Invest in the Customer Experience to Increase Your Profits
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
This quote from writer, actress and activist Maya Angelou reflects what many companies are striving to do today, which is to create a memorable customer experience.
The customer experience is predicted to be the most important growth driver over the next few years. Companies that focus their efforts on the customer experience and invest in it over the long term will build loyalty among their customers and increase their revenue and profits.
Let's take a closer look at these two key factors.
Key Factor: Loyalty
A customer won't stay with your brand if they don't trust you. Offering an exceptional customer experience will help you keep the customers you have.
Acquiring a new customer costs five times more than cultivating and nurturing your existing customer base. Adopting an effective customer experience policy at your company will have an immediate financial impact.
Key Factor: Increasing Your Company's Revenue
60% of customers are willing to pay more for a memorable experience.
Several studies conducted by Bain & Company and Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School observed that just a five per cent increase in customer retention rates is enough to increase profits by between 25 and 95%.
71% of leading companies in customer experience say that their efforts have had a positive impact on their financial performance, and among those companies, 61% report better financial results than their competitors.
With all the restrictions brought about by the 2020 health crisis, the customer experience became even more crucial in terms of business development and brand image. The companies that played their cards right were those that knew how to rethink their customer experience and adapt it to this new context as quickly as possible.
For example, Apple let Apple Card users contact support to enroll in Apple’s Customer Assistance program, which would allow them to skip their credit card payments without paying interest. Because of this response from Apple, they now definitely hold a special place in their customers’ hearts.
To craft a coherent strategy that will increase your revenue and help you retain customers, it's important to keep up with changes in your customers' expectations. To create an optimal strategy with customer experience at the forefront, you'll have to instill a customer-centric dynamic internally among your colleagues and employees.
Determine Your Customer Experience Touchpoints
To make your customer's experience a successful one, you need to understand how they connect to your brand and its products and what they expect from them, and you need to encourage their emotions throughout their journey. Think back to the four aspects of the customer experience we discussed previously. 
To help you create your customer experience, you're going to map out a "customer journey." This map should include every touchpoint or interaction between a company and its customers.
You shouldn't view the customer journey as just a list of steps to be analyzed for marketing research, but as an actual journey toward:
finding opportunities to make contact.
understanding friction points.
creating a strong bond between your brand and your customers.
With so many steps and channels to choose from, an omnichannel customer will switch from one channel to another, sometimes even skipping steps or going backwards.
That means there's never just one journey, but as many different journeys as there are customers. Each customer chooses their own channel at every step of their journey. That's why it's important to define different journeys based on the buyer personas you've identified.
Strategically speaking, taking this approach means being willing to build a real relationship of trust with your customers and giving them the sense of being part of a community, belonging to a privileged group.
Let's Recap!
The customer experience is an important driver of growth.
It can help build customer loyalty and increase revenue and profits.
It's also a key differentiating factor for your company's business.
A successful customer experience makes the customer feel emotions throughout their journey with a brand. For that reason, there are as many potential journeys as there are customers.
Now we're going to see how you can put this into practice to map your customer journeys.
