You will agree that customer experience is fundamental to the success of your company and its brand in a world where choice abounds and standing out can make all the difference. The consumer, your customer, can easily find reviews and recommendations that can guide their buying journey and sometimes lead them to a decision phase very quickly. It is therefore essential that the customer experience you offer is optimal and positive.
You probably have personal anecdotes in mind about positive or negative customer experiences. This is normal since the customer experience is an integral part of the purchasing process. So how can we as a company improve and optimize this customer experience?
What is customer experience? First of all, let's take a look at the concept of customer experience. The customer experience is defined by the amalgam of the perception and the feeling that your customer has towards your company and your brand all along his purchase path. This has a direct impact on several factors of your business, including, to name a few, revenues, purchase recurrence and loyalty.
We must therefore act at several contact points during the buyer's journey to ensure that the customer experience is optimal and personalized. Obviously, this buyer's journey must be defined beforehand. For a moment, you might say, "I can't control a buyer's emotions and feelings!" Of course, we can't have absolute control over everything in life, but tools exist to drive your customer experience optimization strategy within your company. These tools will help you, among other things, to analyze this perception and thus make your customer not just a simple customer but a loyal customer, an ambassador, who will be the voice of your company and your brand.
So how can HubSpot CRM help you? First of all, by allowing you to measure and analyze your customers' satisfaction.
The Service Hub, the Customer Experience Hub
HubSpot offers you to properly and constantly manage the service given to your customers with the Service Hub. Tickets can help you better manage the service you provide. The term ticket can sometimes imply that it is a feature that only addresses an IT support department, but it is not.
Tickets are in fact a method to properly allocate and track service to your customers. They can therefore be used for all kinds of customer requests or even for after-sales service. Several reports exist to give you the right information on the service given, the time spent to satisfy the customer's request and/or the performance of your team dedicated to it. Your email or chat service (instant messaging on your website) can even create service tickets. The tickets and reports included will help you set up internal procedures that can be modified over time to provide an evolving service that is responsive to your customers' needs. Not to mention the day-to-day work of your employees, giving this sometimes very demanding service that will be alleviated by a clear and efficient procedure.
A good customer experience strategy does not only take into account the service given but also the customer satisfaction and loyalty. A satisfied customer is great, but a loyal customer is even better, right? This is the ultimate goal of the Inbound Methodology : bring the hard-earned customer to the last phase, to become loyal and to be a promoter of our company and our brand.
This may sound utopian, but it's possible to analyze your customer's experience easily and appropriately. HubSpot makes it easy and provides survey templates that you can adapt to the specific touchpoints of the buying journey. It's good to know that your analysis must take into account the customer experience at multiple touchpoints, not just measure the quality of the given product or service.
You need to survey and collect data from all parts of the buying journey. From start to finish and beyond. You'll agree that consistency is the key to any analysis that wants to be a rigorous and accurate analysis.
So how do you go about it and where do you start? Go by department. For example, the sales department, support, delivery, after-sales service and not forgetting the Web experience. Define the stages of your customer journey in each department and you will be able to target precisely where to put the necessary efforts to perfect your customer experience at specific touch points.
This experience can generally be analyzed by taking into account data that is calculated by obtaining precise scores. These scores are called CES (Customer Effort Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) and NPS (Net Promoter Score) and are available within HubSpot's Service Hub.
The Service Hub allows you to create your own customer satisfaction surveys. The CES measures the effort customers put into interacting with your company by acquiring your product or service. This survey allows you to analyze the relevance of your future or existing customer's purchase acquisition channels. In other words, when making the purchase or obtaining the service, how satisfied was your customer.
Service Hub
The Service Hub also allows you to collect your score CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).
Typically, the survey is a simple question asked and is defined by a scale of 1 to 3, 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. Since this survey is quick, it is easy to send it several times during the buying process. This way, you will get a quick view and be able to target exactly where the dissatisfaction, if any, lies during your customer's buying journey.
This survey should be sent to the majority of your customers regardless of their point of contact and their previous satisfaction level. Sending this survey only to loyal customers, for example, would obviously not be very representative of the reality of the customer experience within your company.
Within these survey templates, you can get the probability that your customers will promote your company and brand with an NPS (Net Promoter Score) clear and easy to understand.
The NPS score can be calculated using your positive, passive and negative reviews. The highest score is given to positive reviews. However, nobody wants negative reviews, right? So how do you neutralize them?
Let's face it, negative reviews do exist. However, we can always do better or differently and improve. You will certainly agree with this maxim. To do this, we need to know and understand in order not to repeat the same mistakes.
Improving and optimizing the customer experience you offer is done by identifying the reasons for this dissatisfaction. HubSpot helps you once again by allowing you to create automations. These allow you to be consistent in your mailings and data collection, consistency being the key as mentioned above. For example, you can adjust the customer experience by creating a service call ticket that stipulates to contact the customer who answered negatively to your survey. This will make your customer feel privileged, listened to and heard. This initiative may make all the difference in reversing that customer's negative perception or feeling. After all, this customer had an interest in your product or service in the first place, so why not make their experience appropriate and positive by putting in the necessary effort? This can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors, which is generally known quickly and leads to positive reviews and recommendations!
Ask for suggestions for your product or service with the personalized survey
Getting reviews and recommendations is obviously very good for optimizing the customer experience within your company. But why not push the envelope a little more and ask for suggestions to improve your product or service and give the customer what they want.
A personalized survey can also be a good way to make your customer interact positively with your company and thus act directly on the perception and the feeling of your customer. Let your customers speak. Ask them to give you suggestions on your product or service and this will give them a feeling of being at the heart of the evolution of your product or service, but also of being important and show them that your company wants above all to satisfy their needs. You might be surprised, your customers can be an endless source of improvement.
We recommend that you be consistent in your mailings to help you get the real story on customer satisfaction. This will also allow you to analyze trends over time and find problems, reasons that are recurring at certain touch points in your buying journey. Obviously, analyzing the trends of your tickets will be one of the first tasks to do since it is directly reflected in the Service Hub reports.
Setting up a dashboard dedicated to trends including monthly and quarterly reports can also be a very useful tool to give you the right indicators on trends and the degree or rate of satisfaction of your customers which is part of the customer experience. This will allow you to adjust actions at the relevant touch points and take the customer experience up a notch.
In short, customer experience is not a mystery to be solved but a set of perceptions and feelings that you can improve by having the right tools at your disposal. Here are the main points to consider in order to make the customer experience within your company a success to be reproduced:
First, define the buyer's journey within your company and the touch points your customer has to navigate.
Conduct the appropriate surveys to get tangible, concrete data to get your CES, CSAT and NPS scores.
Ask for suggestions on your products and services with a customized survey.
Analyze trends
As a final point, we recommend that you dare, dare to survey your existing customers, loyal customers and new customers. They may have the answer you've been looking for to improve your customer satisfaction!
Here are some HubSpot blog posts that might help you:
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/what-is-customer-experience
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/what-is-nps
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/what-is-churn-rate
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-satisfaction-score
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-effort-score
https://www.guest-suite.com/blog/experience-client
https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/
There are many other reasons to use the HubSpot CRM platform and its 5 hubs. In fact, you can check out our article that mentions the 40 reasons to adopt this CRM platform.