86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer service experience. The experience offered by a business to its customers must be a priority.

The infamous old business saying, “If you make it, they’ll come,” doesn’t apply anymore. Te market is changing. You must provide an incredible experience to your customers, rather than just offer them innovative products/services.

But, it isn’t easy to ensure a delightful customer experience (CX). Even when you learn your customers are happy with your products/services, you cannot ignore the value of a CX analysis. After all, customer loyalty matters the most in this highly competitive world.

According to Temkin Group, loyal customers are seven times as likely to test an offering, five times as likely to buy again, and four times as likely to refer. In order to stay competitive, it is imperative to conduct a customer experience analysis every now and then. Only then can you work on you customer support and improve it to make it better.

What is Customer Experience Analysis?

It’s imperative to create a positive customer experience. We live in a customer-centric environment. Customer experience across channels is key to determine where and how people shop. Your customers need some degree of engagement and personalization as they interact with your brand. However, your brand may not align with your customers’ expectations. Analyzing customer experience thus becomes more important.

A customer experience analysis is a method to measure if your product/service meets or supersedes customer expectations. Your business may fall short to fulfill those. The term carries much relevance for business leaders and progressive brand builders. When analyzing customer experience, you should understand customers’ needs and wants to provide for a personalized service. You also should systematically capture every customer interaction and analyze it in-and-out.

Ways to Conduct a Customer Experience Analysis

A customer experience analysis strategy is of paramount importance when looking at ways to conduct a customer experience analysis.

Here’s how you can customize your customer experience methodology to create a better experience for your customers.

1.   Performance Analysis

This part of the process is where a company sits down and analyzes its website to figure out what things go wrong and what things go right.

A company who conducts a performance analysis may have a question as to why customers who come to their website leave them without purchasing anything. During performance analysis, you may look at your product or service individually or at your business. Measure your customer success via the many sources of customer feedback of data. Only then can you best understand your customers. Employing a help desk ticketing system also allows you to gain valuable insights into what your customers feel about the website and the customer service.

Another part of performance analysis is finding out if your customers would recommend your service or product. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common metric used in this context. Identify what helps to drive web traffic and changes you should make to the website to generate more sales.

Analyzing your website or online portal to check for declining sales or if your customers act as brand advocates enable you to improve the overall customer service experience. As you improve your overall customer experience management (CEM) key performance indicators, your online sales increase and this triggers business growth.

2.   Utilizing a CRM

Conducting surveys enables brands to gain valuable insights into how customers respond to the experiences. In order to conduct a survey at a large scale, you make use of a CRM tool. Most of the CRM software features the ability to organize customer feedback. You can even integrate a customer feedback program within your existing CRM. The goal here is to amalgamate the entire consumer data into a single location.

According to Luminoso, an analytics company, “Make sure you’re leveraging every piece of data you have! Text data is invaluable to understand the “why” behind customer trends and for pinpointing specific drivers of customer delight and loyalty. Still, your quantitative data can help bring more context to the insights and trends you find in your unstructured text.”

3.   Net Customer Needs Solution (NetCNS Survey)

The process of NetCNS provides for an in depth understanding of the customer needs that make for the NetCNS score. Brands know how their product/service better fulfills their customer requirements. Where should I focus to make improvements? This is what the NetCNS Survey helps you with.

During this survey, you gather the needs and wants of your customers, group them, and then analyze those needs and wants. The analysis gives you the gap between the number of needs your brand has been able to meet and the number of unsatisfactory occurrences.

4.   Campaign-Centric Analysis 

Applied to a specific company event or a marketing campaign, this kind of analysis enables you to take action beforehand. You can quickly check for any changes in consumer sentiment or problems with the newly launched product/service. Doing so may save your business from a bigger, long-term, and irreparable issue.

Let’s understand this better with a real-life example. When VMware made a change to their global pricing strategy, they kept an eye on the customer feedback. After 6 weeks of critical comments, the CEO reversed the policy to the utmost delight of customers.

Make your CEM team part of the merger team as soon as your organization is about to go through a big merger that may affect your customers. Keep the transition smooth and customers delighted with a campaign-centric analysis program in place even before the merger announcement.

5.   Net Promoter Score Survey (NPS)

Measure customer loyalty and drive brand promotion using NPS surveys. Understand your customer experience analysis strategy would be incomplete without using the power of surveys. Surveys are great at giving companies plenty of information as to where their pain points are.

Higher the NPS score, the better it is. Majority of the brands that take consumer sentiment seriously use NPS score to ascertain the overall level of customer satisfaction. Spot at-risk accounts and identify improvement areas to bring about improved customer experiences. Over long periods, NPS programs boost proactive account management and cut down on customer churn. You may employ a survey making tool and this tool enables you to create amazing NPS surveys.

6.   Research Analysis

Companies should conduct a research analysis along with campaign-centric analysis or performance analysis. In this stage of customer experience analysis, look for trends and insights in the your customer feedback data. Data gathered helps to improve the customer experience. The data can even be used for new product research, innovation, and to improve your existing product or service.

Your CEM team should aim at looking for insights and the bigger picture in your customer feedback data. Keep the customer at the core of your business and implement their thoughts, as you go about your larger business plan.

The Bottom Line

Conducting a customer service analysis is not an easy task. However, the benefits far outweigh the negative. Businesses who invest their resources into improving the customer experience will enjoy far better customer retention than businesses who choose to spend their resources elsewhere. While the customer experience wasn’t a priority in the past, it is quickly becoming crucial as companies that fail to improve their customers’ experiences will be left behind.

Author Bio: Dwayne Charrington is an expert in customer service and ongoing trends in the customer support industry. He conceptualizes and creates content for ProProfs Help Desk and has paramount experience in SaaS-based products. In his free time, he likes adventure sports and traveling.