CXOXO (eBook)

Chapter 1:
CX Isn’t an Afterthought

I started my career in customer experience (CX) at the tender age of 13. My high school, a private boarding school in the Northeastern United States, called Northfield Mount Hermon (Go Hoggers!), required every person to do four hours of work per week on school grounds. So, you could work in the dining halls, clean school buildings, work on the school farm, or like me, you could be a Residential Computer Consultant (RCC) and spend your time sitting in the library during study hall wearing a bright orange shirt like a literal lighthouse in a storm. I spent my time every evening Monday through Thursday helping folks figure out how to use Microsoft Word formatting or remove the virus they got on their machine after downloading a mislabeled Linkin Park song from Limewire. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but it was a job—and I quickly learned to love it. Not just love it, but see the value in it enough to build an over-20-year career in it, and strive to help others do the same.

If you’re here, I don’t need to convince you: you already know how important the customer experience is. Maybe you are someone who is just starting to build their career and wants to get an insider’s look about what you should be thinking about. Equally possible is that you are heading up CX at a larger company, and want to get some in-depth case studies and information to gut-check your assumptions. Most likely, though, is that you’re a middle-of-the-road manager who gives a hoot about your customers and is always looking to learn.

Since that job in the library, I have worked at companies like PartnerHero, Trello, Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, Wistia, Appcues, and Venafi; along with some less-well-known, now-defunct, businesses such as Panraven, Pixelitis, and Assembly. I have consulted and written for numerous other organizations as well, such as Help Scout, Nicereply, and HubSpot.

Throughout your reading, you can expect supporting anecdotes from my various experiences as well as learnings I’ve gleaned from peers and the communities that I’m a member of: CX Heroes, ElevateCX, and Support Driven.

We’ve designed this book to be used as a guide. You can read it in sequence, or flip around to the specific sections that you are interested in. We would suggest reading through, at least, this first chapter, just to get a grounding into the context for the book. But after that, the world is your oyster (unless you’re allergic, in which case the world is your…playground?).

Let’s get to it.

What Is Customer Experience?

The real question is: what is customer experience? In order to define this business motion and set context for the rest of this book, it’s important that we nail down a common definition.

For the purposes of this text, customer experience consists of the smaller touchpoints that a business uses to cultivate a relationship with their users and customers. That includes the help desk and knowledge base, any user education or onboarding, customer support, and even outreach.

While some of these traditionally fall under marketing, especially in the pre-sales context, a strong customer experience professional will consider each of these within the scope of their role as well. After all, when we can view CX holistically rather than spread piecemeal across several different business functions, we cultivate a better experience. It is better for one organization or individual to own something than it is to have shared responsibility, in most cases.

Consider, for instance, a head chef in a kitchen: there are individual teams responsible for meat, sides, sauces, and plating, but the head chef knows everything that is happening and has a handle on all of it. Without the head chef, it would certainly be possible for the kitchen to run, but it would take much more effort to reach the same level of efficiency. Ownership makes things possible in a much shorter, less effortful timeline.

Many of the business functions that are used interchangeably with CX, such as customer support, customer success, or UX, are usually just a part of the customer experience, rather than the whole thing.

TL;DR: customer experience is the multiple touchpoints that a customer has with your brand both pre- and post-purchase.

Support Versus Success

Okay, so we’ve established that customer experience is not necessarily just customer support or customer success. However, how do those things differ? There are several different industry definitions of these two functions, but the ones that we will be assuming for this book are:

Customer support is reactive and addresses issues for customers after they have already had them. Typically it is broken out into technical support (technical issues such as bugs within a product or item) and product support (guidance on how to use a product or service). It includes knowledge base articles, written and video support, and in-app functionality. It also usually encompasses individuals who have not yet purchased your product and customers. Customer support is also often one-to-many, rather than dedicated. Some companies are exploring dedicated enterprise support as well, which bridges the gap between customer support and customer success.

Customer success is proactive and focuses on teaching customers about the best practices of using your product. It is not usually available for individuals who are not paying for your product, often referred to as users. It is often more consultative and personalized than customer support. Although there is one-to-many customer success, often customer success managers are responsible for a few specific “accounts,” and they build deeper knowledge of those business needs and goals with the product. Customer success can encompass onboarding as well, or it may be built out as a separate section of the CX team.

Some teams are small enough or immature enough that you may hear of customer service folks doing customer success work and vice versa. Ultimately, for a truly mature Customer Experience organization, both should be separated out and allowed to focus on what they do best.

Why You Need CX from the Start

Every single interaction that your customer has with your brand is an opportunity to get them more deeply invested in what you are offering. There are many different reasons why this investment may have value, from fiscal impact to loyalty, and it is ultimately one of the most important things you can inspire from your users and customers.

When I worked at Wistia, we worked hard to create delight every step of the way. A dedicated customer experience-focused person was one of the first ten hires, and this shows through in the relationship that the brand has built with its customers, even through today, ten years after, all of those original hires have left (myself included).

We “dog-fooded” our own product, meaning that we used our product just as our customers would. We created delightful videos for almost every need (holiday autoresponders! documentation! yearly “wrap-up” summaries!) and showed folks exactly what they could do with “video for business.” But more importantly, every decision we made, from the color selection on the website through to the dropdown styling on our contact form, was made with the customer in mind and after deep cross-functional deliberation.

This is deeply important. From when customers first come to your website and try to find information about your pricing, to when they are looking for the option to cancel, you owe it to your customers to take care of them. This is especially true if you are a small business just trying to get started: you need all of the customers you can get.

It can be tempting to look at CX as only a cost center; after all, the fiscal impact isn’t as immediately obvious as, say, a product sale. However, the long-tail return of good customer experience is much higher:

• 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience. (Salesforce Research)
• 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service. (HubSpot Research)
• Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by between 25% and 95%. (Bain and Company)
• 68% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service experiences. (HubSpot)
• Businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market when prioritizing better customer service experiences. (Bain & Company)
• Only one in five consumers will forgive a bad experience at a company whose customer service they rate as “very poor.” (Nearly 80% will forgive a bad experience if they rate the service team as “very good.”) (Qualtrics XM Institute)
• 78% of customers have backed out of a purchase due to a poor customer experience. (Glance)

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