Research Methodologies: CX

Customer experience, or CX, has been gaining immense traction from businesses seeking higher market ROI and leveraging tools for customer retention. As organisations position themselves to be more attractive, there has been less focus on product and service innovation. Instead, efforts to differentiate often prioritise the customer experience.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the sum-total of the interaction (touch-points) between an organisation and customer over the customer’s end-to-end journey. As businesses rely on positive customer experience to develop personal relationships, it is necessary to understand and pinpoint interactions with customers. Ultimately, it is the goal of CX to provide a much-needed lens of customers to contribute to business growth while simultaneously reducing customer churn and increasing loyalty.

Let’s consider a classic example where a business has focused on providing a positive customer experience – Amazon. Think about the last time you purchased a book from Amazon. As you attempt to search for the book, you are already provided with a list of the best sales providers and price points that match (or are related to) the search terms. In addition, you are also prompted with recommended and/or related books purchased by users who have seemingly expressed similar interests. Finally, you may also be recommended bundle deals such that you can get the best value when placing your order. After you have made up your mind on what to buy, payment and delivery options can be settled at a few clicks of the button. It is undoubtedly easy.

This streamlined process of providing customers with a positive and enjoyable experience is a result of Amazon's core philosophy, which revolves around enhancing customer experience by making the customer journey as straightforward as possible. With their fixation on micro-interactions, the ease of navigating their website is an accumulation of data and research on the end-to-end interaction of customers with their services: Amazon has figured out what makes its customers happy. With this information, they are able to predict your habits and preferences, provide recommendations while simultaneously ensuring the whole process is intuitive and easy.

How can Market Researchers then take on CX Methods to Evaluate Business Models?

1. Define Customer Segments

Segmentation is an opportunity to build better, more targeted relationships. While some organizations continue to rigidly segment customers by age, this is only the first step to understanding customers’ respective needs and wants. Other than age, the many means of segmentation include, without limitation, geographic location, customer size and profitability, future opportunity and support channels.

What we must consider in the process of segmentation generally comprises: what the business is trying to accomplish through segmentation and what changes/improvements need to implement across the organization to achieve this.

2. Develop a Customer Journey map

Customers are inherently complex individuals and there is no single ‘solution’ for a business seeking to improve customer experience. By employing a journey map, businesses will be better equipped and poised to understand the various touch-points and cornerstones of customer relationships/experience. This will allow businesses to measure attitudes and emotions that affect customers’ decisions. Customer journey mapping includes an array of methodologies, including ethnography, co-creation (where, for example, the business’ management team and its customers work together to solve problems) and empathy mapping.

3. Create a customer experience that includes a personal human touch

Armed with the knowledge of customers and their interactions with the business's products and/or services, end by adding a personal human touch to the business-customer interaction. Remember when that barista smiled at you before you even reached the till to order?

CX is leading to a more prominent human connection within the business realm, and also arguably redefining the traditional metrics of success: success should no longer be primarily measured by use or price points, but should also encompass – and focus on – the establishment and maintenance of long-term relationships with customers.

The next time you are at a restaurant, grabbing a coffee after lunch or standing in line at the airport, take into consideration the ease or the difficulty experienced in the service. How quickly did the food arrive? Was the line at the airport too long? Did the service representative smile at you or ask you how your day was? Customer ease is met with methodological investments in customer experience research.