Many brands understand that customer experience (CX) is important, but still question how vital it is to success. Depending on your context, CX might be your top priority, or simply nice to have.
For many brands, especially in ecommerce, long term customer relationships are no longer necessary. Being in the right place at the right time, with the right price, will ultimately prove the difference between making a sale and not. But it would be a mistake for these brands to think this means CX isn’t important to their success. It’s still essential, but what constitutes CX needs to shift to reflect the nature of the business.
At the other extreme, for the new wave of subscription brands, selling everything from software to razors and coffee, ongoing customer relationships are absolutely essential. CX means something very different in an ongoing relationship to a one-time product purchase.
Understanding where your brand sits between these two extremes can help you pinpoint what factors will be most important for creating customer experience success.
Two-Factor CX
One way to weigh up your CX priorities is through the lens of Herzberg’s ‘two-factor theory’. The theory the psychologist proposed implied that satisfaction and dissatisfaction were impacted by different factors. While satisfaction is impacted by more aspirational factors which Herzberg called ‘motivators’, dissatisfaction was more likely to be impacted by ‘hygiene factors’ which are more practical or fundamental. Here are some examples of what this might look like:
|
Motivators |
Hygiene Factors |
| Offers | Page load speed |
| Marketing automation | Clear conversion points |
| Personal or influencer recommendation | Pricing |
| Speed of delivery | SEO and discoverability |
Offers, personalisation of content, recommendations and quick service delivery are all factors that might motivate a potential customer to consider you. They help you capture interest when you're being evaluated against competitors, or keep customers engaged with you after the point of purchase. If you need to stand out from a competetive marketplace, or develop customer loyalty, then CX motivators will be the key to improving your performance.
By contrast, other elements of your customer journey, such as the loading time of your product pages or checkout, or even your SEO, fall into the ‘hygeine factor’ category. They aren’t necessarily the reasons why visitors will convert into customers, but they’re certainly factors that might stop them from considering you. If your site has poor conversion, high cart abandonment rates, or poor traffic, your hygiene factors may hold the key to unlocking success. Some of these issues might even be about user experience (UX) on your site, rather than CX.
Identifying the key factors for successful CX for your brand is an essential step in the customer journey mapping process. Our guide to customer journey mapping can put you on track to increased customer satisfaction, and ultimately, increased revenue.
