Not long ago, most businesses banked on winning customers over by providing a top-notch product or a killer deal.
But we’ve moved on to a (not-so) new kid in town: Customer experience.
Customer experience, or your customer’s perception of how your company treats and interacts with them, is a top business priority.
Why?
Customer experience is key to customer satisfaction. If you treat consumers well, they’ll like you. If you continue providing them a good experience, even after they’ve purchased a product or service, they’ll keep coming back to you. They may even become loyal brand advocates!
In fact, 72% of customers will rave about a positive experience with up to 7 people. Yet, there’s another side to the coin. If a customer is unhappy, 13% of them will tell at least 15 people.
If you plan on upping your customer experience game this year and want to keep tabs on the most important customer experience statistics, keep reading. We’ll detail:
- Key CX statistics to know
- The importance of customer experience
- The impact of CX on sales and revenue
- How AI is changing customer service
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is your customer’s perception of how you treat them during every interaction they have with your organization. Each touch point with your company leaves customers feeling one way or another and helps build this perception.
These interactions affect customer behavior and impact customer loyalty. In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. Negative experience does not make for loyal customers.
If you’re not offering a great CX, then customers aren’t likely to stick around; no one wants to continue doing business with a company that isn’t going to listen and fully support a customer.
It’s safe to say that delivering poor customer experience gets you nowhere.
Customer experience has become one of the leading competitive differentiators for companies across all industries — a great product or service is no longer enough to keep loyal customers. An 86% of B2B chief marketing officers say they consider customer experience to be of the highest priority and it shows in the efforts to improve poor customer service.
Why Customer Experience is Important
The importance of improving customer experience can’t be overlooked. In fact, 65% of all consumers say a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising.
It says a lot if a positive CX has a bigger impact than the messaging your marketing team is putting out to attract new customers. But it makes sense when 80% of customers say the experience businesses provide is just as important as their products and services.
Customer experience is so important these days that more than two-thirds of companies now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience — up from only 36% in 2010!
With so many companies seeing the impact their CX has on their bottom line, it’s clear why customer experience has become such an important aspect of both customer support and holistic business strategy. The people in charge of creating those positive experiences are also to blame for customers staying loyal, in fact 44% of consumers blame bad experiences on unhelpful staff both in store and online. Creating great customer experiences isn’t just about keeping customers happy, it’s about increasing revenue growth, improving customer lifetime, and having business leaders stay on top of customer experience trends.
Customer Experience Impacts Sales
Though business leaders risk losing revenue by not strategizing ways to improve their CX and get rid of negative customer experiences, all is not lost.
The more companies realize that positive customer experience has the power to transform, the more revenue they’ll be able to generate. In fact, 89% of companies delivering “significantly above average” customer experiences perform better financially than their competitors. And 90% of US consumers see customer service as a key factor in deciding to buy from a brand.
It makes sense that the companies who are putting thought into the customer experiences they’re delivering are seeing a return on their investment. They’re working on listening to customer feedback in order to create a more consistent experience for more people.
Think of the brands that you stay loyal to. There’s a reason you stick to a more expensive option even though you’re likely bombarded with advertisements and marketing content from that company’s competitors every day.
For most customers, it’s their experience with that company that keeps them going back to them. It’s important to note that customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more than those who had the poorest past experiences, and when one company offers up a better CX and product or service, you know who is winning there.
Customer Experience on Mobile Matters
All aspects of business matter when it comes to customer experience and strategically trying to improve it. One space we are seeing CX matter most is within mobile—with 52% of all worldwide website traffic on mobile devices, its imperative businesses work to improve CX on mobile apps and websites.
The worst customer experiences we hear about come from trying to reach customer support on mobile. In fact, many companies have been slow to adapt to improved CX on mobile and not just within customer support. As a result, an overwhelming 90% of customers report having a poor experience when seeking customer support on mobile devices.
The bad experiences on mobile don’t just stop with customer support; when trying to offer feedback about their negative experiences, 79% of consumers were ignored. That’s not great for business or customer support.
Trying to improve mobile experiences has been a journey for many organizations and is having lasting effects. For example, 57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile. And if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of customers will stop visiting it, even if they like the business.
It’s because of these extremes that 88% of companies now prioritize the customer experience on mobile.
Customer Experience on Chat Matters
Customer experience touches each aspect of business ranging from branding and positioning to customer support and customer loyalty. We primarily hear about improving CX within customer support, and that’s because customer experience in customer support matters most.
Companies see the majority of their customer interactions within support. Think of the last time you had to contact a company for something, it was probably because you needed assistance in understanding some aspect of their product or service.
If you’re like most customers, you tried to find support within two avenues: through self-service or through a chat function. These chat experiences are where customers get let down the most. There are two things customers expect from a support interaction: speed and accuracy, and yes even from an automated chatbot interaction, especially from a chatbot function.
When a chatbot fails to offer the information a customer is seeking, they expect someone to take over the chatbot and actually assist them and do so in a manner that provides them what they need. In fact, 68% of customers agree that the service representative is the most important contributor to a positive service experience.
When companies fail to deliver exceptional experiences on channels where customers believe things to be automated, that is all on the organization. According to a Hubspot survey, 82% of consumers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a support question.
Customer Experience Self Service Matters
When automated chat functions fail customers, the importance of a fully-fleshed and thought out self-service process matters.
Customer self-service empowers customers to solve their own problems and when your customers feel self-sufficient, they’re much happier. In the support world, we like to say that the best kind of support ticket is one that is never created in the first place. When customers aren’t creating demand, it’s because they’re meeting their own needs.
But how are they doing this? Why does customer experience self service matter?
Because of speed and accuracy.
And because, according to Zendesk, 69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own using self customer service options.
If you can sway an unhappy customer by providing them with the tools needed to meet their own needs, then you’ve successfully thwarted poor CSAT ratings.
Providing good CX through self-service means having a couple of things: ideally a robust knowledge base filled with FAQs, easily understood information, and digestible graphics or videos.
How AI Is Changing the Customer Experience
Customer experience is going through a transformation and that transformation has only been possible with the power of artificial intelligence.
And AI is here for the long haul. Since 2019, the percentage of companies planning to deploy AI within three years has increased to 90%, this surge in AI implementation would cause the number of all automated customer interactions to increase to 40% and will impact the world of service and customer expectation. When customers become used to the processes put in place, their expectations will shift and new demands will be in place, think even faster response and resolution times.
This sudden impact in AI adoption has 56% of brands reporting the use of AI in at least one function, an increase from 2020. With global AI software revenue forecasted to total $62.5B in 2022, an increase of 21.3% from 2021, it’s clear where the investment to improve customer experience are coming from.
With the help of the right tool and the right platform, support organizations can begin to revolutionize their CX.
Forethought could be that platform! Forethought provides end-to-end customer support optimization with conversational AI. We’ve helped support teams report faster resolutions, happier customers, less agent strain, quicker onboarding of new hires, and decreases in ticket volume.
Modernizing your customer experience with human-centered AI ensures you continue to delight customers while also increasing agent productivity.
Interested in learning more? View a demo today.