It’s the age of the customer and the world’s biggest brands are duking it out every day for a greater share of our hearts, minds, and wallets. Customers hold more decision power than ever in an era where information about any company’s products and services is just a mobile search away.

Where does the Voice of the Customer (VoC) land in the priorities for your company’s overall strategy? Forrester’s Customer Experience Council survey shows that 79% of all respondents believe that measuring customer experience is a top priority.

Market research shows that the Customer Experience Management (CEM) market is estimated to grow from USD 5.06 Billion in 2016 to USD 13.18 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 21.1%.” If you’re not investing in CX, it’s very likely that your competitors are.

The stage has been set – now let’s jump right into the top Reasons to Invest More in Customer Experience (CX):

1. The ROI customer experience

Building customer loyalty and increasing revenue go hand in hand. When compared with customers who had negative experiences, those who had positive experiences were more likely to recommend, trust, try new products or services, purchase more, and forgive your company after a mistake.

2. What gets measured gets done

Measuring customer feedback is the first step to measuring up to your customers’ expectations. Whether you’re an advanced scorecard-driven enterprise or just beginning to think about CX, the most important thing to do is to start actively listening and measuring your customers’ feedback.

3. Time to set new customer experience goals

CX is not as fluffy as it may seem. There is real science and methodology to measuring and improving customer satisfaction (CSAT). There are many metrics to consider as part of your VoC program, but Bain & Company’s Net Promoter System and Forrester’s Customer Experience Index stand out as the gold standard top-line measures in the CX industry.

4. Elevate your operational performance

Operational performance and CSAT are inextricably linked. For example, it’s no coincidence that airlines with the best CX ratings also boast the highest percentage of on-time arrivals. The best CEM programs cause cross-functional customer-centric collaboration, which requires your company to break down organizational silos to be more valuable, efficient, and enjoyable to your customers.

5. Put the customer at the center of every decision

Your customers see you as one whole cohesive brand, regardless of how complex your organization, systems, and processes might be. When your customer interacts with your company, they don’t care about any bureaucracy, different divisions and departments, or roles and hierarchies.

6. Plug-in and empower your employees

Ready to take your CX program to the next level? Tap into your company’s most valuable assets – your people. The more customer-facing employees with access to a real-time view of customer feedback, the more awareness, focus, and unity there is around your company’s CX mission and goals.

Most firms love to talk about the value of customers but don’t get value for customers right. That’s ironic because customers that get value create business value in return by increasing profitability and market share. Academia has written about value for customer for decades. But businesses have been sluggish and incomplete in applying it.

We asked ourselves: Why is that? How can we do better? What can companies gain if they understand value for customer? What is a CX pros’ role in this?

Misconception (“What”): Value for customer is about value for money

Value for customer is actually “A customer’s perception of what they get versus give up.” It has four dimensions: functional, economic, experiential, and symbolic. Siloed efforts by marketing, CX, product, sales, or pricing fail to create value across all dimensions. Worse, lacking a horizontal view of the customer, these efforts can cancel each other out.

Customers make trade-offs between these value dimensions. They are willing to give up value in a less important dimension if they get high value in another, more important one. But customers have a threshold for how much they are willing to give up depending on their context.

Misconception (“How”): Features of a product or service create value for customers

Value isn’t inherent but a perception. Context (worldview, situation and comparisons) determine what customers value and how they form that perception.

To form value perceptions, many people use “mental shortcuts.” Especially, when they are under time pressure or unfamiliar with a product or service.

Misconception (“Who”): Your firm creates and delivers value for customers

When trying to accomplish a goal, a customer derives value not from interacting with a single firm but from her own actions and interactions with many different organizations and people. For example, to become healthy, a customer creates a value network that includes a doctor but also a physiotherapist, friends and family, associations, and insurance firms – getting different value from each.

Firms that understand customers’ value networks and what value they seek from the firm vs. other actors can help customers create more value.

CX professionals must step up to improve value for customer

CX pros have the horizontal view of the organization along customer journeys. That’s critical to understand what customer want to accomplish, who they interact with as they do and what value they want from each actor – inside and outside your firm.

If you are a CX pro, volunteer to help your firm to improve value for customers! Get started by understanding how well your firm helps customers create value. Then, define metrics for value for customer, focus your research and design practice on identifying what customers value and finding ways to help them create it. Finally, pivot your CX ecosystem to help customers create (rather than destroy) value.

Journey mapping is a tool and a process. The process has six steps, which you can read about in 6 Steps from Journey Maps to Outcomes. The fifth step in the process is Ideate, in which you’ll ideate solutions to customer and backstage pain points and then design the future state.

Here’s a bit more detail about what this step includes.

• Set up and conduct future-state mapping workshops with customers, during which you’ll:
  • Ideate solutions for the current pain points your customers are experiencing
  • Design the ideal future-state experience
• Set up and conduct future-state service blueprint workshops with stakeholders and internal subject matter experts, during which you’ll:
  • Conduct root cause analyses
  • Ideate backstage and behind-the-scenes policies and processes to solve these (root cause) problems
  • Identify people, tools, and systems that are problematic, as well, and ideate solutions that will help you deliver the future-state experience
  • Design service delivery capabilities of the future experienceAs you probably already know, future-state maps are different from current-state maps. They:
    • Are used to design tomorrow’s differentiated experience
    • Are rooted in creativity and ideals
    • Use ideation to identify solutions for customer pain points
    • Add/incorporate listening posts into the experience, as needed
    • Are driven by the CX vision
    • Help you innovate new products and services
    • Allow you to envision and design how you’ll deliver new value for your customers at minimal risk because you’re testing them on paper first

Too many companies stop at current-state journey mapping – assuming it’s been done right – and never move on to service blueprinting or to future-state design, choosing instead to make tactical and cosmetic improvements identified in the current-state map and leave it at that. Future-state mapping is an important piece of the journey mapping process and cannot be overlooked if you want to design a better overall experience – and deliver new value –  going forward for your customers.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.

The CX space has seen significant movement over the last few years – between multibillion-dollar acquisitions, advancement in AI, and continuously evolving core software, the industry is experiencing a renaissance.

Yet despite these technological advancements, it appears that many of those charged with leading these initiatives are too focused on polished, buzzword–laden tools, and are in turn losing focus of why these programs exist in the first place – to enhance the customer experience.

What do customers really want?

Customers want their interactions with your company to be as easy and friction less as possible.

They want to talk to empowered brand representatives who have the answers they’re looking for and the ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently the first time they call. They want your physical space to be welcoming with employees that are easy to find and identify.

Above all, customers want to feel empathy towards their buying experience. Using chat bots and employing staff without the authority or knowledge to solve problems, while scalable, is also the quickest away to erode customer loyalty.

Why are we measuring engagement but not resolution?

Almost every business has some sort of customer experience management (CEM) program. The majority are measuring transactions by using metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT.

However, these data points don’t always expose easy-to-action insights. If you want to marry CX feedback data with actionable insights, you’ll need to measure:

• What are you customers asking and how frequently?
• Are your customers getting the answers they need?
• When are your customers escalating issues or moving to another channel?
• Are your employees empathetic to customer challenges?

Uncovering the answers to these questions will lead your organization to improvement areas where specific and measurable actions can be taken.

Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX). All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.