough of.

5) Digital experience and technology

Customers experience your brand through its people, services, and products. You can manage the first two parts through relationship building and customer support. Then, an intuitive and easy-to-use digital platform can streamline customers’ experience with your product.

Make sure your customers can seamlessly interact with your platform. Offering them well-integrated products lets them increase efficiency while making their experience seamless across the tools they use daily.

Product analytics can help you gain insights into how customers use your product. This allows you to better adapt to their needs and preferences, and with these insights, you can personalize your offerings, improving the overall experience for customers.

According to our newly released research on CX trends, this is precisely what customers expect.

Customer Experience Strategies to Evaluate and Improve CX

There are several ways to improve your customer experience. Following these strategies will add points to your net promoter score while encouraging customers to advocate for your brand and create positive word of mouth for your business.

Applying insights from customer feedback

You can regularly collect feedback from customers about their experience with the brand, which will help you continuously improve your product. For feedback on a product level, it’s advisable to organize a focus group to dive into the granular details of customer opinions and unwrap key insights.

These insights will help you adjust or modify the product to give customers a more seamless experience. Analyze entire customer journeys to identify opportunities to improve your product.

PwC studied various constructs of customer experience between executives and their customers. What stood out is that customers wholeheartedly value ease of use nearly twice as much as brand executives expect. That can apply to getting help, talking to sales, pricing, and choosing the right services.

Customers often review your products on review websites like G2 or Capterra. Watch out for negative reviews; they can be a powerful tool for enhancing customers’ experiences with your brand and its products.

Perform competitor analysis

Understand how your competitors cater to different customer experience components. If you can access the product, you can manually go into it to test how seamless it is. Look into integrations and find ways to reach the “Aha!” moments of the product.

If you can’t access the product, watching its demo videos or product walk-throughs are good alternatives. Read customers’ feedback on review platforms or other forums to learn in depth about competitors’ support experience. This will help you locate areas for improvement in your own business.

You can also inform your strategies by examining industry best practices for customer experience.

Train employees

Your contact center software will help you find incidents where customers’ issue resolutions were delayed or didn’t happen per expectation. These incidents are excellent sources of insight that reveal areas where you can train and inspire employees to develop a more customer-centric mindset.

This mindset plays a phenomenal role in delivering great customer experiences. The intention to support, armed with a deep understanding of your product and services, will help your team to deliver a memorable CX.

Adopt the right technology

You need the right tools to gain insights to improve CX in your company. Customer relationship management systems, contact center platforms, and customer experience automation software can help you manage interactions at different touchpoints and track customer data.

The analytics will drive insights so you can personalize the customer experience. There are several AI-powered software tools, like chatbots or automated CX platforms, that you can use to automate service delivery. These tools leverage automation to help you manage customer interactions at scale while offering features to provide human-driven support when needed.

You can use different predictive analytics tools to guess your customers’ future needs, helping you assist them proactively.

Strive for continuous improvement

Improving customer experience isn’t a one-time act. It’s a recurring process you follow to improve service delivery, solving new issues each time. This enables you to enhance CX on different fronts as you refine improvements.

Make sure you leverage customer feedback and performance metrics data to inform improvements you prioritize in your CX strategy. Delivering extraordinary customer experiences requires a collaborative approach in which your people, product, and service operate in sync to give customers experiences they care about.

Tailor Your CX Efficiently With Nextiva

You need a customer-centric mindset and the right technology to deliver the well-rounded customer experience components that your customers deserve and expect from you. With these foundations in place, you can effectively evaluate and address all other elements of the customer experience to manage it efficiently.

As a leader, you can inspire a customer-centric mindset by setting an example — such as consistently demonstrating a commitment to customer satisfaction yourself. On the technology side, Nextiva’s unified customer experience platform will give you the tools to efficiently manage CX while driving critical insights for the C-suite about the current gaps and the means to bridge them in your CX workflows.