Customer experience is critical for businesses seeking a competitive advantage since customers are an important asset. Marketers should learn about customer experience management to achieve sales improvement and profitability goals. According to Homburg et al. (2017), customer experience management seeks to understand customers and use strategic activities to create crossfunctional efforts and customer-centric culture that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customer experience management depends largely on customer programs quantifying their sentiments and perceptions regarding experience with a firm (Nicolao et al., 2009; Bueno et al., 2019). Thus, Smit and Melissen (2018) suggest that companies should strive to ensure successful customer experience design as the means to manage customer experience. Experience design makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business.
Customer experience design should be an integral part of how a firm manages its interactions with customers. Jain et al. (2017) posit that customer experience design involves designing products or services focusing on the thoughtfulness and quality of user experience. Yohn (2016) adds that this is necessary since companies create products and services targeted to meet real or perceived customer needs. Thus, they should make the customer experience the center of the entire design process. Effective marketers ensure that all touchpoints involving customer interactions with a product or service should be designed to deliver an experience founded on the brand’s promise (Rodríguez et al., 2016; Flavián et al., 2019). The process requires businesses to weave in storylines via offline and online experiences.
Experience design is not simply a medium, such as an online app or advertising campaign. Instead, it is a strategy that ensures ongoing customer engagement with the brand for productive and profitable relationships. Rahimian et al. (2020) elucidate that the process suggests that every action, product, or service delivers an extraordinary experience for the customer. All marketing activities, such as online properties, packaging, mobile apps, check-out experience, web and print ads, and customer service policies should be designed to deliver a positive customer experience. According to De Keyser et al. (2020), experience design is a strategy that everyone in the business should be involved in to optimize the customer experience. The goal is to wow the customer at every point of the sales process.
Experience design is human-centered since it focuses on the customer needs and how well its products are suited to meet the need. Companies, thus, develop human-centered strategies by empathizing with the customer and investigating people and context (Ross et al., 2020). They strive to change how a customer interacts with the business, beginning negative emotional charges. Marketers should ensure that customer experience reaches across the channels the client interacts with the business or brand (Bolton et al., 2018). Thus, a brand can proactively ensure the customer has a seamless, consistent, and positive experience through an omnichannel approach whenever they interact with the brand. Thus, the company should understand the customer, what they want, and how they interact to design a positive customer experience.
Each customer’s interaction with a product or brand is a critical element of the customer journey ecosystem. The interaction is also an important touchpoint in the journey (Wani et al., 2021). Experience design is based on the premise since the customer journey plays a key part in all business actions, whether brick-and-mortar or online. Cases of the customer journey ecosystem are evidence across industries and sectors, whether a customer picks a production from a physical store or orders one online (Becker & Jaakkola, 2020). Marketers should ensure that the customer journey and experience are satisfying such that they will be willing to continue interacting with the brand.
Effective customer experience design has numerous benefits, including improving customer satisfaction and creating product or brand loyalty. Besides, satisfied and loyal customers become business advocates and can market through review and word-of-mouth strategies (Lee et al., 2018′ Suwelack, 2020). Customer experience with a product, service, or brand should contribute to a positive customer experience to put out a positive word about a company. Chen and Yang (2021) add that happy, loyal customers gladly endorse a firm’s brand to peers. Such endorsement can sometimes be more important for a business than advertising or marketing efforts since they influence customer perception and buying decisions.
Marketers should also understand that customer retention costs less than acquisition. When customers have a positive experience with a product, service, or brand, they develop loyalty and keep coming back for more. Statistics reveal that a 5% increase in customer retention results in a 25% increase in profitability (Drettmann, 2020; Motta-Filho, 2021). The benefit accrues from retaining customers and avoiding the cost of acquiring new ones. Besides, satisfied customers tend to buy more from a company. Another benefit of experience design is to obtain feedback from customers that driver quality improvement. When companies design their activities with the customer in mind, they obtain critical feedback to make changes to their product, service, brand, or other business activities. Holmlund et al. (2020) argue that the voice of the customer data is useful since it drives critical changes aimed at improvement. Thus, marketers should strive to enjoy the benefits by ensuring effective customer experience design.
References
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