Imagine that you ordered a bouquet of flowers for a loved one through a flower shop aggregator app. But it turned out that such a bouquet is no longer available, although it is available for order in the service. As a result, you have to cancel the order and look for a bouquet from another supplier, but now the flowers will not have time to arrive by the desired date. You're unhappy with the quality of the service, the app, and generally don't like the customer service organization.

This is one of the customer experience examples, or CX. Each person, using the company's services, gets a positive or negative experience, forms his own opinion about the brand. Why CX is important for any business and how the customer experience affects the reputation of the application, we analyze in the article.

What is CX and why every startup needs to know about it
CX is a person's impression of interacting with the company as a whole. CX includes all the points of contact between the customer and your product: from switching screens in the application to contacting technical support and receiving an e-mail newsletter. CX stands for customer experience. In the era of digital transformation, CX has become more important than before. With the development of technology, customer requirements have also increased: they expect simplicity, convenience and speed from interacting with the product.

Let's take the flower ordering app from the example above. When developing such a service, you need to take into account that the client wants to order flowers in a few clicks on any date (including urgently) and expects that his request will be immediately transferred to the supplier. If the flowers do not arrive on time, the supplier does not have the right product or the order mechanics are inconvenient, the client will be dissatisfied, write a bad review about the company and will no longer buy flowers in your app.

Appentive conducted a study and found that 90% of customers rate an app based on its rating, 79% check reviews before downloading, and 55% view reviews before paying for an in-app purchase. That is, negative reviews not only reduce customer loyalty but also scare away potential ones.

What is the difference between UX and CX?
UX and CX are different concepts that have different goals.

UX (user experience) is the user's interaction with your product, for example, a mobile or web application. This experience is instantaneous, it happens when the user switches screens, clicks on buttons, scrolls through the feed.

The goal of UX development is to create a logical and convenient visual that the user will enjoy interacting with.

In CX (customer experience), there are more levels of interaction. This includes communication between the company and the client, and purchases/renewals of subscriptions in the application, and solving problems in the application with a technical support specialist. CX is a longer customer experience that starts from the moment the customer learns about the brand and ends when they stop using the company's services.

The goal of CX is to increase the level of trust and satisfaction of customers, to improve their opinion about interaction with the company at all levels. CX professionals look for the best methods of communicating with customers through the analysis of many metrics. For example, the client's reaction to the advertising strategy, his assessment of the level of service, and the usability of the product.

It turns out that UX is a part of CX because the overall impression of the company includes an opinion about the interaction with a particular product.

How to Build an Effective CX Strategy
It turns out that customer experience management plays a big role in the success of a project in the market. How to build a CX strategy so that it is effective and brings good results?

1. Create a customer journey map

At this stage, you need to put yourself in the user's shoes and trace the entire path of the client from the occurrence of the problem to the payment for the service. For example, the flower ordering app from the previous example might have a map like this:

After defining the path, you can understand exactly where problems arise in CX with the help of feedback from customers. For example, the processing of an order takes too long, so urgent orders are late. Or users often abandon carts, which means you need to look for flaws in the interface.

2. Analyze customer satisfaction

You can find out how satisfied customers are with using the app using surveys. You can send a survey after the trial period has expired. Or add a quick survey in a pop-up window right in the app.

3. Control user feedback

Regularly monitor reviews on Google Play, AppStore and social networks, do not forget to respond to user opinions on behalf of the company. People value transparency and the possibility of dialogue. If you respond to a negative review, promise to fix the problem and offer a solution/compensation, the dissatisfied user can be returned to the ranks of loyal.

Who manages the customer experience?
Large companies hire a separate person who is responsible for customer experience management, that is, controls the impression and experience of the user. A CX specialist helps the project find weaknesses in the interaction between the company and the client and eliminate them. He makes sure that the quality of customer serviceremains at the same level.

At the start, when you have one product, for example, an application, you can do without a CX specialist and build a strategy yourself. When the project scales, new features appear in the application, or the program has a website, there will be more user paths.