Defining customer touchpoints, interactions and engagement It seems every company these days is embracing a customer-centric strategy and talking about optimizing the customer experience. But it’s impossible to do either of those without truly understanding everything that the customer experience encompasses. When most people talk about customer experience, they think about customer service, customer satisfaction, customer success, customer engagement or customer interactions. But customer experience is all of the above plus more, much more. On the most granular level, customer experience is about each customer’s perception of your company, brand, and product. This perception is based on all the interactions that customer has with your employees, brand, messages, and product across every channel and device. Essentially, every tangible and intangible element associated with your business has potential to shift the customer perception and shape the experience. Customers form this perception by comparing their actual experience with their expectations. You might be thinking this is a bunch of marketing gibberish and buzzwords all rolled up in a few sentences. However, it’s critical for us as business professionals to establish definitions of important terms and concepts. Otherwise, discussions around basic marketing strategy can lead to a dead-end, with parties talking past each other because of conflicting definitions and terms.

This is the fine art of retention — and the Pareto Principle states that 80% of business comes from only 20% of customers. It’s an important concept to grasp! Along with stats that suggest it costs to 7x more to gain a new customer than keeping a current one, maximizing your retention rate should be at the very top of your business strategy. Gaining new customers is hard work. Keep those you have happy. You may also find that as an indirect result, you actually continue to acquire fresh business purely through word of mouth (WoM) marketing. People talk. Here Sam (@Sam___Hurley ) shows you 7 super-simple, actionable hacks to increase your customer loyalty — solely by enhancing your customer service / support approach.

"We created a 'Success Funnel' and used it to find the bottlenecks in our customer journey (where our customers got stuck the most). That way, we could focus all our Customer Success efforts on removing that bottleneck. By doing so we could maximize throughput of the funnel, which means more of our customers will achieve success faster."