consumer behaviour

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My skills areas:

Business Analyst

  • facilitate solutions for stakeholders

Creativity and Creative thinking

  • ways and techniques to work and think differently

Customer Experience (CX, UX)

  • understanding how and what makes a great customer experience off and online.

Customer Behaviour Analyst

Understanding why and how customers behave and what that means for businesses

Distillation

  • examining methodologies, beliefs, and challenges in order to extract the essential and most important aspects -WHAT? WHY! WHAT!

Innovation

  • how to improve, simplify, automate or develop new processes.

Learning Management

–  devising training and training systems

Management

–  improving the way things get done

Process Automation

  • what can be done differently

Strategist change

– preparing and planning for what’s around the corner

Art- public and facilitation

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Understanding customer experience

I was going to update my post on Understanding the customer experience and as part of the research came across this from HotJar.
It really hits the nail of the head so in the interests of not reinventing the wheel, here it is.
LAST UPDATED AUG 14 2019

Understanding customer experience

Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset… and a lot of careful work.
This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to improve it through customer feedback and surveys, plus tips from 100+ CX experts and a report with plenty of CX trends and stats for 2019—so you have everything you need to start delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.

Start improving your CX today 

Grab a FREE Hotjar trial and start collecting feedback from your customers, so you can fix and improve their experience of your website.
what-is-CX

What is customer experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX, is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.

CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you. Everything you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so a great customer experience is your key to success.

Why is CX important for your business?

Delivering a great customer experience is hugely important for any business. The better experience customers have, the more repeat custom and positive reviews you’ll receive, while simultaneously reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns.

The benefits of delivering great CX include:

  • increased customer loyalty
  • increased customer satisfaction
  • better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

create-cx-surveyAll business models can benefit from improving the customer experience: subscription businesses can increase retention and reduce churn, e-commerce marketplaces can increase repeat custom and reduce returns, and service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints.

In fact, we challenge you to think up a type of business that doesn’t benefit from providing a great customer experience. We believe that putting customers first is always good for business (and we also have the data to prove it in the ‘CX stats and trends‘ chapter).

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As we mentioned, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help—for example, calling an operator to request a refund or interacting via email with a service provider.

In other words: CX is larger than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with your company, whether it’s the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your customer service team to complain about your product (and hopefully get a prompt response).

What is a good customer experience?

improve-cx

There is no single universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience: your business is unique and so are your customers. However, we’ve found a number of common principles by polling 2000 CX professionals across many industries. You can read the full results of our survey here, but we’ve included some of the key takeaways below.

In short, good customer experience can be achieved if you:

  • Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
  • Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
  • Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly
  • Reduce friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges

It’s not rocket science: a good customer experience comes from asking your customers questions, listening to their responses, and actioning their feedback.

6 things that cause bad customer experiences

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes, but we noticed a number of commonly-reported issues in our customer experience stats.

customer-experience-top-frustration1
Bad customer experience is primarily caused by:

  • Long wait times
  • Employees who do not understand customer needs
  • Unresolved issues/questions
  • Too much automation/not enough of a human touch
  • Service that is not personalized
  • Rude/angry employees

If you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer—it’s quite likely that one (or more) of the above was the cause.

Ultimately, though, what counts as poor customer experiences in your business will be unique—and you’ll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback, then working to minimize the impact of factors that cause a bad experience for your them.

 

→ Check out the chapter with all the CX stats and trends for 2019 or learn more about improving your CX strategy

Why you should use customer feedback as part of your CX strategy

CS-trends-stats

You may know some theory behind what makes good and bad CX, but for it to make an impact on your business you need to have a reliable method of collecting insight from your customers so you can take action and make impactful changes.

Customer feedback is information you collect from your customers about their experience with your product, service, website, or business as a whole. You can use this feedback to improve customer experience by removing or reducing areas of friction and increasing positive touchpoints.

You’re probably already collecting customer feedback without realizing it: when a customer sends an email, calls customer support, or leaves a review, that’s feedback. The problem is, if that feedback is not measured and analyzed, you’re missing out on the opportunity to use it to improve customer experience and leverage its growth potential.

→ Read more about the CX surveys you can run to collect feedback from your customers 

How to measure and analyze customer experience

CX-analysis

From what we wrote so far, customer experience can look like a subjective concept that’s difficult to measure. That’s why you need to rely on a number of different CX metrics that can be used individually or together to get an indication of customer experience in your business.

By having a measurable indicator of CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use it to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might be affecting your customers. Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals to track customer experience over time:

  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Time To Resolution (TTR)

 

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score measures the experience with a product or service in terms of how ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ it is for your customers to complete an action.

CES surveys are usually sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as ‘How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?’ and a rating scale going from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’. They also work well after customers reach important milestones in their journey (for example, after they sign up for a free product trial or after they successfully concluded a transaction).

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty score that is derived from asking customers a simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”.

You can choose to adapt the question slightly to better suit your business and use a follow-up NPS question to get more insight, but the point of NPS is to get a simple numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience.

We use NPS as a primary CX metric at Hotjar, too.


Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They can be expressed with a 5- or 7-point scale (where 1: very unsatisfied and 7: very satisfied), or through binary yes/no answers.

Unlike the Net Promoter Score, which asks customers to consider their overall feeling towards the brand (and thus, their likelihood of recommending it or not), CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on specific touchpoints they were satisfied or dissatisfied with.

Time to resolution (TTR)

TTR is the average length of time it takes customer service teams to resolve an issue or ticket after it’s been opened by a customer. It can be measured in days or business hours, and is calculated by adding up all times to resolution and dividing the result by the number of cases solved.

In our CX stats and trends, we found that the leading cause of customer frustration is a long wait/response time. For that, TTR is a crucial metric to track and improve: the shorter your TTR, the higher the chances your customers will not experience frustration when they reach out for help.

A great customer experience example using NPS

NPS case study-Hotjar

Here is a practical example of what tracking a CX metric and acting on the insight can do for customer experience.

One of our customers, jewelry e-commerce Taylor & Hart, specializes in bespoke engagement rings—not the kind of product people usually think about buying online, and also not the kind of product customers would want to buy more than one of.

The company’s goal was to turn reluctant visitors into one-time buyers, and one-time buyers into lifelong promoters who would recommend the same service to their family and friends. After choosing Net Promoter Score as their primary CX metric, Taylor & Hart identified two essential customer milestones and set up NPS surveys at each point:

  1. The moment a customer places an order
  2. The moment the customer receives their order

The resulting NPS numbers were kept visible on metrics dashboards in the office, and everyone’s focus was on keeping the scores improving. It wasn’t an easy feat, but the team used each piece of negative feedback to fix parts of their business, from manufacturing to shipping methods, to give customers the best experience they could (if you’re curious about the logistics, you can read a full write-up of this NPS case study).

With customer experience kept very much front-of-mind, Taylor & Hart grew their NPS scores to over 80 (the highest in their industry) and annual revenue followed suit and grew to €4.5M.

HOTJAR 2019

 

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Customers – 5 years from now

What if i told you that customers would want something completely different from what they receive today in five years time.

 

Would you be interested?

 

Would you be willing to listen to me and change what you do ?

Well the answer is, yes they will.

The internet now provides us with so much information, everyone is a 5 sentences deep expert.

People are starting to feel that because they can find information, neatly summarised into bite sized chunks, that they know a lot of what you are going to say about the wine, how it is made etc and many, quite frankly, they are not interested.

In five years time, what will be key, is the tailored experience. I don’t mean standing at a tasting bar, listening to someone tell them about the wine, what they should smell or taste.

There will still be a place for that, but the key will be differentiation. Differing the types of experience to meet the needs of different customers is what will be expected. Many wineries are set up for a one size fits all approach to customers, which relies heavily on the personality of the cellar door staff to make it work.

Great cellar door staff who can change their style and presentation to meet the needs of different customers are invaluable today.

Customers often have a great time when they connect with the person at the cellar door, and winery owners often assume that connection will mean they then connect with winery and wine, but many winery owners also know that the purchases on the day are not replicated down the track.

The customer builds a temporary relationship with the cellar door staff, they chat, laugh, perhaps share stories and that loyalty increases wine sales on the day, but once the customer leaves, that is the end of the relationship with the cellar door staff, there not Facebook friends, they don’t keep in touch! It is hoped they become winery friends by extension and people do sign up etc, but often this engagement quickly fades and the winery becomes one of many choices of winery and wines available to them.

So what will change in five years time, Customer Experiences will need to be differentiated and winery goals will need to become more specific.

Firstly , customer experiences will need to be varied according to the type of customer, there will need to be options, choices,  depending upon what the customer wants to experience and what goals you have set for each of these experiences. Wine tours have an impact here too, but i will need to talk about that in another post.

Secondly, winery goals will need to be set for each experience, these need to be specific, communicated and monitored.
For instance, for people who have a great time engaging with the cellar door staff, the goal should almost certainly be around on the day sales and any post visit sales will need that particular cellar door staff member to be explicitly involved with the post purchase communication, remember those customers had a positive engagement with that cellar door person not necessarily with your winery.

This is the first in a series i intend to write over the coming months as i head overseas to develop a European wine tour experience.
But before i go, if there is anything i can do to help you with your customer experience and future development, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

I am a consultant, coach and mentor with 20 years experience. My consultancy today revolves around doing things better, more effectively, through a deep understanding what you are trying to achieve, understanding what value the customer receives and what is the most effective outcome for all involved.

Get in touch

Published

10 Tips to Achieve Anything You Want in Life

 1. Focus on commitment, not motivation.

Just how committed are you to your goal? How important is it for you, and what are you willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it? If you find yourself fully committed, motivation will follow.

Here’s how to focus on commitment.

2. Seek knowledge, not results.

If you focus on the excitement of discovery, improving, exploring and experimenting, your motivation will always be fueled. If you focus only on results, your motivation will be like weather—it will die the minute you hit a storm. So the key is to focus on the journey, not the destination. Keep thinking about what you are learning along the way and what you can improve.

Here’s how to seek knowledge.

3. Make the journey fun.

It’s an awesome game! The minute you make it serious, there’s a big chance it will start carrying a heavy emotional weight and you will lose perspective and become stuck again.

Here’s how to make the journey fun. 

4. Get rid of stagnating thoughts.

Thoughts influence feelings and feelings determine how you view your work. You have a lot of thoughts in your head, and you always have a choice of which ones to focus on: the ones that will make you emotionally stuck (fears, doubts) or the ones that will move you forward (excitement, experimenting, trying new things, stepping out of your comfort zone).

Here’s how to get rid of stagnating thoughts. 

5. Use your imagination.

Next step after getting rid of negative thoughts is to use your imagination. When things go well, you are full of positive energy, and when you are experiencing difficulties, you need to be even more energetic. So rename your situation. If you keep repeating I hate my work, guess which feelings those words will evoke? It’s a matter of imagination! You can always find something to learn even from the worst boss in the world at the most boring job. I have a great exercise for you: Just for three days, think and say positive things only. See what happens.

Here’s how to use your imagination. 

6. Stop being nice to yourself.

Motivation means action and action brings results. Sometimes your actions fail to bring the results you want. So you prefer to be nice to yourself and not put yourself in a difficult situation. You wait for the perfect timing, for an opportunity, while you drive yourself into stagnation and sometimes even into depression. Get out there, challenge yourself, do something that you want to do even if you are afraid.

Here’s how to stop being nice to yourself.

7. Get rid of distractions.

Meaningless things and distractions will always be in your way, especially those easy, usual things you would rather do instead of focusing on new challenging and meaningful projects. Learn to focus on what is the most important. Write a list of time-wasters and hold yourself accountable to not do them.

Here’s how to get rid of distractions. 

8. Don’t rely on others.

You should never expect others to do it for you, not even your partner, friend or boss. They are all busy with their own needs. No one will make you happy or achieve your goals for you. It’s all on you.

Here’s how to not rely on others.   

9. Plan.

Know your three steps forward. You do not need more. Fill out your weekly calendar, noting when you will do what and how. When-what-how is important to schedule. Review how each day went by what you learned and revise what you could improve.

Here’s how to plan.   

10. Protect yourself from burnout.

It’s easy to burn out when you are very motivated. Observe yourself to recognize any signs of tiredness and take time to rest. Your body and mind rest when you schedule relaxation and fun time into your weekly calendar. Do diverse tasks, keep switching between something creative and logical, something physical and still, working alone and with a team. Switch locations. Meditate, or just take deep breaths, close your eyes, or focus on one thing for five minutes.

Here’s how to protect yourself from burnout.

You lack motivation not because you are lazy or don’t have a goal. Even the biggest stars, richest businesspeople or the most accomplished athletes get lost sometimes. What makes them motivated is the curiosity about how much better or faster they can get. So above all, be curious, and this will lead you to your goals and success.

Tackle your biggest goals with these tips from a former Olympic athlete.
Inga Stasiulionyte
Published

6 Reasons Why Customer Service Is the Most Powerful Word-of-Mouth Marketing Weapon

For this post we’ll explore the connection between great customer service and word-of-mouth marketing.

Providing your customer with consistently great service — experiences that they’d write home about — increases what McKinsey calls “word-of-mouth equity,” an index of a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase. Here’s an excerpt from a McKinsey Quarterly article:

Word of mouth is influential throughout the consumer decision journey. It’s also the most disruptive factor. Word of mouth can prompt a consumer to consider a brand or product in a way that incremental advertising spending simply cannot. It’s also not a one-hit wonder. The right messages resonate and expand within interested networks, affecting brand perceptions, purchase rates, and market share. The rise of online communities and communication has dramatically increased the potential for significant and far-reaching momentum effects. In the mobile-phone market, for example, we have observed that the pass-on rates for key positive and negative messages can increase a company’s market share by as much as 10 percent or reduce it by 20 percent over a two-year period, all other things being equal. 

Getting your customers to do your marketing for you by investing in exceptional customer experiences can reduce costs and increase conversions. We see customers broadcast stellar customer service interactions across a number of channels — social, blogging, email, and yes, IRL (in real life). In the one-to-many channels, particularly blogging and social networks, a positive recommendation can have exponential effects. And so can a negative review.

As consumer review sites are increasingly unreliable (though we are glad to see action being taken against those manipulating consumer reviews online), a personal recommendation from friend or family member for a site to buy those new Steve Madden boots from, or a hotel to stay at for your upcoming trip to Costa Rica, carries more weight than most forms of traditional advertising. And, word-of-mouth can have positive impacts on growing your community of loyal, repeat purchasers.

Here’s why customer service, good and bad, matters when it comes to word-of-mouth marketing*:

  1. A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience.
  2. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people.
  3. Negative interactions with a business are spread to twice as many people as positive ones.
  4. People are twice as likely to talk about bad customer service experiences than they are to talk about good experiences.
  5. 67% of people spend money after getting recommendations from their friends on online communities like Facebook and Twitter.
  6. Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience.

As noted by Andy Sernovitz, head of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA):

“In the end, word of mouth marketing isn’t very complicated: Give real people interesting things to talk about, and make it easier for that conversation to take place.”

Customer experience isn’t just something that impacts the perception of your brand in the marketplace. It is your brand. So what are you doing to deliver exceptional experiences to your customers?

*Source for word-of-mouth statistics: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer, McKinsey Quarterly, Internet Retailer. 

Written By Ross Cranwell 2017